Science and Research Committee on March 21st, 2023

[William Ghali]

I have the easier job, because I get to follow the wisdom of Dr. Murphy.

I do want to add one piece, which is that both of us here are from the post-secondary sector, in which, as I see the numbers, Canada is rather strong, both in public sector expenditures for R and D and in the performance of the post-secondary sector in terms of expenditures in research activity. In contrast, I see in the statistics for business enterprise expenditure on R and D that we are significantly lagging. It's when the public sector and private sector expenditures on R and D are combined that Canada falls in the OECD ranking of per capita expenditure.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Dr. Ghali, I will let you answer the question first this time, because it builds on this.

Are there areas in which Canada is excelling in IP commercialization and areas in which we need to support it better, such as academia or certain business sectors? You were kind of alluding to that.

[William Ghali]

Yes. As to whether there are particular sectors, one area I could comment on, in which we have been quite active as a post-secondary sector, has been responding to the federal government's bioinnovation and biomanufacturing strategy and the investments that have been made just recently, which I think have been motivated by the pandemic and the realization that Canada was lacking domestic capacity to mobilize quickly for novel therapeutics, diagnostics and, most notably, vaccines.

I don't want to overstate the negatives, because there is a biotech and bioinnovation sector in Canada and there are investments being made now to try to bolster that through the Canada biomedical research fund. However, to answer your question, that is one domain in which I think the stress test of a global pandemic revealed that sector to be weaker than that of some other countries. I think we could look to what the U.K. achieved and what the U.S. achieved with the rapid mobilization of massive funding for vaccine development. Indeed, the two most notable vaccines came out of R and D in the U.S.

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

Professor Ghali, I must interrupt you, as Ms. Bradford's six minutes are up.

Mr. Cannings, you have the floor for six minutes.

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

Thank you.

It's great to have the two witnesses here before us today. It's very interesting. I'm particularly happy to see UBC represented, my alma mater, where I worked for many years.

I would like to start with Dr. Murphy. We have heard about and you mentioned some of the initiatives and innovations that came out of the pandemic. You mentioned AbCellera, and there is my friend Pieter Cullis and his work on lipid nanoparticles. I think Precision NanoSystems is developing those things.

Could you perhaps use those researchers and the companies that formed out of their research, and where they are headed now, as an example of how they did it? Did they do it right? Have you learned something from that process? It's something I think we should all be proud of, but one of the things we are concerned with here is keeping IP in Canada as much as possible.

Perhaps you could expand on that story and say what we learned and where we're headed.

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

Thank you, MP Cannings. We are very proud to have you as an alumnus of UBC.

Let me briefly recap two stories that are related to the biomanufacturing and life sciences sectors. One is the company that I mentioned earlier, AbCellera, started by Carl Hansen at UBC for antibody therapies. An interesting aspect of Carl's work is that he incubated the technology at UBC for an extended period of time as he built AbCellera. It was a real case of where the Canada Foundation for Innovation infrastructure was used for both research and innovation. He was able to use that equipment to help further company ideas before they were ready to spawn off. They had a tremendous impact in the recent pandemic as well.

If we look at the lipid nanoparticle work of Dr. Cullis, that was simply stupendous. In large part, it's the reason we were able to deliver those mRNA vaccines into people—hundreds of millions of people worldwide as a society. One of the interesting aspects of his work is how long it took to get to a place where it could be commercialized. He recently cited, at the launch of our bio-hub, that it was a 25-year journey funded by the federal government that allowed the technology to develop to the point where it was ready, in this instance, to really accelerate the therapeutics that could be delivered out to not only Canadians but also the world.

I think you see that need for incubation within the university for both research and innovation, and also the need to really fund fundamental research, because we never know where the next discovery that's going to significantly impact the world is going to come from.

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

Thank you.

You also mentioned in your opening remarks the need for more funding for just patent production, I think, and how that aspect needs more funding. Could you expand on where that money is needed and what it would produce?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

Absolutely.

At UBC, inventors' inventions are provided to the university, because we are institution-owned and it is an institution policy that we take towards IP. When they are disclosed, an analysis is done to determine what should be patented. Our patent budget is very small. We stretch it in multiple ways to be able to file those over 300 patents that we filed last year. If we don't protect that intellectual property at its inception, then over time we lose the ability as a country to even think about commercializing that technology.

