BIV Magazines: LifeSciences 2008

All of us at LifeSciences British Columbia share a vision of life sciences as a major driver of British Columbia’s future as a knowledge-based economy. We also firmly believe that British Columbia has the potential to be and should be, a world leader, not just in scientific discovery, but in the development and in the commercialization of our discoveries. We have had some past success, but we have ongoing challenges ahead. We need to climb the hill together and take our place at the top.

Due to the unique risks of the biotech business model, and because of the tremendous impact that biotechnology applications can have, developing sustainable companies in our industry requires a specific and enabling environment. LifeSciences BC has achieved much in strengthening this environment over the past year, both at the federal and the provincial levels, including changes to SR&ED tax credit eligibility, and revisions to the Canada-U.S. Tax Treaty, thereby removing an important disincentive for VCs to invest in Canada.

At the provincial level, we have worked well with our government partners to provide the kind of policy framework from which we aim to expand on our past success. The provincial government support for life sciences remains unequivocal. This past year, we have seen this province invest $25 million into the Centre for Drug Research and Development, and commitments made by the Ministries of Economic Development and Advanced Education, are also acknowledged and are greatly appreciated. Furthermore, provincial R&D funding bodies like Genome BC and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research continue to showcase how effectively we put provincial R&D investments to work.

Government, industry and academia have also recently come together to consider how we ensure that British Columbia becomes a place where the value and the cost of innovation are appropriately managed. While managing our drug costs should be an important focus for our province, we need to balance this with our need to support investment in innovation in B.C., in particular, our need to bring the pharmaceutical and big biotech industries to the table. Facilitating and fostering this investment into R&D in British Columbia, including from our pharmaceutical industry partners, is more pressing now than ever before, and in the past year, we have seen significant signs of progress.

While biotechnolgy has already impacted human health care, it is continuing to invent itself, and LifeSciences BC recognizes biotech’s potential to disrupt other industries. While in health care, inventions such as PCR enabled breakthroughs that made biotech commercially viable, it will take innovation and considerable investment to make bioproduct applications, such as the production of biofuels from sources such as agricultural waste, viable. Our provincial government and LifeSciences BC see the need to convert a promising technology into a needed and sustained business opportunity by establishing B.C. as a leader in creating disruptive technologies across all industries in the life sciences. Biotech can assist with ensuring sustainability of our forests and marine life, as well as protecting the purity of our water and the air that we breathe. The life sciences must be supported to meet the obligations we have to future generations, not just in terms of our environment, but in terms of ensuring British Columbia remains at the leading edge of the knowledge economy.

It will take innovation, it will take partnership, and it will take a significant commitment from all of us to succeed.

We have achieved much in the past 15-20 years. Our outstanding institutions are graduating wonderful and talented professionals. We have state-of-the art facilities. We have our focus to include medical devices, bioproducts and the health of our environment. Our companies have made some key contributions as we led the development of drugs for the treatment of age-related macular degeneration, coronary thrombosis, and now exciting products are in development for cardiac arrhythmia, for pain and for many infectious diseases. There still exists a significant need to find therapies for the millions of people living with Alzheimers disease, or dying from cancer, malaria, TB and HIV – biotech will have many of the answers. There exists an urgent need to slow or hopefully prevent the decay of our planet as we know it, and biotech can truly make a difference.

I thank you for the support that each and every one of you has given to the life sciences in British Columbia and to our organization. Sustaining and lifting this sector still higher, rests on the shoulders of us all. •

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