ONTARIO’S NEW BIOTECH VOICE

THE BCO AIMS TO BE THE PUBLIC POLICY CATALYST FOR GROWTH

By Deborah Komlos

The voice of Ontario’s biotech industry has, at last, a chance to call out loud and clear.
Launched in late 2003 and headquartered at the MaRS Discovery District (Toronto, ON) the Biotechnology Council of Ontario (BCO) was established to serve as what BCO chair Dale Patterson describes as the “single public policy voice” that the industry had always lacked.
The BCO held its first Annual Public Policy Forum last October, and will continue to hold the event annually, Patterson says, the main objective being to provide the council with its terms of reference for the next year.
“We would be advising the government on views from our perspective,” explains Patterson, also the executive vice-president of the Canadian Medical Discoveries Fund (Toronto, ON). “We would participate in budget consultations each year. We would look to participate or have a role in the evolution of the throne speeches that would come out of the government.”
Ontario has always had good regional and functional representation in relation to particular disciplines or specific geographic areas, but crystallizing that unified policy voice for biotech has been difficult, Patterson says. “One of the first push-backs we get is that it’s (just) another organization, because there are just so many,” he says. “But there isn’t anyone that can say that they’re the public policy voice of the industry. And so very quickly, I moved to that, to say this is all we do.”
Planning for the BCO involved approaching several leading regional representatives in the province’s biotech industry, including Michael Crowley (based in London, ON), Gord Surgeoner, PhD (Guelph), John Molloy (Kingston), Robert Thayer, PhD (Thunder Bay), Lorne Meikle (Toronto) and Ken Lawless (Ottawa), Patterson says.
“My sense was, right from the beginning, once we had those players on side, and they realized what we were doing, they could buy in and then help us promote and build the organization,” he says.
From a provincial perspective, while there has been substantial R&D investment over the last number of years, relatively little attention has been paid to commercialization, Patterson says. For this reason, one of the four recommendations in the BCO’s December 2004 final report, First Annual Public Policy Forum – The Commercialization Agenda, is to create a first-rate environment in Ontario for innovation, development and commercialization.
A second recommendation is to develop the province’s resource of top-skilled scientists and managers for biotech. Third, the province should “build a comprehensive structure for risk financing.” Lastly, the report recommends improving the regulatory system in order to encourage industrial development in Ontario.
“Let’s put these four pillars in the context of not an academic exercise,” Patterson describes, “but an exercise that will lead to commercialization of technologies which will create companies, which will create patents, which will create jobs and wealth and all that good stuff.
“Access to capital is the fuel that drives our entire sector and access to capital is an area that is absolutely critical and essential to commercialization,” he continues. “If you don’t have the capital, you’re not going to have the investments in the technology, and in the scientists and in the R&D.
“It’s terrific to have a goal and an objective out there,” Patterson says, “but then you have to have the public policies that are going to be driven to that objective.”
The BCO forum isn’t going to be a “one-shot deal,” he notes.
“We’re creating an environment that’s going to attract young people coming out of the universities to stay in the jurisdiction,” he says. “It’s going to repatriate folks that have left Canada. This is all about long-term future here. And we are moving in that direction.”
However, the BCO still has a long way to go, Patterson says, particularly if it is to help the province achieve its goal of becoming the third largest biotech region in North America.
“I’m not convinced that those that are setting the goals really understand what we have to do in Ontario to reach those objectives and then, just as importantly, what other jurisdictions are doing to keep us from that objective,” Patterson says. “We need to be looking at the public policies that are alive and well in British Columbia and in Quebec, and look at what’s happening in those jurisdictions.”
The difficulty with government, Patterson explains, is that the election cycle complicates its ability to invest in its first term, with the underlying concern that it may not be around for a second term to point to the benefits.
“There has to be a long-term commitment too,” he says, “and these issues have to be couched in such a way that the government of the day could take just as much credit for taking the initiatives as if it was four years or five years later, when you can actually see the results and ‘kick the tires’ on quantifiable results — that’s what we’re trying to do.”