The more we can file provisional patents and do work on patent families to get those fundamental patents in place, the more our researchers and Canadians have an ability to think about how we can commercialize that further.

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

Just to expand on that further, I assume there's a time constraint too in that patent filing, because these researchers will want to publish their results. Once those results are published, I assume that patenting becomes more difficult.

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

Yes, it does. Indeed, we take care in making sure that all the research that's done at UBC is publishable and can be publishable. That is a goal that every researcher has and that every graduate student needs to be able to strive for. We need to be able to act quickly. It is not something where you can take years and years to think about filing a patent.

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

I have just one more follow-up on that, which is about the role that governments could play in government procurement. We were talking about vaccines. Where do we need more government activity in, say, producing vaccines compared with the U.K. example, when Canada literally failed in that regard to produce things at a real commercial level? Where do we need that government procurement?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

What I know from the health system—I'm sure Dr. Ghali can speak more to this—is that Canada is one of the hardest places to have your invention taken up into the health care system. We need to be able to produce—which the biomanufacturing and life sciences strategy is taking a step towards—not only the vaccines but also the ingredients in the supply chain that go into the vaccine production. Then we need an ability to actually procure at some scale to be able to move that into use.

Before that step, we also need to be able to do early-stage human trials, which is not the easiest thing to do in every part of this country. I know that our researchers are working with Health Canada to be able to keep some of the regulatory changes that happened during the pandemic, regularize those and then move some of the therapeutics more quickly into Canadian use.

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

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

We will now move to the second round of questions.

Mr. Mazier, you have the floor for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming here today.

Dr. Murphy and Dr. Ghali, can you please table with this committee how much money your university has received from the federal government for research and how much your university has made from licensing intellectual property over the last five years? Can you table that report, please?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

We could certainly get that information to you.

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

Dr. Ghali, could you, as well?

[William Ghali]

Yes.

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

Also, 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. Gail Murphy]

We could certainly also do so.

I can say that with respect to licensing out to companies, we have two forms. There is sponsored research, as I mentioned, the vast majority of which is going to Canadian companies. For the second form, which is the spinoff companies, 92% of that went into Canadian companies and 8% went to U.S. and U.K. companies, where there was not as much ability to find the market and accelerate it in Canada.

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

Okay, if you could table those two reports, that would be great.

Dr. Ghali, I have a patent application with me here. The international publication date is June 11, 2020. The publication number is WO 2020/113310 A1. The applicants' names are Huawei Technologies and the University of Calgary.

How many patents has your university applied for with or transferred to Huawei?

[William Ghali]

That's also a question that can be answered in terms of the quantitative details after the fact. I don't have those numbers at my fingertips here.

I think your question is of course a very pertinent one, particularly in the current time, when there is a heightened attention to matters of research security. We are working under some new federal guidelines for safeguarding our research. Those guidelines are accompanied by new bodies that have been created within CSIS and Public Safety Canada to support post-secondary institutions in the consideration of research security and the management of risk.

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

That's good, Doctor. Thank you.

I have some more questions here.

Do you continue to work with Huawei in any form?

[William Ghali]

We don't at this time because of guidance that has come to us through the bodies I just mentioned.

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

Okay.

Dr. Murphy, I have a patent assignment agreement here with me. The conveying party is your university, the University of British Columbia. The receiving party is Huawei Technologies. I'm quoting from the assignment agreement: “We, the University of British Columbia, do hereby sell, transfer and assign to Huawei Technologies Canada...all our interest in inventions and developments relating to “Photonic Elements driven by Common Electrical Driver” including the inventions and developments disclosed in United States Utility Patent Application Serial No. 15/080,065...and We grant to the Assignee all right, title and interest in any and all intellectual property therein”. The patent assignment agreement is dated July 2021.

How many patents has the University of British Columbia filed with or transferred to Huawei?

[Dr. Gail Murphy]

Again, I would be happy to table that quantitative information later.

I will say that as research security guidelines have evolved with the federal government, we have been changing our agreements in that respect and have moved to new standards.