To prepare for the next big health crisis, Canada needs to strengthen its biotech sector

Excerpt from the Press Release:

Subsidies, tax breaks and funding will keep momentum going in Canada’s promising biomanufacturing industry.

Why weren’t we better prepared? The frantic search for gloves and masks, then ventilators and life-saving drugs, and then the scramble to ramp up testing, slow the deaths in long-term care and deploy vaccines — the pandemic exposed a dangerous gap in this country’s ability to keep Canadians safe. It’s a fair question — one that people were asking in other countries, too — but a question that’s always easier to ask in hindsight.

Take, for example, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that were first to be approved. “Nobody would have known even five years ago that mRNA would have basically saved the world,” says Molly Shoichet, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Toronto, co-founder of the biotech startup AmacaThera and former chief scientist of Ontario. Even if we had known, it’s always harder to find the funding and political will before disaster strikes.

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