July 7, 2026
By Megan Fleming
Canada has world-class cell therapy science. What it lacks are often opportunities where everyone agrees on how the science should advance, be translated, and manufactured into therapies for patients.
On a bright June morning at Toronto's MaRS building, the inaugural Toronto Cell Therapy Symposium was convened by Sony Biotechnology alongside partners including the Canadian Hub for Health Intelligence & Innovation in Infectious Diseases (HI3), the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM), Cytiva, and BioLegend. It was also a perfect example of how personal conversations and brainstorming of ideas can quickly turn into action.
For HI3 director of strategy & operations Patrycja Thompson, a feeling of togetherness was unmistakeable: “Our mission to facilitate, support and enable research and industry partnerships… cannot be achieved without our partners. The power of collaboration was on full display.”
And the room echoed Thompson's reflections. A dense cross-section of scientists, clinicians, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders, were grappling with the same challenge: how to turn Canada's scientific strength into scalable, patient-ready therapies.
The symposium's theme — from bench to bedside through next-generation manufacturing — set the tone. Canada has extensive research and talent but it's missing alignment.
Across the day, speakers returned to the same ideas from different angles, especially that
innovation in cell therapy is partly about discovery, but more than ever it's about translation, industrialization, and coordination.
Science isn't the bottleneck
From iPSC-derived immune therapies to novel regenerative approaches, science is accelerating rapidly. But the symposium surfaced less glamorous, yet decisive factors like process development, manufacturability, and CMC – the science of proving a therapy is safe, consistent, and scalable.
“It was so wonderful … to discuss how we can work together to make Toronto a centre for great cell therapy work,” said Janet Rothberg, senior director at CCRM, reflecting on both her role as speaker and organizer.
These conversations shifted the question from can we build these therapies? to can we build them reliably, at scale, and in time to matter?
Building the missing middle
Between academic discovery and commercial success lies the “missing middle,” the space where promising science often stalls.
Sessions on venture development, investment gaps, and scaling early-stage companies exposed friction points, like how investors still underestimate the complexity of manufacturing or how startups often under-resource process development early on.
These stalling points are exactly where organizations like HI3 and CCRM are increasingly critical as participants in the ecosystem, but even more-so as the connective tissue that links academia, industry, and capital into something that moves forward.
Industry's role: Enabling the shift to scale
The presence of partners like Sony, Cytiva and BioLegend emphasized how industrialization depends on platforms and partnerships as much as it does on ideas.
The vendor session showcased the backbone of this ecosystem that can carry therapies out of the lab and into the clinic.
A city and a country at an inflection point
Toronto's ambition to be a true global hub for cell therapy was a recurring theme, but it came without complacency. This city holds world-class academic research, growing clinical and manufacturing infrastructure, and a dense and increasingly connected innovation ecosystem.
Although the gaps in scale-up capacity, coordinated national strategy, and sustained investment were also clear, the symposium gave space everyone needed to align around what needs to happen next.
“Canada can, and should, play a major role in next-gen therapies,” said Riccardo Ricciardi, accounts director at Sony Biotechnology Inc. “But what are our major advantages? How can our scientists access untapped resources? How do we leverage experience to create shortcuts? This symposium is a first step in the right direction.”
By the end of the day, the idea fully took shape that this cannot be a one-off event. This symposium was a starting point and a moment when a fragmented ecosystem began to see itself as a true system and start to act like one.