The life sciences sector gets a new boost

By MaRS Staff | October 29, 2025

L to R, MaRS CEO Grace Lee Reynolds, TIAP CEO Parimal Nathwani, OBIO® CEO Maura Campbell. Photo by Kelvin Li.

A historic health sector collab aims to streamline health tech founders’ path to market.

Yesterday, we launched Life Sciences Central, a historic collaboration among MaRS, OBIO® and TIAP that’s designed to accelerate Canada’s life sciences economy. While Ontario’s health tech sector has tremendous strengths in R&D, it has struggled with fragmentation and sluggish commercialization. This new platform streamlines support from the three organizations, and provides founders with tailored workshops, lab space, market intelligence reports and capital programs. Below, we outline some of the trends that led to the formation of Life Sciences Central. Some of the stats may be grim, but they also highlight the considerable opportunity before us.

Also, in this week’s newsletter:
Stories from the ecosystem, upcoming events and the hottest jobs this week

Checking life sciences’s vitals

It can take a long time for a Canadian life sciences company to make it. Promising solutions get stalled in the lab. The regulatory landscape is complicated and fragmented. There’s a stubborn lack of early-stage funding. And recent trade turmoil and heightened geopolitical tensions have made things even more arduous. Most startups, in fact, never succeed, and even for those that do, it can take 10 or 15 years, and cost billions of dollars.

Life Sciences Central aims to increase those odds. But you can’t fix a problem without first measuring it. Here, summed up in four significant numbers, are the financial challenges and opportunities facing the industry at this critical juncture.

90
Percent of biotech startups fail

“Early-stage biotech ventures face a notoriously difficult funding environment,” says Richard Bozzato, a senior health advisor at MaRS. Because biotech innovations require such long lead times, startups often struggle to land funding from conventional investors. Accordingly, the sector faces a persistent funding gap, particularly in the $2- to $10-million range — critical for companies transitioning from proof-of-concept to early clinical validation. This results in some depressing statistics, according to Bozzato. Approximately half of all biotech startups that explore pre-seed financing never close a round, 60 percent of them fail within five years and 90 percent eventually fail completely.

16.6
Percent decline in life sciences venture capital deals

Funding is also just getting harder to secure. Louise Pichette, director of health sciences at MaRS, points out that in the health tech sector as a whole, capital has increasingly been flowing to less risky, late-stage mega-deals. “When a startup is in the early stages, founders have a very long journey ahead of them,” she says. “And when a company has to go through regulatory approvals, they’ll need that much more time before they see any revenue.” But even accounting for enormous deals like Borealis Biosciences’s $280-million Series A round last year, deals as a whole are down. According to Canadian Venture Capital Market Overview, life sciences secured $218 million across 23 deals in the first quarter of 2025, resulting in an average deal size of $9.46 million — a 16.6 percent decline from 2024.

400+
The number of companies in Life Sciences Central

There’s strength in numbers, as the saying goes, but more specifically, there’s also expertise, resources and connections. By bringing together more than 400 companies, LSC provides all these things, and goes a long way toward addressing knowledge gaps that can slow startups down. “One major challenge we faced was identifying the specific expertise we needed around the regulatory and pre-clinical hurdles we faced,” says Judy Blumstock, founder and CEO of Diamond Therapeutics. “Partly to address this, I’m an advocate of sharing talent between companies, particularly at the early stage.”

U.S.$1.75 trillion*
Total size of the global life sciences market

The payoff of getting a life sciences company off the ground can be extraordinary. According to market research firm IBISWorld, the value of the worldwide pharmaceutical market in 2024 was U.S.$1.2 trillion, and Frost & Sullivan estimated the value of medical devices at U.S.$545.4, adding up to a grand total of nearly U.S.$1.75 trillion. In 2024, the value of Canada’s life sciences market was U.S$16.9 billion; there is a sizeable opportunity to build on that momentum.“By coordinating ecosystems and giving founders a clear route to growth,” says Pichette, “Life Sciences Central will help turn Canadian innovation into global success.”

Stories from the ecosystem

HEALTH: McKinsey says closing the women’s health gap in Canada could boost the economy by $37 billion annually by 2040.

FOOD: Six scrappy startups are transforming organic waste into new products.

AI: What does a “sovereign cloud” really mean?

ROAD SAFETY: In the Toronto Star, Owen Guo on Canadian tech that could make it easier — and safer — to navigate our cities.

FINANCE: MaRS has relaunched our flagship capital program, giving domestic and international investors curated access to promising early-stage tech startups.

In the Lab: Evoco

In this three-minute video, we take a behind-the-scenes look at Evoco’s plant-based foams.

Upcoming events

The Azure Human/Nature conference on climate change adaptation brings together architects, urbanists, business leaders to spark collaboration on greener spaces and cities. October 29 and 30. Toronto.
The 2025 Maclean’s Idea Summit: Education focuses on how Canada’s scientific community can translate discovery into IP, jobs and resilient supply chains. 6 p.m., October 30. Toronto.
At Impact AI, leaders from Google, Vooban, Alectra and more discuss the opportunities and challenges of AI. Use the code MARS2025 for a 25 percent discount on tickets. November 19. Toronto.
Johnson and Johnson’s “Herding Cats” business development and dealmakers panel features founders and principals from Noa Therapeutics, Amplitude Ventures and others. November 19. Toronto.
MaRS Climate Impact features special guests Adam Becker (author of More Everything Forever), Sightline Climate’s Kim Zou, NSTX’s Chris Bryson and more. December 2 and 3. Toronto.

For more, visit our events page.

Careers: The hottest jobs in tech this week

UHN, Canada’s number one hospital system, is hiring for dozens of positions, including personal support workers, nurses and a clinical psychologist. (Toronto)
CSMC, which develops dual-use tech for use both in space and on Earth, is looking for a nuclear containment engineer, an aerospace project manager, a marketing coordinator and other positions. (Various cities)
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research is searching for a scientific director in computational biology. (Toronto)
Quantum computing company Xanadu is hiring a metrology engineer. (Albany, N.Y.)
Ranovus, solution provider for next-gen data centres, is looking for a senior analogue layout engineer and an analogue ASIC design engineer. (Nuremberg, Germany)

For more, visit our jobs page.

In the queue: What we’re reading, watching and listening to at MaRS

This week: Rick Bozzato, former head of drug development at Allelix Biopharmaceuticals and a senior health advisor at MaRS shares his picks.

For a glimpse of our future selves: “Yuval Noah Harari’s three-book series — Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons — is excellent, if heavy, reading. I was most intrigued by Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, which explores how advances in biotechnology, artificial intelligence and data science could redefine what it means to be human.”
For a new way to think about cancer treatment: “Patrick Soon-Shiong: Reinventing the Future-One Cell, One Code, One Cure at a Time” is an interesting biographical sketch of the executive chairman of ImmunityBio, who espouses an innovative (though yet to be validated) approach to cancer therapy. He believes that, rather than destroying tumour cells with chemo and radiation, activating the immune system) is the way to go. Who would have thought?”
For the latest in biotech: “One of my favourite podcasts is The Long Run. Hosted by journalist Luke Timmerman, it features key industry players, providing interesting insights into emerging trends in biotech and life sciences.”
For some CanCon: “On the lighter side, Roy MacGregor’s Escape: In Search of the Natural Soul of Canada is near and dear to my heart. He explores the deep pull of the Canadian wilderness and countryside as an important element in our national identity. After reading it, cottage country will never be the same!”