British Columbia has the fastest-growing life sciences sector in Canada. It is a world leader in lipid nanoparticle and antibody technology, with strengths that span devices, novel drug testing platforms and computational approaches to diagnostics and treatment design.
Enabled by the global AI revolution, BC has produced some real gems that are moving the needle on computational drug design and production, like Variational AI, HTuO Biosciences, and Redwood AI. This strength provides a strong foundation, but it is only part of the picture.
Canada faces real structural pressures: a much smaller investment environment, fragmented data systems, and intense global competition. The opportunity for BC — and for Canada more broadly — is to lead by leaning into our history of innovation through collaboration, rather than trying to out-scale or out-wit much larger players. This tension between capability and constraint defines the challenge ahead.
It’s no secret that AI has the potential to change drug discovery and how treatments are developed. One of the biggest barriers to realizing that potential is the lack of large, integrated, high-quality datasets. To train models that can accurately predict or design molecules that are both safe and effective, we need large, representative datasets grounded in real-world experimental evidence. Addressing this limitation is less a technical problem than a structural one.
BC and Canada will only produce the required large datasets through collaboration across provinces and countries, supported by coordinated infrastructure, shared standards, responsible data management, and community engagement. These elements are critical to ensuring AI innovations are reliable, reproducible, and translatable into practice.
Developing an infrastructure of collaboration is an area where Canada can lead. Health and research data remains fragmented across provinces, territories, and federal systems, limiting AI model development and slowing scientific progress. But the path forward is clear: openly sharing data where possible, securely federating sensitive data, establishing responsible access frameworks, and agreeing on common technical and access standards would allow researchers and companies to build and test new AI tools with confidence, while respecting jurisdictional and privacy realities. This is where coordination becomes a competitive advantage, an opportunity that matters because scale alone will not be Canada’s path to success.
There are a handful of players, largely in the US, that might be able to overcome the data hurdle on their own. Advanced AI approaches for drug discovery, including variational methods and physics-informed models, need massive amounts of high-quality real-world data. Synthetic data can help, but only when it’s well anchored to reality. No single firm in BC or Canada has the scale to compete alone, and that’s okay. Together, we can create the data and models to predict new therapies, and the standards needed to test them. Without coordinated infrastructure and collaboration, Canada risks permanently relying on non-Canadian models or foreign corporate systems.
This is where open science stops being a philosophical preference and becomes a strategic advantage. A persistent misconception is that open science conflicts with intellectual property (IP) or commercial success. In practice, openness accelerates early-stage AI development by enabling collaborative dataset building, shared benchmarking, and transparent, reproducible methods. That early, pre-competitive openness is exactly what allows researchers and companies to move faster later on. It’s all about creating an innovation-conducive environment that builds on our strengths and lets us build with others.
This approach is already being put into practice by organizations like Conscience, a Canadian non-profit dedicated to enabling drug discovery through collaboration for the advancement of accessible treatments, and the Structural Genomics Consortium, a global public–private partnership uniting academia and industry to accelerate drug discovery. Initiatives like the CACHE Challenges and a soon-to-be-launched transbiological open benchmarking platform show how transparent, pre-competitive collaboration can help researchers build better datasets and enable more meaningful evaluation of AI tools.
BC’s life sciences community is big enough to matter, but still small enough to collaborate effectively. The province is home to a number of organizations and initiatives experimenting with new models of open science, and there are numerous academic and non-profit programs helping companies navigate collaboration frameworks, regulatory considerations, and responsible innovation practices.
Several BC-based institutions illustrate what this kind of openness looks like on the ground. The Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health is one of the only dedicated open science institutes in the country; Simon Fraser University has taken an institution-wide open approach; and the University of British Columbia hosts world leaders in computational biology for drug discovery. Add to this Vancouver’s global convening power — from major AI and scientific conferences to international research networks — and a strong cultural inclination toward collaboration for public good. The pieces are already on the board. Together, these efforts show how structured approaches to openness can strengthen the ecosystem without requiring any single organization to dominate or control it. What remains is alignment across policy, infrastructure, and incentives.
Canada may never out-scale the United States or China on its own, and it doesn’t need to. With aligned policy, research, and industry action, Canada, with the BC life sciences ecosystem as a leading light, can leave a lasting mark on global health and technology. If we can lead the creation of standardized data structures and access frameworks together in an open, collaborative way, we lead by creating an environment that can work seamlessly with partners around the world.
Dylan Roskams-Edris is the Lead of Conscience’s Open Science Advisory Services and Estrid Jakobsen is the Communications Lead at Conscience.
Leave a Reply