Low-profile parliamentary studies are low-profile but have implications for access to medicines, high-stakes consequences for drug access
Public research and development risks prioritizing profits over patients in Canada’s drug strategy.
Adam R. Houston is the medical policy and advocacy advisor for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières Canada. Srinivas Murthy is a clinical associate professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Flying under the radar in the current parliamentary session are two studies by Canadian Members of Parliament, each with potentially serious implications for medical innovation, pandemic preparedness and access to medicines.
Both deserve greater attention, not least because they threaten to continue the worrying trend of the Canadian government emphasizing public investment in the research and development (R&D) and biomanufacturing of medicines as a means to boost private enterprise rather than to improve public health.
The first of these studies, already well underway at the Standing Committee on Science and Research, is misleadingly titled “Private Sector Investment in Research and Development in Canada.” A closer reading of the study description reveals it is actually about exploring ways “to advance the commercialization of innovation emerging from research at Canadian universities to build a stronger innovative economy in Canada.” In other words, it is about efficiently transferring publicly funded research to the private sector.
This is unsurprising at a time when Canada is increasingly framing R&D as an economic driver. However, it also is highly concerning given that publicly funded research at public universities has frequently been handed to private interests, who then maintain full control over who accesses the fruits of this research and at what price – control that can determine who can access medicines, the consequences of which may be a matter of life or death.
The second study, soon to begin at the Standing Committee on Health, is on “Canada’s pharmaceutical sovereignty.” This was brought to the forefront by COVID-19, which saw Canada facing both shortages of existing drugs and lack of access to new vaccines. A core issue was Canada had limited capacity to produce these products domestically. Disruptions in trade and supply chains underscored its dependence on other countries for both finished medicines and their underlying ingredients; indeed, it was not until September 2025 that the first doses of any COVID-19 vaccine were produced domestically.
The pandemic fuelled much-needed major public investment in domestic biomanufacturing. However, much of this was subsidization of capacity-building by private sector companies, including major multi-nationals. Ceding control to private agencies, many of them based outside Canada, is a strange approach to achieving pharmaceutical sovereignty.
It is crucial the committees undertaking these studies recognize that while there certainly are times when the interests of the public and the pharmaceutical industry align, there are also key areas where they diverge. This is why measures transferring public funds, or publicly funded R&D, to the private sector in areas fundamental to health must be undertaken sensibly to ensure public investment prioritizes benefits for the public. As yet, and to its detriment, Canada largely has failed to take such steps.
For instance, the University of British Columbia (UBC) was the birthplace of multiple important innovations during the COVID-19 response, notably the monoclonal antibody (mAb) treatment bamlanivimab and the lipid nanoparticle technology used in mRNA vaccines. These innovations originated with publicly funded, fundamental research at a public university. After the innovations were spun off into private companies, they received further public funding to support their ongoing development. Nonetheless, the ultimate benefits accrued primarily to private interests. AbCellera’s record-breaking stock market debut made it Canada’s most valuable biotech company, while Canada paid tens of millions of dollars for the drug.
Reliance on private industry to bring products to market disadvantages products whose public health impact outweighs their commercial value.
Meanwhile, in the absence of access conditions tied to funding by the government or by UBC for lipid nanoparticle technology, Canada not only faced its own challenges accessing mRNA vaccines, but also found itself funding the World Health Organization (WHO) mRNA Tech Transfer Hub in South Africa to reverse engineer the very same mRNA vaccine technology that had been funded by Canadians in the first place, after pharmaceutical companies refused to voluntarily participate in technology transfer to increase production for low and middle-income countries.
Nevertheless, there are still health researchers suggesting that one of the reasons for public investment in biomanufacturing facilities at public universities is so that companies can “benefit from premium pricing, with high upfront costs justified by reduced long-term health-care costs.” That argument might seem logical for a private enterprise seeking to maximize the return on its own investment, but it is a baffling one to make for the public purse that is paying first for research that will lower treatment costs, then paying again to cover a premium to a private entity just to access the fruits of that publicly funded research.
At the same time, reliance on private industry to bring products to market disadvantages products whose public health impact outweighs their commercial value. Numerous medicines considered essential medicines by the WHO, including for deadly diseases like tuberculosis, are not sold in Canada at all, simply because the pharmaceutical industry considers them insufficiently profitable. As a result, patients who require these drugs face serious challenges accessing them in a timely manner. When globally recognized essential medicines are not formally marketed and are consequently difficult to access, it is hard to say Canada is exercising its pharmaceutical sovereignty effectively.
The same is true of developing new treatments and vaccines, where a dependence on profit-driven commercial interests to bring products to market means that Canadian research breakthroughs face challenges getting out of the lab. For instance, the first effective vaccine against the most common form of Ebola originates from the government’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. However, the saga of getting this vaccine out into the world – involving Canada handing the license to a company that had never before brought a product to market, did nothing with it and then earned millions of dollars sublicensing it to another company, who finally brought it to market at a high price – illustrates how Canada should not be relying on industry, but filling the gaps where market failures occur.
The Government of Canada has a real opportunity to shift from subsidizing an already lucrative industry whose decisions are made in profit-focused boardrooms frequently located abroad, to filling the gaps at home that commercial interests largely ignore.
This lesson can’t be learned too soon: the past few years have seen multiple outbreaks of serious diseases – Lassa Fever, Marburg virus, the Sudan form of Ebola virus – all of which have promising vaccine candidates originating at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory. In all cases, however, recent funding to further advance these Canadian innovations has not come from Canada, but from foreign governments like the US and the European Union.
The Government of Canada has a real opportunity to shift from subsidizing an already lucrative industry whose decisions are made in profit-focused boardrooms frequently located abroad, to filling the gaps at home that commercial interests largely ignore. It must be more proactive in identifying these gaps, basing its actions on what is needed for health rather than what is desired by industry.
It also needs to recognize that the mere existence of capacity on Canadian soil is not enough. Its biomanufacturing investments, while sizable, have nonetheless failed to effectively assert sovereignty over how biomanufacturing capacity in Canada is actually used. This is exemplified by the publicly owned Biologics Manufacturing Centre (BMC) in Montreal, which began operations in 2022, but has been sitting idle since, while receiving $17 million in funding per year just to keep the lights on. The government’s approach of operating the BMC as a contract manufacturer for commercial interests has failed, as the calamitously unsuccessful deal with Novavax illustrates.
Instead, for a comparatively small investment, Canada could simultaneously be meeting domestic and global needs for important products like mAb treatments needed in outbreaks, with some for Canada’s own biosecurity stockpiles and the rest to put out the fire long before it gets to Canada.
Canada can and should abandon a failing strategy of appeasing private commercial interests in the vain hope doing so will be sufficient to ensure people have affordable access to the medicines they need, when they need them. Let us hope these two committees reach similar conclusions about Canada exercising its pharmaceutical sovereignty in a manner that prioritizes patients rather than profits in supporting Canadian R&D and biomanufacturing.
A version of this article was originally published on Healthy Debates.
