Science and Research Committee on March 21st, 2023

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

That's good to hear, to be honest with you.

Dr. Murphy, what is the single largest roadblock to inventors trying to commercialize their IP, and how do we fix it?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

If there were only one roadblock, I think it would have been a lot easier of a problem to fix. I think there are different roadblocks for every sector. Some of the work that is going on in post-secondary institutions like my own and Dr. Ghali's is trying to understand where those roadblocks are and trying to start understanding how we can address them.

Some of them we've talked about a lot today: How do we get patents into place? How do we get pilots built to a size where it's interesting for investors in taking out into a company? How will we be able to get procurement so those companies can grow here in Canada and not face the challenges that I faced in my own company of international sales from day one?

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Okay.

[William Ghali]

I just want to add that one of the biggest roadblocks is failure, and failure is a predictable outcome in these pathways. That's why mentorship programs are so key to supporting resiliency: Step back and try again, modify your approach, etc.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, Dr. Ghali, for that as well.

Do you think the roadblocks are through legislation that the government has handled, or are they because of lack of funding? Are those the primary ones, or would you say there are other factors as well?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

I can go first, if you would like, Dr. Ghali.

I think funding is a huge one that I am hearing about often, the inability to have Canadian lead investors invest in companies at a risky stage and keep the company firmly anchored in Canada. A second one is simply ensuring that we have the sales and marketing people who have the expertise to grow the companies in Canada. Those are definitely two that I hear our companies are facing.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Go ahead, Dr. Ghali.

[William Ghali]

In the second part of your question, you asked if it was a combination of factors. I think it's a combination of factors. It's not an easy space, and we know the pathways to commercialization have successes but also many ventures that fall off and don't make it. That's part of innovation ecosystems.

Nevertheless, I do endorse Dr. Murphy's comment that, of course, funding pathways are a big part of it. We have the programs that I mentioned, such as the UCeed program. I didn't mention CDL, the Creative Destruction Lab. We have a CDL-Rockies franchise, which exposes many of our university ventures to angel investing. Those funding pathways are helpful, as are government programs.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Maxime Blanchette-Joncas]

Thank you, Mr. Soroka.

We will continue with questions. This is still a five-minute round.

Mr. Longfield has the floor.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you, Chair. It's great to see you again, and you're doing a great job.

I'm going to start my questions off with Dr. Murphy.

I was co-founder of Innovation Guelph. It's an innovation ecosystem in Guelph. On the governance model, we have the University of Guelph sitting on the board of directors of Innovation Guelph, an innovation centre out of the University of Guelph, and the businesses in Guelph are also quite tied in with “created in #Guelph”.

I've been to Innovation UBC, and tremendous work, as you said, is going on, particularly on lipid nanoparticles and other health innovations. The University of Guelph is doing innovation around corn-based nanoparticles that cancer drugs are attached to and then put into the body. The corn is absorbed by the body, and the drugs do their work on specific cancers.

UBC didn't know what Guelph was doing, and Guelph didn't know what UBC was doing. How do we develop an ecosystem in Canada where universities are aware of the research that's being commercialized where they could benefit from each other?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

Thank you for the question.

I'm sorry; the lights turned off. We're very into sustainability here at UBC.

One of the challenges, as you said, is connecting the ecosystem across the country. We should also mention that UBC has created a database for people to be able to search across the federal agency databases and through patent databases for both researchers and companies to understand who's doing what within the country.

I think we need to train up our partnership people, the people who are supporting our innovation, to look for those connections. Once we make those connections, one of the places where we need to do better in this country is in funding collaborations across the country. We have various programs that come and go, but we need to be able to connect, as you said, and really understand where we can take those next steps together, so collaboration funding would also be extremely welcome.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

That's great.

You mentioned earlier in your testimony the provincial funding. There's a whole provincial piece, and then there's the federal piece. Quite often there isn't a connection.

We do have programs like the Engage grants, and with IRAP as well. With regional agencies, we're looking at developing better communications. We have the Mitacs system. We do have federal programs that are common across university innovation ecosystems.

Could you comment on the benefit of those in the way they bring industry into the university innovation ecosystem?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

Many of those programs help facilitate those initial introductions between companies and researchers and start off the ability to connect. I do think that for companies sometimes there are lots of people coming at them who say they have somebody who can help them in a university. The more we can coalesce some of those relationships, the better off we'll be.

We do have a great network across the country of both Mitacs business development and NRC IRAP individuals. We know that IRAP will be folded into the new Canada innovation corporation. As we do that, I think we need to make sure that we also have the connections into the universities. It's very difficult for someone outside to know the complexity of the university landscape. We have had success in having people who are dedicated to partnerships internally. That can help bridge that gap and get to the researchers, who are often extremely busy with both their research and their teaching commitments, to make sure we have educated Canadians.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Great. Thank you.

Dr. Ghali, I was also fortunate to visit Innovate Calgary to see what was going on there—incredible work in the different pillars that you're working on. Of course, energy transition is one of the key areas of development where industry is looking for support.

