Thank you Mr. Chair
On behalf of the BIOTECanada members, thank you to the committee for giving us the opportunity to speak today about these very important issues.
I'll briefly introduce our industry.
Biotechnology is a pretty broad envelope. It includes health biotechnology, but also for BIOTECanada we have members that are in the industrial, agricultural and environmental space. We'll focus uniquely on the health side today, but we do have members in the other parts of biotechnology.
On the health side, our members include many of the large multinational corporations that are brand names that everybody is familiar with across the country, but they are a very small percentage of our membership. The vast majority of our membership is comprised of small commercial companies that have a new innovation they're trying to commercialize. They're across the country in every province and are usually found in clusters that are centred around either hospitals or post-secondary university institutions. They are driving these innovations forward. They're driving the innovations forward for a world that's in a bit of trouble right now. Whether we're at 6.5 billion or 7 billion people, we're moving very quickly to 9 billion people. That's putting enormous pressure on the planet. It's changing our environment and we're dealing with a changed environment. We need to find solutions for those pressures that are being placed on the planet but, more importantly, for the pressures that are being placed on the people who reside on the planet. That's where biotechnology comes in. It's a solution to many of those challenges.
In the health space in particular, as we see with the emergence of new diseases across the world, we also see the growth of what we could consider traditional diseases, ones that we've been used to in the western world, that are emerging now in other countries. As their economies grow and they start to take on a more western-style diet, we're seeing similar diseases emerge there. Obesity, hypertension, diabetes, asthma, all of those we've been used to are starting to become prevalent in those countries as well. We have to find solutions for those.
We also have to take advantage of the fact that we can now map the human DNA. We know what the genome looks like and we have an ability to predict what sort of diseases are going to impact people, but also, we can come up with very specific cures for those challenges. That's an enormous opportunity. It's an enormous economic opportunity for Canada, because as a country we have a long-standing history of developing innovation in this space, from early days of vaccines, whether it's in the polio world, right through to developing solutions for other issues, including our contribution to the Ebola virus.
There's more to come. There's a great opportunity out there for this country, and we have, as I say, a long-standing history. We have a great set of institutions. We're developing great science and scientists who are moving these innovations forward.
I'll give you one example of an innovation. It comes out of New Brunswick. It is based on the saliva of the shrew, the lowly shrew that is a sort of little forest mouse. It has a paralytic quality in that saliva, and the paralytic quality is peptide. There's a professor out of UNB who has discovered there's an application there for a rare form of ovarian cancer. That's a remarkable development from something that seems so innocuous as a shrew out of the woods. But he has to get financing and partnership to move that forward and create a Canadian company, and that's the sort of membership we represent.
There's thousands of those out there across the world. Canada's not the only one developing these. We know there's more coming. There are great solutions. We're seeing solutions to what were once death sentences, whether it be in the world of AIDS or other afflictions, that are no longer death sentences. These are cures for many of these diseases, or at least prolonging life and turning them into simply chronic illnesses rather than a death sentence.
That's enormous innovation, but they do come with a cost. We're aware of that. We know the pressures that the provincial governments and the other payers are under. We think it's an important and timely opportunity to have this sort of study to figure out what those solutions can be to address it. At the end of the day, what we want to make sure of is that the solutions get to the patients. It's about health care. The industry absolutely stands ready to address those challenges with all the stakeholders, as Mr. Keon said. We do want to sit down. We think we can be an important part of the solution, driving this forward on behalf of all patients.
I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much, and I look forward to questions.