The cutting edge

This discussion paper has been produced in consultation with members of the Public Policy Forum Life Sciences Forum and further informed by conversations held at the 2026 PPF Growth Summit. Drafting support was provided by Chris Waddell, Pierre Sabourin, Chris Hobson and Sophie Gaudreau.

Seizing the moment

Three years after the World Health Organization declared the end of the COVID-19 global health emergency, Canada’s health and life sciences sector has made significant, but insufficient progress.

The federal government created Health Emergency Readiness Canada (HERC) giving it a structure, budget and access to funds from the government’s Defence Industrial Strategy to support dual-use health investments. HERC is building international partnerships and developing domestic purchasing processes under the federal Buy Canadian policy. The federal Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy is proceeding with its investments; the Business Development Bank (BDC) has launched a $150 million venture capital fund for therapeutic products and medical technologies; and OMERS pension fund is dedicating at least $10 billion to new investments in Canada over the next five years.

These measures will help support and expand Canada’s life sciences output. But on their own, they will not be enough. Despite world-class research, Canada continues to underperform in commercialization, scale-up and domestic capture of health innovation value. Canadian firms produce leading discoveries, yet much of the economic return accrues elsewhere through foreign investment, acquisition and manufacturing.

The world is changing and Canada can take advantage of the new opportunities emerging. The first human genome project took 15 years and cost US$3 billion. Today, a human genome can be sequenced in a day for US$500-$1,000. This progress is driving an explosion of biological and health data, transforming our understanding of living systems, human health, and disease and creating a historic economic and scientific opportunity that Canada cannot miss.

In summer 2025, the Public Policy Forum released Canada’s Code Red, calling for an urgent approach to unlocking growth in health and life sciences, positioning the sector as an asset for investment as opposed to a cost-base. The Forum followed that with Mining Canada’s Health Data, a playbook for how Canada can lean into its data advantage to lead the next generation of treatment development and delivery.

But Canada must go further and faster. This requires a clear, unifying vision: a new “Made in Canada” strategy for health and life sciences. A successful “Made in Canada” will reinforce domestic production and retain economic, scientific and health-system value within Canada – from discovery and data generation to manufacturing and deployment.

A new Made in Canada strategy

Protecting our health security, leading new technologies

The global life sciences sector represents approximately US$2–3 trillion in annual economic activity when pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, medical devices, diagnostics and related services are combined. Many subsectors are projected to grow 8 to 10 percent annually over the coming decade. While large pharmaceutical companies will continue to dominate, most new growth will come from biotechnology and AI-driven discovery. Responding to this reality, a new Made in Canada strategy must balance two imperatives.

The first imperative is one the country is well-versed in: population-based medicine. In the current world economy, Canadians’ health must not be outsourced. Canada needs continued industrial manufacturing capacity in antibiotics, vaccines and treatments for global maladies such as diabetes, dementia and cardiovascular diseases. G7 countries all consider domestic therapeutics industries as strategic priorities that benefit their economy and citizens. While Canada has had limited success to date in building population-medicine anchor companies, it has taken significant steps since COVID to establish a vaccine manufacturing base that can be globalized, with GSK’s plant in Ste. Foy, Quebec, Moderna’s facility in Laval, Quebec, and Sanofi’s site in Toronto. These efforts must be continued. As explored in Canada’s Code Red, Canada is not able to compete with the U.S. on market share and so must make itself ultra-efficient to attract investment. This means a laser-like focus on reducing regulatory burden, addressing inter-provincial inefficiencies and, when it comes to procurement, engaging in a race to the top in value rather than a race to the bottom in cost.

The second imperative represents the next frontier in health and life sciences: personalized precision medicine. The future of health care lies in therapies tailored to specific genetic or molecular profiles, such as targeted oncology drugs for patients with specific cell mutations, gene therapies for rare genetic diseases, or cell therapies where a patient’s own cells are extracted, modified and reinfused.

Personalized precision medicine requires a domestic ‘vein to vein’ supply chain spanning cell collection from patients, rapid transport to specialized labs, highly controlled manufacturing and rapid return to hospitals for administration. This emerging market requires new technologies such as gene editing and mRNA platforms.

Recent uncertainty around U.S. public support for mRNA research and commercialization creates opportunities for Canada. We need to develop more localized supply chains with distributed manufacturing from smaller hubs, automated cell therapy facilities, hospital-based production and data-driven companies built on AI-driven drug discoveries, genomics and real-world evidence. Underpinning this, we need to have access to standardized, disaggregated, high-quality data, allowing an in-depth understanding of health at both the individual and the population level.

The good news is that Canada is already well positioned. Companies like AbCellera in antibody discovery and biomanufacturing, and Precision NanoSystems in lipid nanoparticle and genomic medicine technologies, already develop and manufacture here, alongside national strengths in genomics research, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing.

Investment in platforms such as VITAL also bring promise of rich, research-ready data to support the advancement of new technologies. A new Made in Canada strategy would codify the measures that have led to these successes, with the aim of building the country as a destination of choice for personalized medicine.

In doing this, there are lessons we can learn from others. Five metropolitan ecosystems currently lead the world in personalized precision medicine:

• Boston, Massachusetts (the global leader)
• the San Francisco Bay area, California
• Basel, Switzerland
• London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle, United Kingdom
• Singapore

These clusters all contain similar ingredients: proximity to elite research universities, deep pools of life-sciences venture capital, major academic hospitals with reputation for innovative patient care, anchor pharmaceutical companies with manufacturing capacity, regulatory expertise that accelerates the path from discovery to treatment, progressive approaches to health data collection and sharing, a dense network of biotech startups, strong genomics and AI capabilities and, importantly, a long-term industrial strategy.

Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto all to varying degrees possess most of these attributes. A key outcome of a successful Made in Canada strategy would be one or more of these cities joining this global list.

