Science and Research Committee on March 21st, 2023

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

My first question is for Ms. Hayashi. It's in regard to the isotopes.

I'm pretty sure I saw a video of you at a dinner one time. It was in regard to your work with Bruce Power. I was just wondering if it is correct that TRIUMF has a working relationship with Bruce Power and the medical isotopes they produce in their reactors.

[Kathryn Hayashi]

We do in a way. We are all part of the group that is working on the Canadian medical isotope ecosystem proposal that is part of the strategic innovation fund stream five, which is for building new national ecosystems. That is what we have been hard at work doing for the past few years.

Bruce Power is one of the main partners in that effort. They have a project that's really unique. It takes the reactors they use to generate power and uses them to co-produce medical isotopes. Their part of the project is really innovative. They also have a really important reconciliation component that involves the Saugeen Ojibway nation. We're very excited about medical isotopes playing a role in that relationship.

We did do.... Actually, it wasn't us. A group of independent filmmakers made a 10-minute film talking about actinium-225, which they call the rarest drug in the world. That has gone viral a little bit, so people tell me all the time that they saw me in a video.

It is true. The promise of medical isotopes and what they could mean for Canada, both for health and for economic benefit, is really important. We're hoping that our strategic innovation fund proposal will be finalized in the coming weeks.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Yes, it really is impactful. We had a Movember event last year, and there was an individual from Australia who was livestreamed from there. He was talking about a Canadian isotope that would be used for his prostate cancer treatment. What's happening really has stretched around the world.

There's one other question I wanted to ask you. I'm sure this has come up in conversations through the years. Does Canada need to look at the way we do our accredited investor? Do we need to look at different ways, so people who maybe don't have the means of income or total investment dollars can still participate in some of the venture capital project early-stage funding rounds, which aren't available to them because they aren't accredited investors?

[Kathryn Hayashi]

That's a really good question.

Part of the rationale behind accredited investors is that they're investors who have a lot of investment experience or a lot of capital, so it's not jeopardizing their retirement savings to participate in an investment.

I think we do have to continue to find that balance of coming out with the right end points. Having a fund that would perhaps have professional managers who understood the space but could deploy other types of capital into the system is a really exciting idea. We're starting to see a little bit of it, with more specialized funds being developed.

There's certainly much more of that in the United States, but exploring how we could bring that to Canada in a targeted or focused way is a really exciting idea.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Dr. Singh, with you out in Saskatchewan, what are some areas that are, I guess you could say, chronically underfunded? What are great ideas at the university, specifically in agriculture, that just always seem to come up short in funding? Are there any out there you can identify?

[Dr. Baljit Singh]

I couldn't put my finger on any specific piece, but overall there is a feeling that in Canada we have underfunding of our research system and of the connections between basic science and the applications for commercialization.

For example, to add to what has been said about TRIUMF, the University of Saskatchewan has a cyclotron. We produce isotopes that contribute to Canada's capacity as one of the major countries producing radioisotopes. We also have Canada's only synchrotron, Canadian Light Source, which is situated at the University of Saskatchewan.

When you look at the discovery science and the papers that are coming out, I think the connecting piece is not as robustly funded and it's not as robustly connected. There might be a suite of programs at the provincial level or at the federal level. Those are not deeply connected with each other.

The last point I would make is that I think there's a need for the universities to have a fund directly at their disposal that they can provide to the inventors, at a very early stage, when they find something truly interesting. The reason I'm asking for that is that, when an inventor discovers something, it takes a long period of time to get the funding to move it to a TRL 1, 2 or 3. If the universities had a purse of money, they could quickly invest in that product while they're looking for additional funding or creating connections with the private sector.

Those are a couple of ideas I'd like to submit.

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

Thank you, Mr. Lobb. Your time is up.

Next we have Mr. Lauzon for five minutes.

[Stéphane Lauzon, Liberal, Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to say what a great job you're doing in the chair's stead.

I'm going to start with Mr. Singh.

You talked about the successful commercialization of IP. I want to come at it from the standpoint of small and medium-sized businesses. They are a big concern of mine because you find a lot of them in rural and remote areas. I'm somewhat of a spokesperson for them.

