For Innovation, Open Science Means Open for Business | Centre for International Governance Innovation

"Last week, Celgene – an American biotech company – invested the most ever for a Canadian-discovered early-stage drug. The US$40-million down and potentially US$1-billion deal only came about because of strategic funding by governments both for “open science" partnerships and for risk-taking, IP-generating research and commercialization centres. Open science partnerships openly share data and research results with the scientific community and do not seek patent rights over their results.

The Celgene deal is the fruit of a new innovation path – from open science to Canadian IP – that involves the Ontario government-funded Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and its commercialization partner, FACIT Inc. This "made in Canada” approach does not copy U.S. approaches, which commonly result in Canadian IP rights being transferred to foreign firms for pennies on the dollar, as we are doing in the cases of Sidewalk Labs and investments in artificial intelligence. Rather, it leaves the IP in Canada for much longer, within a locally owned company that will continue to develop the drug and conduct clinical trials here, and thus extract fuller scientific and economic value from our investments....

Five years ago, OICR embraced open science as an early innovation strategy and partnered with the SGC. Both OICR and SGC appreciated that although IP is a key pillar of the innovation economy, seeking it too early or by the wrong entity creates barriers to collaboration, leads to redundant research, introduces significant transaction costs and, perhaps counterintuitively, slows down innovation. The open science collaboration allowed knowledge, materials and data to flow freely and enabled OICR and SGC to develop a new chemical probe against the WDR5 protein and to share it freely and rapidly with research groups around the world. Those groups revealed WDR5’s therapeutic role in leukemia, breast cancer and neuroblastoma...."