Canadian patients benefit when government and private sector work together
In the natural world, an ecosystem is a community of interacting organisms, one that requires careful balance to maintain it. In the business world, it’s a similar idea: enterprises of all sizes deepen their working relationships to generate new, more lucrative or more impactful products, services and technologies.
“Ecosystem” is a word that comes up repeatedly when speaking with stakeholders in the pharmaceutical industry.
“The pipeline to drug development is no longer vertical,” says Jason Field, president and CEO of Life Sciences Ontario, an umbrella group representing hundreds of life sciences businesses in the province.
Instead, drug development has become an ecosystem. Where R&D once ran in a straight line from idea to clinical trials to regulation and eventually treatment, all under the auspices of a single pharmaceutical company, today’s drug development looks more like a tree, with global drug companies acting as the trunk, branching into dozens of innovative start-ups and developers acting under outsourcing or licensing agreements.
And just like in an ecosystem, when one part of the cycle is affected, it disrupts the whole chain.
That’s why industry leaders are hoping that collaboration from all parties will ensure that the current Health Canada drug price reform proposal doesn’t result in a system where austerity at one end of the ecosystem chokes the investment needed to fund Canadian start-ups at the other.
“To say that Canadian small and medium enterprises will not be affected is shortsighted,” Field says. “That’s not how ecosystems work.”
What that means for smaller start-ups, the kinds of places that are making and testing discoveries, is that it becomes harder for global drug makers to view Canada as an attractive place to finance the clinical trials needed to carry a new discovery from the laboratory out into the world.
“The risk is we start to lose economic prosperity if these companies are unable to stay here and grow here,” Field says.
That’s not to say it isn’t possible for the health system to see overall savings. And it’s not to suggest that industry doesn’t have ideas for how to reduce costs and build savings into the overall ecosystem, rather than only at one end of the spectrum.
“We’ve never seen such unprecedented alignment,” Field says. Patients, academics, industry, municipal economic development, even service providers are pointing out ways to make Canadian-made drugs and medical devices better.
For Field, collaboration and partnership between all parties is necessary in order to avoid wiping out one area of the ecosystem while reining in the costs of another. “Really, what we’re asking for is a pause and a space to have a meaningful dialogue. Let’s be thoughtful about it.”
[Price reform will make it] harder for global drug makers to view Canada as an attractive place to finance the clinical trials needed to carry a new discovery from the laboratory out into the world.