I'd like to know how small and medium-sized businesses could work more directly with universities.

Remote areas don't have universities or CEGEPs, so businesses have to turn to equipment suppliers, which do the research for them.

There are small businesses with the IP rights for incredible innovations, businesses that have grown from two to 100 employees, businesses that have invented a number of products and techniques you may not even know about.

What can be done to improve the relationship between universities and those businesses, which don't have a place in the ecosystem?

[Dr. Baljit Singh]

Thank you very much. I think that question is of deep importance to our country. As large as our country is, we have only 37 million people spread across a large land mass.

For the polytechnics, for example, there is a very critical role when it comes to working with the small and medium-scale businesses, whether they are in the city or at a remote location.

When I was making my submission about the disconnect or better ways to connect our system, again I was thinking about the province of Saskatchewan, which has very few people spread out in large municipalities. How do they reach out to the inventors in the communities, who may not have direct access to Saskatchewan Polytechnic or the University of Saskatchewan, for example?

I think that again leads us to the idea of the role of the provincial and federal entities to create that awareness and create the forum where the businesses are located, so those in remote communities can come to the universities and polytechnics to refine the product or add the last technical piece to the product. They could really work with the universities' incubators to take their product to the market.

The University of Saskatchewan, to fulfill that need, just created an incubator house, which is very busy. For the last 12 months we've had dozens of teams that have been learning from the incubator how to pitch their product, how to create the product and how to move it to the market.

I think it's an ongoing effort, but we will win this game if we can create that true connectivity among the federal, provincial and city levels of government and working with the universities and the polytechnics in this country, because isolation does not help us.

Again, I look forward to the guidance from this committee and the government as to how we can support such a mechanism to connect with the sectors. I think I was giving an example of the farm train in the twenties from the University of Saskatchewan. Maybe we need to reinvent something like that, through the modern ways of communication, like video conferences, for such entities.

[Stéphane Lauzon, Liberal, Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation, QC]

You established living labs, in a way, and you received federal support through that type of programming.

In the report you forwarded to us yesterday, you make recommendations and you talk about the fact that today's critical challenges transcend national borders. You recommend a mechanism built on culture change. I really find that fascinating.

What type of culture change should be fostered to support IP commercialization?

You have 50 seconds to answer.

[Dr. Baljit Singh]

Thank you very much.

One of the changes in culture is the way we view intellectual property and the way we can make investments. The recent investments in biomanufacturing hubs in our country is really to offset the challenges we felt during the pandemic. We had no biomanufacturing capacity in our country. That's a national sovereignty issue.

I think that by working together with the universities and the private sector and bringing companies like Moderna or Sanofi into our country, we can really have a mechanism to take the new vaccines, produce them in Canada and sell them around the globe, creating jobs and prosperity for our own people and protecting the health of animals and people in this country.

The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan has produced and marketed six or seven vaccines that are the first of their kind in the world. That is emerging as Canada's pandemic centre. We are so thrilled to be partnering with four of the biomanufacturing hubs that were announced in our country.

Again, as I keep requesting of everyone, collaboration is the key for us if we're going to deliver on the promise that Canadians want from us.

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

Thank you, Mr. Lauzon.

We are continuing with the rounds.

We'll go to Mr. Cannings for two and a half minutes.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

I'm going to turn to Ms. Hayashi again.

You brought up something during your introductory statement about the importance of the basic research. TRIUMF is thought of as very basic research in looking at the basic particles that make up the universe, but you connected it with some very real developments in innovation. I'm just wondering if you could expand on that.

Maybe I misunderstood you, but I thought you somehow connected dark matter research with COVID ventilators. I'm not sure if I got that right. Maybe you could expand on that in particular, because I'm very curious about it, and also on the broader picture of how important it is to support and fund the basic research to develop the IP that we're talking about here today.

[Kathryn Hayashi]

It really is remarkable how, for those basic research ideas that seem very esoteric, like “We're looking for neutrinos in a giant water tank in Japan”, we can take that detector technology that we use to keep the water clean in those giant tanks and turn our attention to, “Could we make a clean water monitoring system that would ensure remote communities and first nation communities have clean water?” That's a new idea that's come from a very basic research project.

