The breadth of biotechnology in Canada covers a lot of areas. Most of our companies are health-based. They'll range from producing vaccines—we have some leading vaccine companies within our country—to therapeutic products to deal with diseases, unmet needs, oncology, neurology. And there are stem cells—we have some world-leading companies. But it goes beyond that. It goes into diagnostics, which is convergence with our ICT colleagues. You can look at it in terms of our ability to characterize things, such as being the first in the world to characterize H1N1, the flu pandemic virus.
But what's broader in the bio-based economy is that we also have companies in Canada that are able to take historical, traditional biomass and convert it into.... We all know about biofuels and bioethanol, but it's starting to lead into butanol, other products, fine chemicals. We see Sarnia in Ontario converting classical petrochemical into bio-based feedstock to make compostable plastics, bio-based materials; we see agricultural innovation across the west, which is introducing new, high-value crops for farmers.
Canada has a wealth of expertise in biotechnology. Everyone thinks about it as drugs, and that is the traditional field, but when you take biology as a platform and apply it with ICT and other areas, we become globally competitive.
It feeds into our traditional industries. We have a couple of companies in Ontario that are producing products for automobiles of bio-based materials. Woodbridge Foam makes the foam car seats for the Ford Mustang. We have polyols that are made for new plastics in automobiles. We have technologies that feed into the forestry industry to bleach the pulp, using enzymes instead of chemicals.
It is such a ubiquitous platform. It's Canadian technology that feeds into that one, which can be globally relevant, but we need to be able to help grow the companies a little bit further to commercialize it.