Panel Abstract:
Canada produces world-class health research but faces persistent challenges in translating discoveries into commercialized solutions. This panel will explore how to strengthen the country’s innovation pipeline by examining the structural, cultural, and policy barriers that slow the path from bench to benefit. Drawing on perspectives from startups, funders, industry, and government, panelists will discuss how to better align research, regulation, and investment to accelerate health technology adoption. The panel will offer forward-looking strategies to enhance commercialization and build a more resilient, competitive, and inclusive Canadian life sciences ecosystem.

Summary of Conversations

The discussion centered on the imperative of accelerating the translation of scientific discoveries into tangible health benefits for the public. A key theme was the critical role of collaboration across academic, clinical, and private sectors, emphasizing that successful innovation translation requires integrated, multi-disciplinary teams working beyond traditional institutional silos. Participants highlighted the necessity of reforming funding models to support the riskier, early-stage development necessary to bridge the ‘Valley of Death’—the gap between initial proof-of-concept and viable market readiness. Specific examples shared included streamlining regulatory pathways for novel devices and therapeutics, and designing clinical trials with implementation and scalability in mind from the outset. In addition, speakers underscored several systemic issues not limited to funding. These included the absence of a long-term national strategy for life sciences, persistent procurement barriers that prevent Canadian innovations from being adopted at home, and the need to grow anchor companies to retain talent and strengthen domestic capabilities. Furthermore, the conversation underscored the need for patient and public involvement throughout the innovation lifecycle to ensure developed solutions address real-world needs and health equity challenges, while recognizing that evolving geopolitical pressures and global competition heighten the urgency for more coordinated national action.

Take Away Messages/Current Status of Challenges

• • Absence of a Long-Term National Strategy: Canada lacks a durable 10-20 year industrial plan for life sciences, resulting in unstable funding cycles, talent loss and fragmented execution.

• Geopolitical and Economic Shifts: Canada faces intensifying global competition, declining R&D investment relative to peers and a changing economic relationship with the U.S., increasing pressure to strengthen domestic resilience.

• Cultural Risk Aversion: A persistent societal and institutional hesitancy toward risk-taking limits experimentation, scale-up and bold decision-making across academia, government and industry.

• • Pervasive Systemic Siloing: Significant barriers remain due to rigid institutional and sectoral boundaries, impeding fluid knowledge transfer and collaborative development between researchers, clinicians, entrepreneurs, and regulatory bodies.
  • The “Valley of Death” in Funding: A critical lack of dedicated, sustained, high-risk capital exists to finance the crucial mid-stage development—prototyping, de-risking, and initial scaling—required to transition successful academic research into marketable health solutions.
  • Misalignment of Academic Incentives: Current institutional promotion and reward structures prioritize publication counts and grant dollars over the complex, resource-intensive work of commercialization, clinical validation, and real-world implementation.
  • Regulatory Complexity and Chronology: Health innovation often outpaces existing regulatory frameworks, leading to protracted, unpredictable approval timelines that discourage investment and delay patient access to novel therapies and diagnostics.

• Procurement Barriers: Even strong domestic technologies face significant obstacles entering provincial health systems, depriving innovators of early customers and slowing adoption.

• Insufficient Data Infrastructure: The lack of standardized, interoperable, and ethically governed health data platforms hinders the efficient conduct of large-scale validation studies and the effective real-world monitoring of implemented innovations.
• Limited Scale-Up Expertise: A deficit exists in the ecosystem regarding personnel trained specifically in the business acumen, manufacturing, market access, and clinical adoption strategies necessary for effective technology scale-up and diffusion.
• Lack of Proactive Public Engagement: The current approach often fails to integrate patient needs and health system demands into the research design phase, resulting in brilliant innovations that ultimately lack clinical utility or widespread acceptance.

Recommendations/Next Steps

• • Develop a Long-Term National Life Sciences and Industrial Strategy: Commit to a 10-20 year coordinated plan aligning capital, talent, regulatory modernization, procurement reform and infrastructure investment to stabilize the ecosystem and retain global competitiveness.
  • Establish Integrated Translation Hubs: Fund and empower national or regional centers dedicated to cross-sector collaboration, offering shared infrastructure, specialized expertise (e.g., regulatory, IP, scale-up), and hands-on mentorship to bridge bench-to-bedside gaps.
  • Implement “Innovation Bridge” Seed Funds: Create dedicated, milestone-based funding mechanisms specifically targeting the high-risk, mid-stage validation and de-risking activities within the translational ‘Valley of Death.’
  • Revise Institutional Merit Metrics: Restructure academic tenure and promotion guidelines to explicitly recognize and reward successful commercialization, patent generation, industry partnership formation, and demonstrable clinical/societal impact.
  • Create Flexible, Adaptive Regulatory Pathways: Develop “sandbox” or fast-track regulatory schemes for groundbreaking health technologies, allowing for concurrent validation and review while maintaining robust safety and efficacy standards.

• Modernize Public Procurement Practices: Create mechanisms that allow provincial systems to test, adopt, and scale Canadian innovations, including early-adopter programs and coordinated federal-provincial procurement pathways.

• Strengthen Anchor Firm Development: Introduce targeted co-investment tools and scale-up supports to grow mid-to-large domestic companies capable of retaining talent, manufacturing locally and serving as hubs in national clusters.

• Mandate Foundational Data Interoperability: Invest significantly in creating a national, standardized, and secure federated data ecosystem to support research, facilitate clinical trial enrollment, and enable rapid post-market surveillance.
• Develop Specialized Workforce Training: Launch national training programs focused on cultivating “Translational Scientists” and “MedTech Entrepreneurs” skilled in the intersection of science, business development, and health system implementation.
• Enforce Patient-Centric Design: Mandate early and continuous involvement of patient representatives and end-users in the governance, design, and evaluation phases of all publicly funded health innovation projects to ensure relevance and adoption.