—but bienvenue nonetheless.
My name's Gordon McCauley. I am the chair of LifeSciences BC. I've been an investor in this space for about 15 years. Over that period of time I've been directly involved in raising and deploying about $200 million of capital from major investors in Canada, the United States, and Europe. In addition, I've served as president and CEO of a company that took a promising compound that showed potential in animals, and over the course of almost eight years, $100 million, and 10 human clinical studies, all but one of which was effective, it ultimately failed.
I share all that with you simply to say that I've enjoyed some success in this industry, but I've also experienced some defeats as well. I understand the risks and the opportunities pretty well.
In addition to my commitment to LifeSciences BC, I serve on the board of a couple of other biotechnology companies: The Centre for Drug Research and Development, a national centre of excellence at UBC; BIOTECanada, our national organization; and until recently, I was the only Canadian on the board of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, in Washington, D.C.
I'm joined here by my colleague Paul Drohan, the president and CEO of LifeSciences BC. Paul joined us last year after a lengthy and successful career with Genzyme, and now its parent company, Sanofi. Paul was the senior executive responsible for their business in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and South Africa. He has a uniquely global perspective from the driver's seat of one of the original biotechnology companies.
We share all of this background simply to demonstrate that the two of us have fairly broad global backgrounds in this industry, including research, clinical trials, regulatory filings and approvals, in multiple jurisdictions. We join you today on behalf of roughly 200 members of LifeSciences BC, from the biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device, and electronic health care sectors in this province. Our members—companies, research institutes, and academia—contribute over $1 billion of GDP and are responsible for something like 17,000 jobs in this province.
Our members are globally competitive because they have to be. They operate in a fiercely global industry. The research in our public institutions here is equally globally competitive and recognized around the world as among the leaders in many fields, including HIV/AIDS, prostate, heart and lung, neurosciences, and cancer. Every day, in every corner of the world, someone lives longer, sees better, survives heart surgery, breathes more easily, among so many other things, directly as a result of the work of these researchers and these companies. The promise of the work being done today is of equal measure to the successes of the past. We have every reason to anticipate many, many more groundbreaking developments.
Before diving into CETA specifically, we would like to give you a sense of some of the unique features of our industry. Others have no doubt already told you about the $1 billion and 10 years it takes to typically get a new medication approved. These factors are certainly critical to any understanding of the challenges faced by our members, but we'd like to emphasize something else: this industry is highly, highly mobile. At the end of the day, our companies have only two assets that really matter: the people who come up with novel products and guide them through a difficult, lengthy, and expensive process to prove that they work; and the intellectual property that protects them against these ideas and this work from being stolen or copied by others.
I don't need to tell you that people and IP can be anywhere. Indeed, they will actively seek out the best environment from the options around the world. Of course, capital is the fuel that drives this business. Clearly, the only thing more mobile than people and intellectual property is capital.
Given all that context, I hope you'll appreciate why LifeSciences BC is so supportive of CETA. It is a groundbreaking agreement that is very important to the global competitiveness of our sector.
There are two points that we would like to emphasize, subjects we know you've dealt with in the past, patent term restoration and the right of appeal.
Hopefully I'm not boring you by covering them again. No doubt, others have covered these subjects as well.
Implementing patent term restoration in CETA so that companies can recover up to two years of the lost time on a patent as the result of lengthening the regulatory process is crucial. As you know, Canada is the only G-7 nation that does not provide any form of patent term restoration. In the U.S. and EU, patent term restoration is five and ten years respectively. Implementing a two-year system will not equal what we're competing with around the world, but it is definitely a step in the right direction. Our companies need a level playing field, or as close to level as possible, to compete around the world, and patent term restoration will help.
The second issue important for B.C.'s LifeSciences community is the right of appeal. This issue is really one of fairness. As you know, the companies that patent innovative products are not allowed to appeal court decisions when a patent is ruled invalid. An appeal process is currently available to challengers, but not to the company that created the patent. Clearly, candidly, the status quo is absurd and can be a bit of a joke in other jurisdictions. Any competitor, in any arena, wants to know that basic fairness is inherent in the system. The right of appeal process in CETA will provide essential fairness and balance in our legal system. Without question, there is much to be understood about the specific mechanisms of right of appeal and we encourage you to closely examine those mechanisms when they're available but also to implement right of appeal.
Before we conclude, let us cover two other quick comments. First, regulatory cooperation in biotechnology is absolutely welcome. The EU is significantly faster at reviewing and approving products without any trade-off in safety or cost. These timelines should be the standard and if we can't match them, perhaps we should think about EU approvals as a mechanism of approving Canadian products.
Along the same lines, the EU has had an orphan drug policy for almost 15 years and the U.S. for 30 years. The data are quite clear. There is no rational debate to suggest that a similar orphan drug policy in Canada would be anything but a win for patients, a win for drug developers, and a win for our health care system.
Second, temporary entry is an important component. If you ask any biotech CEO—probably anywhere in the world, but certainly in B.C. and Canada—what their biggest challenge is after money, the answer is attracting talent. The temporary provisions of CETA will facilitate the movement of talented individuals. We would suggest that beyond the inter-company transfers and professionals, life science researchers should be included. Ours is an ecosystem that requires ideas, innovation, money, but most of all, talented people.
While we look forward to the full details of CETA on behalf of the members of LifeSciences British Columbia, we endorse this agreement. We represent the best and the brightest innovators in the world, developing new products and services for the health care sector, products that are and will be sold in B.C. and Canada and exported around the world. CETA is an important element of keeping Canada and our companies competitive.
Thank you very much.