Q&A: CQDM's Diane Gosselin on catalyzing Canadian innovation in biopharma

The lack of big pharma companies doing early-stage research in Canada means "Canadian technology needs to be extremely competitive worldwide," says Diane Gosselin, the president and CEO of the biopharmaceutical research consortium CQDM.

The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines has been a pandemic success story. Canadian technology helped to make mRNA vaccines possible, and Canadian researchers are ushering vaccine candidates through development with the goal of vaccinating the world. One of the most notable is Medicago’s plant-based vaccine, which is undergoing regulatory review by Health Canada.   

Those successes are no surprise to Diane Gosselin, PhD, President and CEO of the biopharmaceutical research consortium CQDM. The consortium, created in 2008 to fund the development of tools and technologies to accelerate therapeutic discovery, forged a unique model for R&D collaboration between the private and public sectors.

CQDM invested in the development of Medicago’s vaccine discovery platform in 2009. “It’s really because Medicago had that platform in place that they could get into the race for an anti-COVID vaccine very quickly,” Gosselin told Research Money in a recent interview.

We spoke to Gosselin about what it takes to fund early-stage drug development and how Canada can stay competitive in the global biopharmaceutical industry.

CQDM was founded more than a decade ago, when the need for translation research funding was particularly urgent. Are there ways in which the biopharmaceutical sector has changed in that time that have implications for policymakers today?

Yes. When CQDM was created in 2008, we had many big pharma companies anchored in Canada who were doing research and development. This is gone. We still have big pharma, but they are not doing much research and certainly not early-stage research. I should say that that change is not specific to Canada. It has happened in many other countries. But it means the context has changed. Today, we are talking to external research heads in global pharma companies who are exposed to everything that’s happening around the world. They are keen to invest in new technologies but they can be extremely selective about it. As a result, Canadian technology needs to be extremely competitive worldwide.

Honestly, I think that is good news. It’s forcing everyone here to ask ourselves, is this technology going to compete internationally, yes or no? It is forcing us to be extremely rigorous in the way we're evaluating early-stage technology. We will make mistakes, but the important thing is to stop the project early, then put our money and resources into innovative tools and technologies that hold the most promise.

CQDM was designed to catalyze research collaboration between small biotech companies, big pharma and academic researchers. What have you learned along the way about building successful collaborations, especially with industry?

Number one is to create a win-win situation. It seems pretty obvious, but it is not trivial, especially with the pharma industry. We have been able to bring several pharma companies to work together, whereas usually those pharma companies are competitors.

How did we do that? We always ask ourselves, how can we create value for everyone here? I'll give you an example. We funded a project with Feldan Therapeutics, based in Quebec, which has a drug delivery system to bring biologics into cells, which is a very important challenge that we're facing in biopharma research. We have five big pharma companies who are willing to support the development of this delivery technology. At the end of the project, they will also be able to work with Feldan to use it with their own therapeutic compounds. We have funded Abcellera, which has a unique discovery platform for functional antibodies, in a similar way. The number one goal is to develop a platform that everyone can use. But Feldan and Abcellera will also benefit from future collaborations with the project's partners.  

During its time as part of the Business-Led Networks of Centres of Excellence (BL-NCE) program, CQDM made some key investments that are beginning to pay off. Medicago is one example. What do you think has been lost as a result of the end of the BL-NCE program and the federal funding to accelerate drug discovery and development that came with it?

We are trying to bring discoveries into early commercial development by de-risking early stage technologies. At that stage, it's too early for the private sector to invest fully in them. So we bring incentives and non-dilutive funding, and it works. But if you stop in the middle of that development process, it's a pure waste of time and money because, in many cases, those technologies are going to have a really, really hard time to find another way to bridge that gap.

The BL-NCE funding wrapped up in 2020 and then CQDM undertook a 10-year review and measured its outcomes (see Figure 1.) What did you learn from that process, and what message do you hope it sends to policymakers?

The lesson I learned is that it takes many years before we really see the impact of major programs like the BL-NCEs, so we need to be patient. I'm not saying we need to pursue these programs forever without asking ourselves if they are effective. I think what we need is to have smart metrics that enable us to track what happens with an R&D project over the years and measure it. I can tell you, it takes a lot of time to do that, and I can imagine that for the NCE Secretariat, it is almost an impossible task. But if we don't do it, we are never going to know really what the NCE program, or any other one, achieved. 

Figure 1: CQDM by the numbers

Source: CQDM 

In 2018, the research and commercialization activities of BL-NCE program were transferred to the Strategic Innovation Fund. What was the impact of that transfer? Was it effective?

No. I think the SIF is a great program, but it is not designed to support early stage development. Unfortunately, if we don't take care of early-stage technology, we are never going to address our number one innovation challenge: Canada's capacity to translate discoveries into a commercial product. 

Also, it's worth noting that when I talk to VC investors in Canada, the number one challenge they bring up is the lack of a pipeline. There are simply not enough good-quality, de-risked projects for them to invest in. If we want to fix that by creating, feeding and maintaining a pipeline of early stage innovations, we cannot do that with SIF. 

What advice can you offer to policymakers as they work to reinvigorate and build Canada's biopharmaceutical sector post-pandemic?

What’s clear to me is that we need public sources of funding for R&D to create the leverage we need in the early stages. We need those public funds, but we should also try to be as effective as possible with those funds. 

Honestly, if we make smart choices and bring those technologies to the point where they are commercialized, we are going to generate value for Canada. And what I would like to see is this value returned to the innovation ecosystem to make it more sustainable. We need to find ways to ensure that if we invest massively in early-stage innovation, we find a way to bring that back to Canada and continue to fund innovation at the early stage. It’s a dream, I would say. I don’t know exactly how it could work, but it needs to be done.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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