Thank you for this opportunity. I'm sorry that I can't be there in person, but I've just wrapped up a board meeting here.
I really appreciate the opportunity, particularly in the context of this committee, to give you a bit of a view of our efforts to build a coherent innovation system in the health sector. Although much of our work focuses on the early side of the innovation food chain, harvesting assets from academe, and building young companies, we are increasingly also working in the scaling and diffusion of these opportunities both in Canada and beyond.
Briefly, I would highlight five areas for you. I think they reflect some of the challenges and opportunities across the country.
The first is an experiment in the better commercialization of academic research. As we know, we significantly fund health sciences research.
In Toronto we have a sister organization called MaRS Innovation, which is funded through the federal centres of excellence for commercialization and research and is creating a single storefront for 15 academic institutions, including four universities, nine teaching hospitals, and two research institutes, to really create a pipeline that is globally relevant. In terms of the volume of discoveries coming through that pipeline now, it is on par with MIT and Stanford around the world.
I think we've created an engine to bring about the important discoveries, and it allows us to bundle them and develop them to the point where they can partner with industry in a more significant way. That is under way. I think it's an important example of a unique collaboration to do business differently in terms of harvesting academic research.
The second part is the engine room of our work at MaRS. Really, it's work with young start-up companies. In the health space particularly, we work with about 250 such companies today. We support them with entrepreneurship and education, including skills, tools, market intelligence, a very hands-on mentoring model, which we deliver with sector experts as well as a large number of volunteers, talent attraction and development, and access to corporate partners.
Also, on behalf of the province, we administer a seed fund that can invest up to half a million dollars in these young companies. That's another piece of the engine room. It brings about important technologies, hopefully to our own health benefit, but it also obviously can create high-value jobs for the future of the company.
The third part, which you've already heard about, is really about how we become better adopters of our own innovation. This is a critical cultural, economic, and health outcomes goal for us. We've developed, in partnership with the other two presenters, a project called EXCITE, which tries to bring these technologies through the system much faster and earlier in their development cycle. That's a very interesting proof point today: get important technologies to patients better and faster, but also allow Canadian companies that are developing those technologies to use the evidence they garner locally and take that further internationally.
What is interesting about that process is that we are productizing the soft knowledge that Canadians have around running single payer health care systems. We are now beginning to move that also into the area of health data, which I think is also an increasingly important asset for us, in order to make better evidence-based decisions in our own health care system, but also to engage with international partners to see the value of our assets and our innovation.
The fourth area I want to highlight flips the innovation process upside down. If you think about young companies and researchers with ideas and discoveries and moving them to the market or into the system, there is an important way to apply innovation to the bigger challenges in the health care system, such as how we are going to take care of an aging population that will increasingly be cared for in the community.
If we put those big, hairy problems on the table, the new challenge I think for us—and I think there's a big opportunity for Canada—is to create multi-stakeholder partnerships of technology providers, policy-makers, funders, system clinicians, and so on, in order to figure out what the innovative solutions are for that problem, which of course are applicable not only in Canada but around the world. We can then take those solutions further internationally.
We're currently working on a very interesting public sector innovation in the area of chronic disease management in that context.
The final example I'd like to highlight is twofold. I think you've heard the challenges of risk capital, which are very significant in the commercialization of research, and developing of our companies. We are looking at new funding partnerships between the public and private sector in the area of social finance and in subsectors like venture philanthropy, and also social impact bonds, where we are partnering with a couple of very significant disease-based foundations to look at new pay-for-performance models in health care delivery. That's a very interesting early experiment. I think it's a new way of bringing innovation into the system and forging new public-private partnerships around results.
The second example is that we've recently launched, in partnership with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and our sister organization, MaRS Innovation, a new cancer drug development accelerator called Triphase, which has attracted very significant international investment. What's interesting is that we are developing Canadian assets in that accelerator, but we're also creating a magnet for the best assets around the world to come into our very innovative development platform. That is a way to use our local skills to also do investment attraction.
If there are two big barriers, from our window, risk capital remains an absolutely stifling challenge. We simply do not have highly expert seed capital in the life sciences space in Canada, and that makes it very difficult to attract international investment. They are looking for local partners, and then talent, that can take these technologies global.
Commercialization of health is difficult. You need highly specialized science. You can't actually do this stuff in your garage; I would disagree with John. You need sophisticated business expertise to execute the partnerships with large companies, intellectual property issues, and you need significant capital.
The flip side of that, though, is that although it's hard, when I look across the innovation spectrum, I still very firmly believe this is the one area, and it's one of very few areas, where our strengths in research and science coupled with our highly talented diverse population and our health care system as a potential adopter of technology, and the global market opportunity, gives us a unique opportunity for Canada to punch well above its weight. That's the work we have to do.
There are no shortcuts in this, but I'm very encouraged with the progress that's been made over the last few years.
