Compiled by Shawn Lawrence
Canadian Life Science
We asked
and You answered!
This marks our seventh Hot Button Issue and you might have noticed it looks somewhat different than past editions. For starters, in tallying your responses we wanted to keep it short and simple but more importantly we wanted to focus on the success stories in Canadian biotech. In our last hot-button survey story (March 2011), one message that caught our attention was that biotech needed to do a better job of selling itself, to dangle a few carrots at government rather than simply hounding government with its problems. As such, we placed less emphasis on the challenges the industry and the sector is facing. We found this approach to be more in line with the ideals of National Biotechnology Week. That’s not to say we didn’t include your concerns about the state of Canada’s biotech and life science sector or which areas needed improvement, but rather we focused on telling government why Canada needs to do a better job at supporting the industry. We broke our survey answers down into two different categories. In the first category, we lumped drug discovery, therapeutics, biomedical, and devices together under health sciences. In category two we combined agriculture, food, bioindustrial and environment as one.
12 BIOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS SEPTEMBER 2011
Here’s what you, our readers, had to say: Drug Discovery, Therapeutics, Biomedical and Devices Canada has world class facilities and personnel but the first question we asked was is Canada a world leader in your field of specialty? Despite approximately 72 per cent of respondents believing Canada is not a world leader in their field, a further 76 per cent believed Canada could, given the right support, be that leader. The majority of respondents said with the right financial support, a kinder investment climate and better business practices in general, Canada could be a global leader in their particular area of expertise. Our readers also indicated that the biotech industry was benefitting from powerful partnerships and collaborations between universities and industry. These relationships are strengthened by government research
dollars. Canada has a rich infrastructure of publicly funded hospitals, university research institutes, a network of Centres of Excellence and government laboratories which provide a strong and vibrant R&D base, and industry is starting to take advantage of these facilities. At the same time, industry is still in a state of neglect and Canada needs more progressive financing to make up for the lack of venture capital programs for Canadian biotech enterprises.