Sometimes the funding models of universities in Canada are in competition with industry getting funding from, let's say, government sources. I'm not saying the University of Calgary in particular, but the royalty streams that come from innovation or IP that's owned by the university, or the funding that comes to a university from industry to finance innovation.

Could you comment on following the dollar trail on innovation funding, and how the government can help to encourage investment from industry into the university network?

[William Ghali]

Yes, thank you.

I will just make one quick comment about our IP policy. We have a creator-owned IP policy at the University of Calgary. We received some strategic input from an investor community here in Alberta that suggested that historical levels of IP claimed by the university were too high, and indeed a barrier to company creation. One of the interventions that occurred a number of years ago was a change to the creator-owned IP and a rather small university claim in ventures.

To your other piece, I know you are a parliamentary committee where science policy is in play, as I said in my comments. With the private sector expenditures in R and D being so modest in Canada, I do wonder about tax incentives for increased private sector spending on R and D as a potential lever.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Maxime Blanchette-Joncas]

Thank you, Mr. Longfield.

That concludes our first hour.

My sincere thanks to the witnesses, Ms. Murphy and Mr. Ghali.

We will now suspend briefly to bring in the next panel.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Maxime Blanchette-Joncas]

I want to mention a few things for the benefit of the new panel.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. If you are on the video conference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute yourself. When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute.

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A reminder that all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair.

Now, I would like to welcome the witnesses. We have Baljit Singh, vice-president of research at the University of Saskatchewan, and Kathryn Hayashi, chief executive officer of TRIUMF Innovations.

We'll start with opening remarks. You will each have five minutes.

Professor Singh, you can go first.

[Dr. Baljit Singh, Vice-President, Research, University of Saskatchewan]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for this opportunity to be in front of this committee. It's quite a privilege. I hope that some day, I will get a chance to visit with the committee in person, as well.

I am speaking from the Treaty 6 territories and the homeland of the Métis, where we continue to advance our indigenous engagement with the communities in this province.

I also thank the committee for taking this very important question for discussion. At the University of Saskatchewan, we have been engaged in moving intellectual property or knowledge for the benefit of the end-users and in the service of prosperity of our province and the country.

Recently, there was an advisory panel that was struck by the honourable ministers of ISED and Health Canada, Minister Champagne and Minister Duclos, respectively. I had the privilege and honour of being a member of that seven-member panel. We were deeply engaged in the discussion on moving intellectual property to commercialization. That report was released yesterday, which the committee has already seen.

I'm going to speak in two parts. First, I want to share some examples of where we have been very successful in moving intellectual property to commercialization, and a couple of points that come to my mind as to how we can strengthen the system further.

The Province of Saskatchewan was created in 1905, and the university was established within two years of that to strengthen and grow the agri-food production system in the province of Saskatchewan. The university's College of Agriculture created a system called the “better farming train”, whereby the researchers from the university went to the farmers directly, where they were tilling their land, to provide the latest knowledge in agronomy, watering, crop science and harvesting technologies. That has led to what we have today, which is a multi-billion dollar agri-food enterprise in our province.

Within that period, the university created a crop development centre, which, from 1971 until today, has released more than 500 varieties of crops. If you figure it out in a timeline, that's one new variety every month or month and a half. It's no wonder that in western Canada we are a powerhouse when it comes to food production systems. This was a collaboration among the university, the producers and the federal and provincial governments' investment in the agri-food knowledge discovery system.

The second example, to really flesh out the point, is the collaboration that happened between multiple universities and led to the creation of a vaccine against a virus that affects pigs. However, before that, there was a step when discovery science came into play, which is so well funded by our tri-council in our country.

Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan discovered a virus, which led to the development of a vaccine in collaboration with Queen's University Belfast in Ireland and Ohio State University in the U.S. That vaccine technology was purchased by a company in France. Although we got more than $100 million in royalties to the university and the inventors, the job creation took place in France. We need to think about an ecosystem in this country that goes from end to end, in which we can take our intellectual property and develop the jobs in Canada.

There are two or three points that I want to make to advance our discussion. Number one is that we need to keep making investments in our federal research support system that we have in this country. I believe, based on the discussion we have had over the last year, that countries like the U.S., Germany, Norway, France, India and Brazil are moving ahead at a very fast pace when it comes to making investments.

Number two is that the ecosystem we need to create with the universities' creation of intellectual property can be strengthened in two ways. One is that a middle tier, where we go from technology readiness level 3 to level 7, needs to be somehow created so that small and medium economic enterprises can work with the university through a support system from the federal and provincial governments.

The other investment is in the training of researchers, graduate students and young researchers, so they can keep an eye on their inventions and know how to connect them to the private sector through commercialization pipelines that we can establish and support within our country.

Therefore, the training and retention of young minds and the strengthening of support for TRLs 3 to 7 are how we can connect that piece.

Mr. Chair, I will stop here, and I look forward to the discussion with the committee for the remainder of the time.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Maxime Blanchette-Joncas]

Thank you, Professor Singh.

Ms. Hayashi, you have five minutes. Go ahead.

