By DANIEL TSAI (/AUTHOR/DANIEL-TSAI) MARCH 1, 2021
Favourable procurement policies, additional funding, and private-public partnerships can build a Canadian health-care-industrial complex to allow Canadian companies to lead the world, create jobs, save and improve lives, and protect and enhance our Canadian economic and industrial interests.
For Canadian health-care companies to succeed, the provinces must centralize their procurement to favour Canadian health-care companies with a ‘Buy Canadian’ policy while the federal government provides extensive financing to help these companies to flourish. Also, Canada should encourage public-private partnerships in health-care innovation and business, writes Daniel Tsai.
TORONTO—As the European Union threatens export controls on COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers for failing to meet their contracts and to adequately supply its EU citizens, and without COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing facilities of its own, Canada is helplessly at the mercy of others to supply our people’s vaccines.
Canada’s inability to make and distribute its own vaccines exposes our major weaknesses in health care, industrial, and national security as Canada contends with the highly transmissible new U.K. and South Africa variants of COVID-19—and future variants and mutating strains to come.
Now is the time for Canada to lead on medical-industrial policy by developing, supporting and commercializing Canadian health-care technology to become a powerhouse global manufacturer and supplier in health care. This strategy would address the cold geopolitical reality that health care is inextricably linked to national interests, economic prosperity, and security.
Rather than focus on declining carbon-based industries, such as oil and gas, the emphasis in Canada should instead be on healthcare innovation, manufacturing, genomics, and data analytics, and the commercialization of new medical technologies for national interests, and economic and global infuence.
Canada doesn’t have to look far to develop its resources in medical expertise, artifcial intelligence, and information technology.
Ontario has several Canadian health-care companies engaged in cutting-edge technology with the potential to revolutionize health care globally.
Consider, for example, CSTS Healthcare in Toronto. Founded by Dr. Giannoula Lakka, a pediatric hematologist oncologist, she left Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto to become director of rare tumors and vascular anomalies at Tufts Medical Centre and established the Experimental Therapeutics Program at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Lakka returned to Canada to co-found CSTS, which has produced leading technology that uses sophisticated artificial intelligence to help develop next-generation, cancer-fighting drugs and therapies.
Recognizing that every individual has a unique genetic makeup (or genome), CSTS’ AIOMIC technology uses AI to determine the optimal cancer-fighting drugs, doses, and therapies that will work best with that individual patient.
Traditional pharmacological research and studies look at broader populations, which may mean significant percentages will not react well to the therapy. As well, most cancer therapies may be based on a traditional approach of maximum dosing, which can be harmful to a patient’s well.being as they undergo excruciating chemotherapies.
A man pictured on Feb. 19, 2021, walking up Wellington Street in Ottawa. Canada’s inability to make and distribute its own vaccines exposes our major weaknesses in health care, industrial, and national security as Canada contends with the highly transmissible new U.K. and South Africa variants of COVID-19—and future variants and mutating strains to come. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade
Instead, CSTS’ AIOMIC technology offers the possibility of “bespoke” or tailored therapies, potentially making cancer a manageable as opposed to a terminal disease.
AIOMIC avoids the human guesswork of therapeutic teams by relying on massive datasets and the machine learning to help tailor the treatment.
Precise genomic-therapies like AIOMIC for cancer are analogous to the mRNA (messenger RNA) genetically tailored vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, which have laid a path for more unprecedented and revolutionary therapies.
Bespoke therapies can also reduce intangible costs to patients while significantly reducing the burdens to the health-care system by allowing patients to stay healthier, have a high quality of life, remain productive, and contribute to their families, work, and society.
Tailored genomic therapies also have the potential of reducing the direct costs of cancer therapy, which was $158-billion as of 2019, according to the National Institute of Health. The technology could potentially treat other diseases, and tap into an even larger global market for CSTS’ Canadian technology.
And to show that Canadian ingenuity and prowess in health-care technology is not limited to large, urban centres like Toronto, consider Sudbury’s Verv Technologies.
Verv has developed Vi, a home biochemistry lab that fits in the palm of your hand.
With only a finger prick of blood, Verv’s Vi device separates blood plasma which is tested against dried reagents, and produces lab results in almost 15 minutes within the convenience of your own home.
Given the public health authorities’ recognition of the importance of detection and testing, particularly in light of COVID-19, this device has the potential of conducting up to 100 standard biochemistry tests.
Dried blood spot testing is a $380-million industry, and Verv is looking to provide affordable and easily accessible tests to outcompete large U.S. companies. Vi has the potential of making preventative medicine accessible to anyone and reducing healthcare system costs.
The success of startups like Verv is related in part to a northern Canadian venture capital fund that is angel invested by the federal government using industry professionals (non-bureaucrats) in the decision-making process for grants, which could be expanded to all rural regions in Canada.
Toronto’s VitalHub offers an innovative dashboard technology that tracks health-care trends in real time by providing a live “heat map” of what’s happening with predictive analytics. VitalHub’s technology increases hospital productivity, reduces patient wait-times and can track vaccinations in real time. Its technology is already used at the Windsor Hospital and has cut wait-times from 12 to two or three hours.
As one of Canada’s top 10 fastest growing companies according to Deloitte, VitalHub is finding its success in the U.K. rather than Ontario.
For Canadian health-care companies to succeed, the provinces must centralize their procurement to favour Canadian health-care companies with a “Buy Canadian” policy while the federal government provides extensive financing to help these companies to flourish.
Also, Canada should encourage public-private partnerships in health-care innovation and business.
For example, in a first in Canada and unique to North America, Shores Hospital’s Mental Health Innovation Accelerator Program will partner with private-sector companies.
Shores will work with businesses and entrepreneurs across a range of industries, including outside of health care, to develop, trial, and bring to market innovative solutions for mental health, such as technology to speed up and expand access to virtualized delivery of mental health care.
Favourable procurement policies, additional funding, and private-public partnerships can build a Canadian health-care-industrial complex to allow Canadian companies to lead the world, create jobs, save and improve lives, and protect and enhance our Canadian economic and industrial interests.
Daniel Tsai is a former Canadian health-care executive, a former senior policy adviser in the Government of Canada, and a lecturer in law and technology at the University of Toronto. Follow him on Twitter at @dtsailawyermba
Original Article Link with permission from The Hill Times https://www.hilltimes.com/2021/03/01/facing-a-vaccine-crisis-canada-desperately-needs-a-med-tech-industrial-strategy/285501