British Columbia Innovation Council

Renowned for being Canada's fastest growing Life Sciences community, British Columbia is home to a vibrant Life Sciences community comprising areas such as medicine, health, agriculture and food, marine, forestry and bioproducts. These vast areas in Life Sciences are unique to resource-rich BC. With world-class post secondary research institutions and facilities, BC has stimulated an explosion of innovative technologies making it an attractive place for Life Sciences companies.

BC's Life Sciences sector is comprised of over 340 companies, employing approximately 4000 British Columbians and generates revenues of approximately $800 million per year. The sector is made up of a number of subsectors including:

• Medicine and health
• Biotechnologies (including genomics)
• Agriculture, marine and forestry
• Food and beverage
• Bioprocessing and bioproducts

Industry Snapshot

• BC has a vibrant health and medicine sector including such ground-breaking companies as Angiotech, QLT, OncoGenex, Cardiome and Xenon.
• Centre for Drug Research and Development is a national Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research offering preclinical drug development services to BC's researchers to expedite commercialization. It also houses the newly developed Innovation Fund in partnership with Pfizer.
• The Michael Smith Laboratories at UBC, built in memory of the Nobel Laureate, is Canada's first interdisciplinary biotechnology research facility encompassing areas such as fermentation and bioprocess engineering, human/animal genetics, plants and forestry molecular genetics and bioinformatics.
• The agriculture, food and bioproducts sectors contribute to the economic vitality of BC, generating over $2.5 billion at the farm gate and over $8 billion in food processing sales. Innovations in these sectors have been developed by leading companies including EnWave and Lignol.
• The recently launched Genome BC's Strategic Opportunities Fund for Industry (SOFi) is a funding competition designed to accelerate commercialization.

Stakeholders

• Industry Organizations:
  • BC Agriculture Council
  • BC Cancer Agency
  • BC Clinical Genomics Network (BCCGN)
  • BC Food Processors Association
  • BC Food Protection Association
  • BC Technology Industry Association (BCTIA)
  • Centres of Excellence: BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, Centre of Excellence for the Prevention of Organ Failure
  • Genome BC
  • Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC
  • LifeSciences BC
  • Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research
  • TRIUMF: nuclear medicine program
  • Western Canadian Functional Food & Natural Health Product Network (WCFN)
    

• Research Centres:
  • ICORD - Blusson Spinal Cord Centre
  • Michael Smith Laboratories, UBC
  • UBC Brain Research Centre

• Accelerators:
  • Centre for Drug Research & Development (CDRD)
  • New Ventures BC (NVBC)
  • ORIC
    

Post-Secondary Programs

• BCIT
  • Applied Research Liaison Office
  • Technology Centre
• SFU
  
  • The Bioinformatics Centre
    
  • Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience Institute
  • Faculty of Health Sciences
  • Faculty of Science
• UBC
  
  • Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT)
  • Faculty of Land and Food Systems
  • Michael Smith Laboratories
  • Wine Research Centre
    

• University of Northern BC: UNBC's DNA Analysis, Sequencing and Processing facility
  

• University of Victoria: Genome British Columbia Proteomics Centre (UVic-GBC)

Innovative R&D Funding Initiatives

• BC Renaissance Capital Fund Ltd.
• Funding Guide for International Science and Technology Co-operation
• MITACS: the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems Inc.
• NRC-IRAP
• NSERC