Québec: Canada’s home for Big Biopharma

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By Shawn Lawrence

A true pillar of Québec’s economy is the province’s biopharmaceutical industry. The province enjoys a long history of pharmaceutical industry activity and boasts the largest concentration of R&D spending in Canada. Even more unique, is the fact that the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world all have operations in Québec.Among these ten are two companies that have left a major footprint coupled with a long tradition of success in Québec’s bio-economy.

Q: What are the current activities of both your companies in Québec?

Paul Levesque: We have facilities across Canada, but Kirkland is pretty much our major foot print in this country at the moment. Our activities fall under many different therapeutic areas. They include antibiotics, cardiovascular disease and oncology to name a few. Pfizer Animal Health markets a variety of medicines, vaccines and feed supplements for livestock and companion animals. We are also sponsoring many disease management programs. These management programs have the objective of helping the healthcare system by identifying better ways to manage patient flow, and improving the health care system cost. We are also one of the top investors in Canadian R&D.

As the largest pharma company in Canada we recognize that we also have a major role to play within the life science sector in both Canada and Québec. We see our selves as being catalysts by virtue of the scientific knowledge we have and the input we can give in terms of the strategic direction of the Québec life science sector. For this reason we are active in such initiatives like CQDM (The Québec Consortium for Drug Discovery) to help improve the drug discovery process. There is a lot of research that leads to publication but will never have a chance to be commercialized. I think in general we have a system in Canada whereby people are too often satisfied with the publication and reputation that they grain from the publication, but don’t actually push their ideas to actually get on the market. At the same time big pharma’s such as ourselves are not finding medicines at the pace that we should. By backing initiatives like the CQDM we hope to rectify both problems at the same time give back to the industry in this province.

Joe Vacca: Merck Frosst has a great history of drug discovery and in the past we’ve worked a lot in the area of inflammation and respiratory disease. Our biggest product, SINGULAIR®, was discovered and developed by scientists at the Merck Frosst Centre for Therapeutic Research in Montréal. Its creation took 19 years of intensive work, several hundreds of millions of dollars, and the talents of more than 250 people. Used in the treatment of asthma, it is now available by prescription in more than 75 countries. However, just last year our parent company announced a big reorganization within Merck where fragmented research that was being done at various sites was consolidated into individual sites. This meant that each site would be focused on one area or two areas depending on its size. Merck Frosst prior to this reorganization had been focused on respiratory, cardiovascular and diabetes targets. The result of this reorganization was a massive transformation of our facility, The Merck Frosst Centre for Therapeutic Research. Already the largest biomedical research facility in Canada, it was given a new mandate: to discover new therapies for the treatment of infectious disease.

Q: Why do you think Québec is such a hot-bed for biopharmaceutical research?

Paul Levesque: I would say that Québec is a province that gets it. What is quite unique is the long-term support this industry has been shown by both our existing and past provincial governments.

I think it has to do with first and foremost the vision that these governments have had, whether the Liberals were in power, or the Parti Québecois.

Government’s in Québec have been ahead of the curb in understanding the idea of a knowledge based economy, and they’ve gone the extra mile over the years providing incentives to company’s which the other provinces don’t offer. These incentives are what allows the industry to be at the core of the province’s economy. For example, one only has to look at the rate of reimbursement of medicine in Québec, this speaks volumes as to why innovation is significantly higher here than in the rest of the country.

Joe Vacca: I think I can answer this by looking at why Québec was chosen as the site for our infectious disease research centre. Well for starters, researchers at our Québec site have a great reputation of being able to handle hard chemistry and biology. It seemed natural that infectious diseases which have pretty complicated molecules would be suited for this location because of the really good chemists and biologist we have here. And the reason why they’re so good is because the Québec area is a good incubator for scientific talent. We’ve been doing some recruiting the last six months and Québec is probably one of the easiest places I’ve come across to attract good people. There are also a lot of people from local universities that are really good at chemistry and biology. This leads to another advantage that can be applied to why biopharmaceutical research is successful in Québec, the sheer number of academic laboratories.

This allows pharma companies to form good relationships with people and put on some good collaboration. The third thing is there seems to be a good density of CROs (contract research organizations) up here which help us to fill in some of the gaps we have in terms of needing expertise in certain areas. The one thing though I’d like to re-emphasize is the closeness to the universities. One thing we do here at Merck Frosst which is what I think is unique among all the Merck sites is we have a co-op program that allows undergraduates to come here and do research that is unrelated to what you’re working on in the laboratories. This co-op program has been going on for many years and it really gives us a couple of advantages. First our scientists that mentor these people get to mentor someone who’s still excited about science, as well as work on things outside their defined projects. The kid’s that come in here are very talented, then they come in here and learn how to do industrial research in a short amount of time. And they end up going of to do PhD programs. Some even come back to us years later and start working with us. And the best part is that they’ve been trained properly.

By far Canada’s largest pharma company, Pfizer Canada is the Canadian operation of New York-based Pfizer Inc, itself the world’s largest pharmaceutical company. It has had its head office in Montréal since the 1953’s and also has pharmaceutical and animal health businesses in Kirkland, QC. The company employs more than 1,400 Canadians.

Merck Frosst’s roots in Québec go back even further, starting in 1899 when Charles E. Frosst founded his company in Montréal. In 1965, Frosst was purchased by Merck & Co., Inc., & Co. Inc., an organization well-known for its research tradition, and the company known today as Merck Frosst Canada Ltd. was created. The company employs more than 950 Canadians, including 225 scientists.

This month Biotechnology Focus asks the two men overseeing much of the activity of the companies, executive director and interim site head, Merck Frosst Centre For Therapeutic Research Joe Vacca and president and CEO of Pfizer Canada Inc. Paul Levesque, about both company’s activities in Québec, and why Québec is such a hotbed for biopharma.