Speaking Notes

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,
I appreciate this opportunity to be with you tonight and to celebrate 100 years of the PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION IN CANADA. As such it joins a very small number of organizations with that length of continuous activity in Canada – universities, banks and  churches.

Today, as we have heard, you represent more than 46,000 direct and indirect jobs and you invest over $1 billion annually in research in Canada. But you also produce and distribute the medicines and vaccines essential to a healthy society.

There are two essential and mutually necessary components of a
knowledge based society.

1. Discovery and Invention
2. Innovation

I define innovation as the successful implementation of new ideas.

Discovery, invention and innovation are essential to the future success of our country. They have played an important role in my life and they are essential components of the business and culture of the research based pharmaceutical companies.

Indeed if you want to ask yourself what is an example of a knowledge based industry – one based on discovery, invention and innovation you couldn’t find a better example than that of the research based pharmaceutical industry.

Canadians have been exceptional in their abilities to discover and invent and to innovate. But we have failed miserably, compared to other OECD nations, to translate these into social and economic benefit within Canada. One of the bright spots in this area has been in Rx&D health related developments.

What I would like to do in celebrating the 100 years of success in this great industry in Canada is to take an example that covers much of that time and in which Canadians have played a major role with benefits to all the peoples of the world. And an example that shows the critical importance of the research based pharmaceutical industry.

I will start with the 1924 Banting, Best and Macleod isolation and identification of insulin as the essential missing element in diabetes and its role in controlling glucose in the body.

Now once that was known, the issue immediately became one of obtaining insulin. Insulin is a protein molecule – and compared to most drugs it is a big molecule; one that was impossible in the early days to synthesize.

So ask yourselves – where would you get it. Well, only humans produce human insulin. And you can’t put a tap on a healthy human body, drain off insulin and supply it to those in need. No, you had to extract it from the pancreas of human cadavers. Fortunately many diabetics would respond to insulin from pigs or cattle. Thus this molecule, critical to improving the lives of diabetics could only be obtained from human or animal cadavers. It would be in limited supply for over half a century.

Now during this time, scientists continued to explore living systems with considerable emphasis on microorganisms – bacteria and viruses. And through patient research they made great strides. They clearly identified the relationship between genes and proteins. And as knowledge of life increased at the molecular level it became clear that there is a gene for every protein.

And scientists learned amazing things from bacteria – they learned that bacteria were capable of exchanging genes. They identified the enzymatic tools that bacteria used to cut their own DNA and splice in new genes borrowed from other bacteria.

Well, this meant that perhaps one could pick a tame bacterium and insert a gene for, say insulin, and then grow a whole batch of this bacteria through fermentation and then harvest human insulin from the broth. But to be able to do this – that is, to refine the techniques, to be able to isolate and sequence individual genes or to make them, you had to be able to make DNA synthetically, in a lab. And now a whole new type of scientist became important to the enterprise – those who make molecules and these are usually chemists.

It was this fascinating possibility that drew me to the chemical synthesis of DNA – a worldwide objective in the 70’s. And we succeeded. With synthetic DNA at hand scientists were able to isolate, characterize and synthesize genes including the gene for human insulin.

By inserting human insulin genes into tame bacteria scientists were able to produce human insulin in great quantity and purity and by the late 80s the only insulin legal for sale for use in humans in North America was that produced by this marvelous new process from biotechnology.

But even at that, this new insulin would not have reached the public without the research based pharmaceutical industry.

The pharmaceutical industry not only carried out much of the key research over this 60 year period, they financed many independent researchers and they developed the means of scaling up production, of isolating huge quantities of insulin and purifying it to the highest standards. All of this cost billions of dollars over time. And then they distributed the product around the world through a secure and highly regulated distribution system.

Ladies and gentlemen, we must recognise that this great industry, and the fruits of our great Canadian research capability in the health sciences, must not be taken for granted.

We have got to get our mind set away from a race to the bottom price for existing medicines and re-focus on the complexity of the total system required to continue to bring benefits to the health and happiness of Canadians.

In the decades ahead we will see great new advances in understanding cancer at the molecular level and revolutionary new approaches to treating cancer.

We will also face the need for a major new advance in killing bacteria or the rapid development of antibiotic resistance will present a catastrophic health issue worldwide.

We need our greatest minds in academia and in industry focused on new and innovative approaches to these two monstrous heath challenges. And having a healthy research-based pharmaceutical industry operating within Canada will be essential to bringing the fruits of such research to the benefit of all Canadians.

Thank you, and best wishes for your next century.