[Kathryn Hayashi, Chief Executive Officer, TRIUMF Innovations]

Hello, Vice-Chair and committee members. Thank you so much for inviting TRIUMF Innovations to appear before you on this important study.

My name is Kathryn Hayashi, and I am president and CEO of TRIUMF Innovations, the business interface and commercialization arm of TRIUMF, Canada's particle accelerator centre.

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that TRIUMF is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people, who for millennia have passed on their culture, history and traditions from one generation to the next on this site. TRIUMF's home has always been a seat of learning.

Located on the campus of the University of British Columbia, TRIUMF is a world-class subatomic physics and accelerator facility that, using world-unique infrastructure, carries out fundamental science and applied research that is changing the world.

TRIUMF's network of innovators, which includes 21 Canadian universities, is constantly developing new tools and techniques that push the frontiers of knowledge. These scientific innovations hold immense promise for the world beyond the lab, including the marketplace. Our dedicated team of business and technology transfer professionals at TRIUMF Innovations connects scientific inventions and ideas from particle detectors to isotope manufacturing systems and the innovators behind them to opportunities in the private sector.

TRIUMF Innovations acts as a connector to the business world by providing market opportunities for applied technologies that emerge from the TRIUMF network by streamlining access to our world-class expertise and infrastructure, and by connecting our researchers and technologies to the world via industry partnerships, company creation and licensing.

The work of TRIUMF is sometimes seen as merely theoretical with little practical impact. The truth is that our work is often applied in ways we cannot foresee at the outset, with often surprising commercial and societal benefits.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, TRIUMF used learnings from research looking for dark matter, which included experience with gas handling and control systems, to help engineer and produce low-cost COVID ventilators through partnerships with other Canadian institutions, Italy and the United States.

Another real-world application is seen in our spinoff company, Ideon Technologies, which uses muon detectors originally developed to study fundamental subatomic particles as part of a new technology that provides X-ray like visibility up to one kilometre beneath the earth's surface. By detecting muons and using proprietary algorithms to produce 3D maps, Ideon helps exploration geologists more accurately identify new material and metal deposits, allowing companies to mine in a greener, more cost-effective way.

Ideon is the lead for a unique digital supercluster project with a world-leading consortium that includes Dias Geophysical, Fireweed Metals, Simon Fraser University, Mitacs and Microsoft.

None of these advancements would be possible without first providing the necessary funding and resources to the fundamental research being done at TRIUMF as well as the funding to enable our researchers to devote more focus and more applied activities to successfully develop and commercialize intellectual property. Future success will require even broader collaborative research and funding approaches across disciplinary boundaries.

As part of our recently released 20-year vision, we are continuing to focus on what we do best, translating fundamental science to real-world applications. We are excited about the opportunities for TRIUMF to drive further scientific breakthroughs and solutions to complex challenges facing Canada and the world, ranging from climate change to health to quantum and green technologies.

TRIUMF's newest capital investment, the institute for advanced medical isotopes, will provide academic and industry partners with world-leading capacity for new isotope research and clinical applications, and forms an important building block in our growing national medical isotope ecosystem.

In summary, our team at TRIUMF and TRIUMF Innovations continues to work tirelessly to translate Canadian scientific IP to real-world applications. Through our partnerships, we are bridging the gap between applied and theoretical research and tangible innovations.

As you continue to study the commercialization of IP as well as your study into big science in Canada, we look forward to hosting you at our facility in Vancouver and showcasing the amazing work we are doing to drive innovation.

Thank you, and I look forward to the committee's questions.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Maxime Blanchette-Joncas]

Thank you, Ms. Hayashi.

We'll now begin the first round. Everyone will have six minutes.

Mr. Williams, go ahead.

[Ryan Williams, Conservative, Bay of Quinte, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Hayashi, thank you for being here today. This is fascinating information.

I want to start with this: How does Canada, first of all, become number one in medical isotope IP creation?

[Kathryn Hayashi]

We have an incredible base to build on. Canada has been a leader in this space for decades. I say that quite seriously because I think that Canada is a small country on this stage, but we punch above our weight in the medical isotope space.

We have decades of investment in cyclotrons and reactors across the country that give us an edge that we can leverage in a booming sector. We're seeing advances in radiopharmaceutical development that are really changing the way we treat cancer. Medical isotopes used to be used for imaging, which is also an extremely important part of health care, but when you have isotopes that are playing a role in treating cancer that is otherwise untreatable, those are exciting developments.

Canada is poised with the components of an ecosystem all the way from research through to commercial supply and radiopharmaceutical development to really take our place on the global stage.

[Ryan Williams, Conservative, Bay of Quinte, ON]

A lot of witnesses in the past have talked about how the Americans have a robust VC system. They have more of an ability, it seems, to take risk when it comes to investing.

When we have IP developed, we see medical isotope production systems ready in Canada and we have companies that have started up and are growing, are you seeing from your industry that we have enough risk-takers, investors and VCs in Canada? Are a lot of these coming from overseas or from the U.S.?