Life Sciences Forum
Building up Canada’s resilience and health security through collaborationWith COVID-19 now a near distant memory, Canada has warded off amnesia and embraced preparedness for future health emergencies. One critical lesson from the pandemic remains clear: health security in Canada depends on a thriving life sciences sector. Canada has learned this lesson and has shown commitment to emergency preparedness by creating Health Emergency Readiness Canada (HERC) — a national focal point agency for improving emergency response capacity through sector mobilization.
Improving health security through sector growth — such as enabling proactive procurement for emergency response — means growing a sector that can profit off of its own capacity. For Canada, this can mean a sector that can patent its own ideas and drug discoveries, and commercialize products such as medical countermeasures (MCMs) for the domestic and international market. As it stands, Canada’s life sciences sector finds itself lacking in these capacities as it moves forward into uncertain political and economic times.
Our Life Sciences Forum (LSF) was created during the COVID-19 pandemic to convene government, industry, association and academic leadership on the question of how Canada can better respond to the next health emergency. The LSF has progressively researched and promoted recommendations to the federal government on the steps needed to improve its own knowledge of life sciences sector capacity, build stable and secure supply chains, and bolster the life sciences sector through infrastructure growth and investment and talent attraction.
The first two phases of the program promoted recommendations to this effect in The Next One: Preparing Canada for the next health emergency (September 2023) and Exposed: How Canada can close its health security gaps (August 2024). The LSF’s work has been amplified by journalists André Picard and Paul Wells.
The LSF Phase 3 (September 2024 to December 2025) will delve deeper into the themes of health security and sector growth in three policy briefs over the course of 2025. The first will provide strategic guidance to the federal government on steps needed to engage directly with BARDA and industry to grow the life sciences sector. The second will be a two-part series on how Canada can create the right conditions for investment across the whole life sciences value chain by showcasing the success stories of Canadian life sciences companies that have grown to thrive in the sector. The third policy brief will provide strategic guidance on how Canada can maximize the use of advanced technologies (such as AI) to streamline data analysis and management, make drug development more efficient and close the time to market.
The coming year — 2025 — will feature several key events integral to the development of Phase 3. In April, the LSF will host a Canada Growth Summit Pre-Summit Dinner. The event will feature presentations by AI experts and a roundtable discussion for the LSF Leadership Table of government and industry leaders. In September, the LSF will host its annual Life Sciences Summit, open to the Leadership Table and PPF stakeholders to discuss the development of Canada’s health security and ways forward for the LSF. In addition, there will be several Leadership Table convenings, virtual Member Events proceeding publications, and meetings of the AI Working Table throughout the year.
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