Policy plays to deliver a new Made in Canada strategy

Building the data and platform infrastructure

(1) Make Canada a global leader in clinical trials. Canada’s diverse population and strong health care and research systems give it natural advantages, but four gaps hold it back: the lack of a unified national system for clinical-trial health data; the absence of a privacy-compliant mechanism to identify and contact eligible trial participants from health records or genomic profiles; fragmented contracting, ethics review and incentive-sharing across jurisdictions that slow trial startup; and inconsistent collection of race- and ethnicity-based data in administrative health records, limiting representative trial design and AI-driven optimization. The federal government’s forthcoming AI Strategy for Canada presents an opportunity to respond to these challenges and must have an unlocking of our health data as a priority.

(2) Create a pan-Canadian genomics and health data platform. Building on Genome Canada’s Precision Health Initiative, establish a federally coordinated platform that leverages universal health care, longitudinal health records, and world-class genomics research to provide anonymized data for drugs development and clinical trials. The UK’s Genomics England offers a proven model to do so.

(3) Launch a national personalized precision medicine strategy. Implement a coordinated national strategy linking genomics, AI, drug development and health system deployment.

Scaling discovery to manufacturing

(4) Invest further in advanced biomanufacturing platforms. Personalized precision medicine relies on flexible, small-batch manufacturing. Leverage proven research capabilities at the University of Toronto, UBC and McGill to create biomanufacturing hubs for cell and gene therapy, RNA therapeutics and automated biologics production.

(5) Strengthen the biotech scale-up environment. Canada produces many biotech startups but few global life science companies. It spends $4.5 billion annually on basic life sciences research, yet 80 percent of the capital that commercially exploits that research comes from the U.S. Canadian pension plans could help close that gap, ensuring the country captures more value from its own research investment.

(6) Support hospital-based manufacturing. Personalized precision medicine requires diagnostic testing alongside drug delivery, such as genomic tests that determine who receives a specific therapy. Canada’s strong academic hospitals could lead in point-of-care manufacturing but need time-sensitive regulatory pathways to do so.

(7) Implement a targeted life sciences talent strategy. Leading global ecosystems actively recruit world-class researchers, clinician-scientists, entrepreneurs and specialized talent. Canada’s new International Talent Attraction Strategy and Action Plan provides an opportunity to strengthen the country’s leadership in life sciences and personalized precision medicine. To succeed, the strategy should be targeted and sustainable, focusing on long-term integration through research infrastructure, academia-industry collaboration and professional networks for newcomers. Recruitment efforts should also support the return of Canadian researchers working abroad and include clear performance measures and strong governance to ensure accountability and coordination across jurisdictions.

Regulatory competitiveness and procurement innovation

(8) Benchmark Health Canada, CDA, PHAC, CIHR and CIHI performance against leading international equivalents. Use the findings to introduce an integrated “Made in Canada” high-priority pathway that supports Canadian innovation and accelerates approvals for drugs, biologics and medical devices developed and manufactured domestically. Most foreign regulators do not explicitly prioritize domestic products, but the United States, Japan and China are increasingly using expedited review and differentiated administrative pathways to encourage domestic manufacturing for supply-chain resilience and national security.

(9) Establish new procurement approaches for personalized and small-market medicines. New therapies in personalized precision medicine, including vein-to-vein cell and gene therapies and novel antibiotics to combat antimicrobial resistance, are produced in very small volumes for limited patient populations. This creates affordability challenges, as personalized therapies are costly to manufacture, while antibiotics generate low returns because their use must be limited.

Canada has already begun testing innovative approaches through the PHAC’s Antimicrobial Economic Incentives Pilot Project. Building on this and on the federal government’s centralized procurement of COVID-19 vaccines and rapid testing kits, the federal government should create a broader, distinct federally funded program to procure and distribute high-cost, high-value small-market medicines to provinces and territories. Such a mechanism would improve equitable access, strengthen purchasing power and free provincial drug budgets to focus on routine population-based medicines. This could include innovative procurement models such as subscription-style payments for antibiotics, outcomes-based agreements for gene therapies and national risk-sharing arrangements for ultra-rare disease treatments.

(10) Modernize reimbursement pathways. Regulatory approval alone does not ensure patient access to personalized precision medicine. Reimbursement pathways also determine whether innovations succeed. Existing reimbursement processes were designed for conventional therapies and often struggle to evaluate one-time or highly individualized treatments. Canada should modernize reimbursement approaches through adaptive pathways, outcomes-based payment models and evidence generation after market entry.

The need for leadership

Canada has responded to the upheaval of recent years with new trade alliances, a renewed mandate to ‘Buy Canadian’ and a hard-headed recognition that the world is not returning to the way it was. That same clear-eyed realism must now be applied to health and life sciences.

The opportunity is specific and time limited. The U.S. shifts in various health policies and research funding has opened a window that will not stay open indefinitely. The cost of genomic sequencing has collapsed to the point where personalized precision medicine is an emerging industrial reality. The countries that build the ecosystems to support it over the coming years will define the sector for a generation.

Canada already has world-class research universities, strong academic hospitals, a universal healthcare system that, once better connected, can generate longitudinal data at national scale, established companies in antibody discovery and genomic medicine, and a diverse population that is an asset for clinical trial design.

What we lack is a unified strategy that connects these pieces.

The measures of success should be concrete. Within a decade, at least one Canadian metropolitan ecosystem should be recognized as a global leader in personalized precision medicine. Reaching it demands not just leadership, but sustained coordination across governments, institutions and industry. The next generation of health and economic leadership will be defined not by who discovers the science, but by who builds the ecosystems capable of translating discovery into national advantage. Canada has the ingredients. The challenge now is execution. There is no time to waste.