The COVID ventilators came from a lot of the equipment that has to be designed and built to do research into dark matter, which involves creating vacuums, valves and all these sorts of technologies. When the Italians literally were dying because they didn't have enough ventilators, they asked us for help and to work with them on creating a COVID-design ventilator. All of our experts in gas movement and valves got together. They worked with the Italians and the Americans and very quickly designed and built one, and then found a manufacturing partner and also a funding partner in the Government of Canada. I think we started in March 2020 and by the fall of 2020 had delivered hundreds of ventilators to the government. That was really when the lightbulb came on as to how we can take these very brilliant people who have these fundamental research technologies and we can deploy them in new ways.

An example is neutron detection. Apparently, neutron detection is something that is very important as a proof of concept for fusion energy. We have a collaboration with a fusion energy company to help them determine whether their fusion energy technology is actually really working. We also do proton and neutron radiation testing so that companies like Cisco can ensure their components will withstand radiation in the upper atmosphere or in space.

There are all of these things that we can use these fundamental technologies for, and I think the really exciting part is that, when we give our researchers funding and a bit of bandwidth to focus on more applied technologies, really exciting ideas can come. That's something we're going to be focusing on in the future: How do we get funding to allow these brilliant researchers some time, focused bandwidth and some personnel to turn their minds to more applied problems?

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

Thank you, Mr. Cannings.

We now go to Mr. Mazier for five minutes.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Thank you, Chair.

Dr. Singh, can you please table with the committee how much money the university has received from the federal government for research and how much the university has made for the licensing of intellectual property over the last five years?

[Dr. Baljit Singh]

I will be happy to do that. We will submit it to the committee today.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Ms. Hayashi, could you do the same?

[Kathryn Hayashi]

Yes.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Thank you.

For the both of you, can you table with this committee what percentage of your IP has been transferred to Canadian companies and non-Canadian companies over the last five years?

Dr. Singh, being from the farm all my life, I'm very interested in agriculture development, especially when it comes to seed production. You talked about “never too early” as far as getting involved in IP protection. If I'm hearing you right in your testimony and your comments, we need to have a different approach when it comes to IP protection, or at least in getting the value of IP here in Canada. I'm wondering if you can expand on that a little bit more.

Right now we have a system where we're still very focused on the jobs parts of it or actually putting people in big plants and stuff like that, but for the intangible kind of assets that are out there right now, which are proving to be of greater value, such as intellectual property, I think Canada is really falling short.

I don't know if you could expand on that or if you could comment on that. Maybe we need to have a different look at how we protect intellectual property in Canada.

[Dr. Baljit Singh]

Thank you very much.

May I request that you speak to one or two intangibles that you think we need to look at?

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

What are the intangibles?

[Dr. Baljit Singh]

Yes, you were mentioning that there are some intangibles that we need to keep in mind when we look at intellectual property.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

It's everything from the information...even what we learn here in Canada, and then you give that information back to, say, the seed developer, in the agriculture point of view.

[Dr. Baljit Singh]

Thank you very much.

I think the intellectual property piece is always under flux with the new legislation and the legalities around it. On the same point, there's our ability to identify a piece of knowledge that could have a material effect on the prosperity of Canadians, whether it's through job creation, protecting the health of the animals and the humans in this country, or by creating royalties from the products that might be produced in some other jurisdiction and brought back to us. Sometimes I believe that an intellectual property piece could also advance Canada's diplomacy around the globe, in the countries where there a food security challenge or a water security challenge.

May I give you an example?

The discovery at the University of Saskatchewan of the virus I was referring to that affects pigs is called circovirus. A few years later we figured out that this virus is actually causing a disease in the pigs. Once we developed the technology to produce a vaccine, it was purchased by a company that is based in France. Still, through the production of the vaccine, not only did we protect the health of the pigs in this country, which is a multi-billion dollar export, but we also were able to generate about $100 million in royalties for the inventors and for the university, to further flow back into research ecosystem.

I really agree with you—