Canadian biopharma companies are capitalizing on increased government investment stimulated by the recent pandemic to strengthen domestic capabilities and foster multinational partnerships that enhance drug discovery and development worldwide.
By Brian Owens
Canada has long punched above its weight in life sciences and biotechnology, with many of the fundamental discoveries that underpin today’s important blockbuster drugs and therapeutic approaches tracing their origins back to the country’s universities and researchers.
The lipid nanoparticles that deliver messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines for COVID-19—and potentially soon for other diseases such as cancer and neurological disorders—were developed by Pieter Cullis, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, while the existence of stem cells was first discovered at the University of Toronto by Ernest McCulloch and James Till in the 1960s.
“Some people call regenerative medicine ‘Canada’s science’,” said Declan Hamill, VP of policy, regulatory and legal affairs at Innovative Medicines Canada, a national association of pharmaceutical companies.
And much of the early development of artificial intelligence (AI) which is transforming drug discovery and clinical science was done by 2024 Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.
“Canada has historically always been a player in these fields,” said Hamill.
The country is home to more than 1,000 biotech companies, including local subsidiaries of global players such as Roche, Novo Nordisk, AbbVie and Amgen. Most are clustered in and around the three major hubs of Montreal in Quebec, Toronto in Ontario, and Vancouver in British Columbia, with another growing cluster in the Calgary‒Edmonton Corridor in Alberta (Fig. 1). Montreal is home to the largest cluster, but the most vibrant right now is in Vancouver, said Andrew Casey, president and CEO of BIOTECanada, a biotechnology industry association.

“Most of the action is there, there is a lot of really fantastic innovation coming out of Vancouver,” he added.
Tamer Mohamed, founder and CEO of Vancouver-based Aspect Biosystems, which develops bioprinted tissue therapeutics, said the city is home to many visionary biotech companies that were spun-out of UBC and built on broadly applicable platform technologies in antibody therapies or gene and cellular medicines.
“There’s a real powerful synergy between engineering and biology that’s coming out of UBC, and we have these founder-led organizations that are able to push the boundaries to create these types of generational companies,” he said. “We’re creating our own playbook to produce a thriving ecosystem.”
Pandemic renewal
The COVID-19 pandemic generated a renewed interest and sense of urgency about biotechnology and pharmaceutical development among governments around the world, said Hamel. “They now see domestic capacity in biotech not as a ‘nice to have’, but as a ‘must have’,” he said.
Casey said both federal and provincial governments in Canada are investing significantly in building up biomanufacturing capacity and the life-sciences sector more broadly, in an effort to not be caught off-guard again when the next pandemic or other public-health crisis inevitably arrives.
“We have no idea what the next challenge, or solution, will be, so building our broader capacity gives us a better chance of succeeding in the future,” he said. “It’s an important strategic pillar for Canada and the world.”
In 2021, the federal government unveiled its Can$2.2 billion Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy, which aims to strengthen the country’s domestic vaccine, therapeutics and biomanufacturing capacity through strengthened governance and regulation, and funding for research and innovation. It also encompasses the Can$126 million Biologics Manufacturing Centre in Montreal, built at breakneck speed during the pandemic—though it has since sat largely idle. A contract to make COVID-19 vaccines for US-based Novavax appears to be dead in the water, and no other clients have yet come on board.
In addition, the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia each have their own life-sciences strategies that aim to support the industry in their local jurisdictions.
Growing partnerships
The federal and provincial investments are helping innovative Canadian companies to grow and get noticed, stimulating new funding and partnerships with big multinational pharmaceutical companies.
“We’re seeing a lot more partnerships with global pharma who are now here and looking for investment opportunities or pipeline-replenishment opportunities leading to a very robust ecosystem right now,” said Casey.
Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, for example, acquired Montreal-based Inversago Pharma for just over US$1 billion in August 2023, to support development of the company’s cannabinoid receptor 1 (CB1)-based therapies for the treatment of obesity, diabetes and other metabolic disorders. That followed an April 2023 deal between Novo Nordisk and Aspect Biosystems to license and develop its therapeutics, worth US$75 million in initial payments and up to US$650 million in future milestone payments per product, plus royalties.
Aspect CEO Mohamed, said the Novo Nordisk partnership is focused on creating an islet-replacement therapy for diabetes that would not need chronic immune suppression. That builds on the rich history of diabetes research and treatment in both Canada—where insulin was discovered in 1921—and at Novo Nordisk, which was founded to produce insulin in Denmark just two years later.
“Now, over 100 years later, we’re paving the way together for the next generation of therapeutics in the diabetes space—only this time using a cellular-based approach that again leverages Canadian innovation through stem-cell discoveries,” said Mohamed.
Another fast-growing company in the Vancouver cluster is AbCellera, which develops antibody medicines for a variety of disease areas including cancer, metabolic and endocrine conditions, and autoimmune disorders. But its biggest success by far has been the development of antibody treatments for COVID-19, in partnership with Eli Lilly, headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Even before COVID-19, AbCellera was working on pandemic response as the only Canadian member of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program. Then, in February 2020, the company received a blood sample from a COVID-19 patient and, working with Eli Lilly, had the antibody drug bamlanivimab ready for clinical trials in 90 days; this became the first to be licensed for use, well before the vaccines were ready, said Tiffany Chiu, VP of communications for AbCellera.
