Nearly a century apart, two of the world's most consequential therapies can trace their origins back to Canadian science at the University of Toronto. Insulin's patent was famously sold for just $1 in the belief that a life-saving medicine should belong to humanity, while Canadian scientist Dr Daniel Drucker's GLP-1 research helped pave the way for today's breakthrough therapies, including Ozempic. Other notable contributions include the "Toronto Method," a vaccine mass-production technique developed in the 1950s that made the polio vaccine viable at scale.

“Clinical development is one of Canada’s strengths. Canada has the highest proportion of clinical trials in the G7, with more than 3,000 ongoing trials in 2025, representing over 5% of global trials. In 2024, 30% of those trials were in rare diseases,” notes Andy Zylak, General Manager, Shionogi Canada.

Canada's medical innovation record is beyond dispute. So why has the country yet to produce a homegrown pharmaceutical champion on the scale of a Novo Nordisk or an Eli Lilly? The problem has never been invention; it’s execution: the ability to scale breakthrough science and capture its commercial value before it leaks elsewhere.

“We talk a lot about R&D, but we’ve probably been overweight on the 'R' and less focused on the 'D’,” says Wendy Hurlburt, President & CEO, Life Sciences British Columbia. Canada also lacks the depth of institutional capital found in competing jurisdictions. The repercussions speak for themselves as companies, talent and investment gravitate south of the border, and international partners abandon Canadian trials out of frustration with delays in later-stage development. As Tom Madden, Co-Founder & CEO, Acuitas Therapeutics, observes: “There are centres of excellence like Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto, but not at the same concentration of companies as in US hubs like Boston-Cambridge. With that concentration, you also get access to capital and expertise in those locations.” 

Canadian biotech Eupraxia Pharmaceuticals illustrates the challenge of scaling breakthrough innovation. Despite its ambition to bring its precision drug-delivery platform, which targets medicines directly to the site of disease, to patients globally, the company will manufacture its first commercial product in the U.S., citing more seamless access to capital. As CEO James Helliwell puts it, "The only way it changes is if the government moves at the speed of business. We cannot ask our patients or investors to wait nine months for a political process before capital is unleashed and decisions can be made. Canadian pension funds spend a huge amount of their investable dollars outside Canada. Redirecting those funds toward Canadian innovation would be a start.”

For many biotech CEOs, raising capital has become as much a part of the job description as building the business itself. Determined to avoid "another insulin story," one in which Canadian science fails to generate lasting value back home, Dr Kevin Smith, President & CEO, University Health Network, argues: “We are too timid about excellence, often regressing to the mean and spreading the peanut butter evenly across institutions. That is not how you win, and it is not what China, India, the U.S., or advanced Scandinavian economies are doing.”

Refusing to accept acquisition or foreign commercialization as the inevitable fate, biotechnology companies AbCellera and Aspect Biosystems have set out audacious ambitions: to build homegrown life sciences champions. The former is pursuing the vision of a fully integrated global biopharma company, while the latter aspires to become Canada's first $100 billion biotech company.

For Carl Hansen, Founding CEO of AbCellera, the stakes are existential. While encouraged by the marked shift in tone across business, politics and academia over the past two years, he warns, "If we don't get to scale, Canada will be forever condemned to be a research outlet for the U.S. Leadership recognizes Canada needs to stand on its own two feet, and global champion companies are key.”

The signals are promising. Improvements to Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED), dedicated life sciences investment funds and proposals such as patent boxes all point to a policy environment beginning to shift, even if the funding gap for mid-sized companies remains unresolved.

Wendy Zatylny, President & CEO, BIOTECanada, is confident that both federal and provincial governments are actively engaged on these issues: “There is a stronger recognition of the barriers to companies growing and scaling in Canada, and the policy environment is adjusting to solve that. We are seeing a greater urgency across government, and the opportunity now is to build on that momentum in a way that delivers lasting competitiveness.”