OTTAWA — Canada’s artificial intelligence capabilities and the boost that public money is giving the life sciences are the key reasons Pfizer wants to tap the country’s healthtech ecosystem with a health-research program, says the president of the global pharma giant’s Canadian operations.

“I’m from the U.S. and I totally see this looking a lot like Boston or San Diego was 10 to 20 years ago,” said Najah Sampson, in an interview with The Logic.

Sampson has been in her post just over a year, moving to Pfizer Canada’s headquarters in Montreal after climbing through numerous posts at its global HQ in New York.

“We have great relationships with Health Canada, we have great relationships with our associations, with our advocacy partners. But we don’t know the healthtech world here and the healthtech world is an incredibly important part of the life-sciences ecosystem,” she said. “We can’t be a part of that community without understanding the innovators in the market.”

So Pfizer announced in mid-May that it’s running a “Pfizer Healthcare Hub” in Canada, a perhaps confusing label for what’s really a competition for Pfizer’s time, expertise and money.

The program, similar to 18 others Pfizer runs around the world, invited submissions from Canadian companies with technology that could attack problems in five areas. They are eclectic and broad, from women’s health to diagnosing cancer to planning for drug shortages.

For the ideas where Pfizer sees the most potential, it will pitch in expertise in clinical trials and manufacturing, and potentially seed money; Communitech, the Kitchener, Ont.-based accelerator, will add its scaling-up advice for the people with winning proposals.

There are parallels with Pfizer’s relationship with BioNTech, which began two years before the pandemic partnership that would make both companies billions.

At the time, Mainz, Germany-based BioNTech had early clinical trials underway on an influenza vaccine applying then-novel mRNA technology, when Pfizer and BioNTech made a deal to have Pfizer take over later trials and commercialization. When COVID-19 hit, the companies already knew each other; they announced their vaccine cooperation March 17, 2020, less than a week after the World Health Organization declared the illness a pandemic.

Pfizer has been a drug company for nearly 175 years but is trying to “think beyond the pill,” Sampson said.

“We have a broad footprint and we’re in a lot of therapeutic areas, but we are not a healthtech company,” she said. “We realize that that is truly the future of patient care.”

In the U.K., where Pfizer has run two Healthcare Hub competitions, it explicitly disclaims any commercial interest in winners’ businesses or intellectual property. In Canada, it doesn’t intend to be an equity investor or to reap venture-capital-style rewards from its dealings with the hub companies, Sampson said: “There’s no back-end payment for Pfizer.”

But it does hope to get other benefits. Outside the hub process, she said, Pfizer has funded research awards in Canada for work on cardiomyopathy, a form of heart disease for which the company sells a drug. It gave seed money to a company with an AI algorithm for crawling through health providers’ data to identify patients who could be candidates for treatment.

“Maybe not Pfizer’s treatment, but just treatment overall for this particular cardiomyopathy,” Sampson said. “It’s a long game, it truly is—keeping the patient at the centre.”

Pfizer has 998 people in Canada—1.2 per cent of its global workforce of 83,000—but doesn’t do substantial research and development in this country. It has seven R&D centres in the United States and one in Britain, none in Canada; of 3,615 ongoing clinical trials in Health Canada’s database, 74 are Pfizer-sponsored, about half the number being run by Merck, Roche or Novartis.

More than half of Pfizer’s Canadian employees work remotely, the company says, though there are concentrations of staff in Pfizer Canada’s suburban Montreal head office and a factory in Brandon, Man., that turns urine from pregnant horses into ingredients for menopause treatments.

Pharmaceutical research was not a policy priority for Canadian governments for a long time, with consequences the COVID-19 pandemic illuminated: Canada relied on imported vaccines and treatments, having negligible capacity to produce any itself.

Now, with the help of a lot of public money, that’s changing. For example:

• AstraZeneca is opening a research centre for rare diseases.
• Moderna is building a factory and research site.
• GSK recently bought drug developer Bellus for US$2 billion.
• Vancouver’s AbCellera, which uses AI to devise antibody treatments, is rapidly expanding.

AI-driven research like AbCellera’s is especially interesting to Pfizer, Sampson said.

“I think we have the right mix of strong IP and academic institutions that are… truly building a foundation for digital innovation, especially in the health-care industry,” Sampson said.

The company’s Health Canada relationship bloomed with the COVID-19 pandemic, as Pfizer worked on its vaccine and treatment drug Paxlovid, and ultimately delivered tens of millions of doses.

In a 2021 interview with The Logic, Sampson’s predecessor Cole Pinnow said the agency’s emergency “rolling reviews” for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments such as Pfizer’s should be broadened and made permanent, so innovations can get to market faster. Rolling reviews let drugmakers submit partial results from trials and have back-and-forths with regulators rather than submitting everything at once and waiting.

Late last year Health Canada proposed new regulations that would permit rolling reviews for some pharmaceuticals, for good.

“We had an amazing amount of collaboration with public health, with Health Canada, and we did absolutely impossible things right on the behalf of the Canadian people,” Sampson said. The cooperation “told us that this market was ready for Pfizer to take the next step into being a bigger player in the life-sciences sector.”