The Eli Lilly partnership was vital, said Chiu. “We’re excellent at discovery but didn’t have the capabilities for advanced drug development and clinical trials,” she said. The collaboration has led to two authorized therapies, and was extended and expanded in July 2024 to include programs in immunology, cardiovascular disease, and neuroscience.
There is more to the company than just COVID-19 drugs though, said Chiu. Working with 40 different partners, it has started more than 100 projects and brought 14 to the clinic so far. “We’re well positioned for pandemic response, but it’s just a small part of the projects we’ve done,” she said.
And it has big plans for expansion, she added. An initial public offering (IPO) in December 2020 raised US$555 million—the largest ever for a Canadian biotech company—and next year the company plans to open its new Vancouver campus which includes the first good manufacturing practice (GMP)-certified facility for antibody drugs in Canada. Further expansion plans, partly funded by the governments of Canada and British Columbia, will allow AbCellera to bring its drug candidates all the way to phase 1 clinical trials. “We’re building our engine, and it will soon be time to apply it to our programs,” said Chiu.
Chicago-based AbbVie has also partnered with AbCellera to develop antibody candidates for up to five targets across multiple indications, but that is not its only foray into Canadian biotech. In September 2024, AbbVie announced a partnership with Toronto’s Ripple Therapeutics to develop next-generation sustained-release drug delivery implants for the treatment of open-angle glaucoma or ocular hypertension.
“AbbVie has taken notice of the great work being done by Canadian biotech companies and is interested in learning more about these new technologies and innovations,” said Rami Fayed, VP and general manager of AbbVie’s Canadian operation.
One way the company is seeking out potential partners in Canada is through its new Biotech Innovators Award, which will provide a year of free laboratory space at the University of Toronto’s SpinUp incubator as well as mentorship by AbbVie’s scientific and business executives to one early-stage biotech company working in areas that align with AbbVie’s therapeutic areas of focus: immunology, oncology, neuroscience and eye care.
But it is not just innovation in the laboratory that is helping Canadian biotech to succeed. A strong computer science and AI research sector is also attracting the attention of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies looking to use AI and big data to enhance their drug discovery and development.
“Informatics helps along the entire value chain […] in the discovery of new molecules, in optimizing clinical trials and regulatory submissions, and in manufacturing,” said Brian Mereweather, the Mississauga informatics site lead for Roche Canada, based in Mississauga, Ontario.
In November 2024, Roche Canada announced a partnership with the Ontario government to expand its Mississauga global informatics hub, adding up to 250 new jobs in areas like AI, machine learning, computational biology, and data analytics. This is one of Roche’s five hubs around the world—Europe and Asia are each home to two more—and Mereweather explained that Canada has some unique advantages beyond its expertise in science and research.
When considering the expansion last year, Roche’s senior leadership visited and were impressed by how well different players in the sector worked together, said Mereweather. “They had not seen that elsewhere. The other four hubs have never had government agencies, universities and AI institutes come to talk to them, let alone all as one entity,” he said. “It makes us unique, though we may not always realize it ourselves.”
Future plans
With a strong base of research and talent to build on (Fig. 2), the future looks fantastic for the industry in Canada, said Casey. But there are still challenges. Canada has always struggled to develop its innovative start-up companies into global players.

“The one thing we need to do as a country is we have yet to develop our own anchor companies that were started here, grow here, and stay here and become globally commercial,” he said—as Novo Nordisk has done in Denmark. “That’s what we have to be striving for and I think that’s the most important missing piece of the ecosystem more broadly.”
Both Aspect Biosystems and AbCellera have ambitions to become such anchor companies. “Aspect has a bold goal of becoming a stand-alone US$100 billion company,” said Mohamed, which it aims to achieve through strategic partnerships that can help get its products to market. One of those is a Can$200 million deal signed earlier this year with the governments of Canada and British Columbia to build up manufacturing capabilities to pave the way for clinical and commercial manufacturing of cellular medicines in Canada for both domestic use and export.
AbCellera, said Chiu, is already an anchor company in Canada, but is looking to become a global anchor company for therapeutic antibodies. “We are showing some of the things that are possible here,” she said. “We’re trying to build a global biotech company, but we’re also trying to establish a legacy of innovation that we’re going to see for decades to come.”
Hamill said that building strong global companies in Canada will require continuous and sustained cooperation between government, universities, hospitals and industry, and urged the sector to take advantage of the current interest from government in supporting the life sciences.
“The attention of policymakers is fleeting and can’t be taken for granted,” he said. “But as we’ve seen in countries with a strong life-sciences sector like the UK and Denmark, it is a marathon, not a sprint.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d43747-024-00141-4
Read the original article here – https://www.nature.com/articles/d43747-024-00141-4