Those are some of the questions business and trade law experts with Gowling WLG will try to answer in a series of seminars across Canada, including a breakfast meeting in Vancouver on July 14 at the Terminal City Club.
Gowling WLP CEO Peter Lukasiewicz and partner Scott Foster, who specializes in intellectual property law, will try to describe what the legal landscape might look like in an EU without Britain and explain potential impacts on Canadians doing business there.
Gowling WLG was created when Gowlings, a Canadian law firm, merged with London-headquartered Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co., so its lawyers have unique insights on Canadian and British business law.
One of the big questions on the minds of many Canadian business leaders is how the UK’s separation from the EU might impact the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA).
While the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) appears to be in serious trouble, many experts believe CETA still has a good chance of being ratified.
It has been described as one of the most important trade agreements Canada may ever sign, since it is more comprehensive than the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and would give Canadian businesses access to an $18 trillion market.
B.C.’s life sciences sector is one that stands to benefit from CETA, since one of the measures in it would extend patents for up to two years for pharmaceuticals and biologics (non-pharmaceutical products such as vaccines, gene therapies, and therapeutic proteins).
That extended patent protection could be extremely important for biotechs, which can spend a decade or more and hundreds of millions of dollars getting a new drug or biologic through clinical trials, Foster said.
By the time companies get approval for new drugs or treatments from regulators like the Food and Drug Administration, Health Canada or the European Medicines Agency, there may not be much life left in a patent to give the company that developed the product a good return on investment.
Under CETA, Canadian drug and biologics companies would be able to get patent extensions of up to two years for products sold in Europe.
“When you’ve maybe got your first product, or you’re a new venture and you’re tying to raise capital, and you can say to someone, ‘Yeah, I’m early stage but there’s maybe a couple more years of extra protection coming,' it looks a bit more attractive,” Foster told Business in Vancouver.
“It applies equally to pharmaceuticals and biologics so it will lead to a benefit for the Vancouver biological sector.”
Foster cites Vancouver companies like Stemcell Technologies, Qu Biologics, Cardiome Pharma Corp. (TSX:COM) and Zymeworksas examples of Vancouver’s better-known biologics companies that could benefit from CETA.
