News & Events
Contact Us
Our network
Strategic Directions
Genome British Columbia
Genome Alberta
Genome Prairie
Ontario Genomics
Génome Québec
Genome Atlantic
About Genome Canada
Our people
Our approach
Governance
Work with us
Publications
Genome Canada timeline
Corporate policies and statements
Evaluation
Financial reporting
Funding guidelines and policies
Corporate policies
Future of genomics dialogue
Research and innovation
Genomics in society
People
Projects
Funding opportunities
Funding guidelines and policies
IMPACT AREAS
Health
Agriculture and food
Climate change and the environment
PROGRAMS AND INITIATIVES
Canadian Precision Health Initiative
Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Systems
All for One
Genomics-based pathogen surveillance
CanCOGeN
News
Events
In the media
Genomics Impact Awards
About
How we work
Projects & Funding Opportunities
Challenge Areas
News & Events
Contact us
Search
Our network
Strategic Directions
Genome British Columbia
Genome Alberta
Genome Prairie
Ontario Genomics
Génome Québec
Genome Atlantic
About Genome Canada
Our people
Our approach
Governance
Work with us
Publications
Genome Canada timeline
Corporate policies and statements
Evaluation
Financial reporting
Funding guidelines and policies
Corporate policies
Future of genomics dialogue
Research and innovation
Genomics in society
People
Projects
Funding opportunities
Funding guidelines and policies
IMPACT AREAS
Health
Agriculture and food
Climate change and the environment
PROGRAMS AND INITIATIVES
Canadian Precision Health Initiative
Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Systems
All for One
Genomics-based pathogen surveillance
CanCOGeN
News
Events
In the media
Genomics Impact Awards
About
How we work
Projects & Funding Opportunities
Challenge Areas
News & Events
Contact us
By /

Canadian Genomics Summit 2025

February 5–6, 2025 | Ottawa

The inaugural Canadian Genomics Summit brought Canada’s genomics community together to celebrate 25 years of impact across the Canadian Genomics Enterprise and take a new step forward as a community with the announcement of the Canadian Genomics Strategy.

Across sectors and regions, Canada’s genomics community is delivering the solutions Canada needs to turn our country’s challenges into our biggest opportunities. Opportunities to deliver breakthrough health-care advancements. Opportunities to increase the resilience of our agricultural and food systems and stop biodiversity loss. Opportunities to sustainably manage prosperous natural resources and grow productivity across sectors. 

We were proud to convene more than 200 people from across this community at the Summit to build on our impact and chart an even bolder future for Canada. Together, we will take on even bigger challenges than before, delivering on the ambitions of Canada’s new genomics strategy and continuing to redraw the boundaries of what is possible in genomic innovation.

Thanks to our Summit sponsor,

Canadian genomics: A community built to take on big challenges

“The work that you do is holistic, it is a medicine wheel. It shows how all is connected. You are a community of knowledge keepers and leaders of excellence.”

Elder Claudette Commanda,
Opening the Canadian Genomics Summit

At the Summit

2025 Genomics Impact Award winners announced, recognizing lifetime achievement, societal impact, industry collaboration and early-career achievement
See Awards

Summit sessions

As the Summit sessions explored, the work of the past 25 years has established the foundations of a technology, a sector and a community ready to realize the potential of the bio-revolution.

Igniting growth
Commercialization and adoption

Highlights

Scaling the impact of precision health
Data ecosystem building and AI

Highlights

Cultivating Canadian resilience
Agricultural and environmental innovation

Highlights

Shaping regional futures
Canada’s unique Enterprise model for genomics impact

Highlights
Stay connected
Sign up for updates on Genome Canada news and events
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Facebook Icon. YouTube Icon. LinkedIn Icon Bluesky Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.comBluesky
Contact Us
Twitter Icon Facebook Icon. YouTube Icon. LinkedIn Icon Bluesky Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.comBluesky
Contact Us

@2022 Genome Canada. All rights reserved.     Terms and Conditions

Genome Canada’s main office is located on the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg.

Summit sessions

Igniting growth

“How we can do better with each other and how that can make a difference ultimately for Canada, but also our planet and our world.”

Cate McCready,
Vice-President, External Affairs, BIOTECanada

The new Canadian Genomics Strategy prioritizes advancing genomics commercialization and adoption. The first panel on day 2 of the Summit addressed this essential topic, examining how to remove barriers to ignite growth in the sector. 

Many barriers are not new, and many are complex. Some are rooted in the academic culture, where, as Nancy Tout of the Global Institute for Food Security at the University of Saskatchewan said, “sometimes commercialization becomes a bad word.” Tiago Hori, Director of Innovation at Atlantic Aqua Farms, believes academia and funders must “get more comfortable with funding the boring.” 

Hori says, “People think that innovation is just excitement, but it’s not; there’s a part that is boring, which is reproducibility, application, looking at your ROI and making sure that it makes sense.” These are the foundations for sustained success and tangible impact, yet “we don’t fund that well.” 

Other barriers are rooted in regulatory regimes. Trevor Charles, a Professor at the University of Waterloo, says, “We have a regulatory structure all over the world that actively impedes innovation in many aspects of genomics.” Suppose Canada can be ahead of the regulatory curve, facilitating innovation while maintaining trust, as we have done with our gene editing guidelines. In that case, we can carve out significant opportunities, providing a “navigation tool for companies” to bring their products to market, said Tout. 

For Neil Aubuchon, Chief Commerical Officer at Abcellera, more than anything else, “We have to unite, get out of our own way and develop the capabilities to be competitive on the global stage.” Canada has immense talent and world-leading research, but we must accept that “We get in our own way too frequently and think too small.”

We have fantastic science that exists in Canada. We have great talent. It’s a matter of whether we are able to cut across our silos and harness the power of the talent and science we have here to produce something world-class.

Neil Aubuchon,
Chief Commerical Officer, Abcellera

Getting in our way includes siloing our efforts domestically and internationally. Tout noted the existence of innovation silos across Canada. “Innovation is really a team sport, and when we are competing amongst ourselves in this room here and across the country, that means we’re not thinking about competing with the rest of the world,” she said.

 Aubuchon agreed, stressing that while “it’s important to focus on the Team Canada approach, we can’t be too insular either.” We must look to the world, identify areas to collaborate and leverage other countries’ talent, data, and assets to our advantage.

Charles identified a lack of inclusion as another obstacle to progress. “How can we harness all the talent that is not currently involved in genomics or really any other type of science?” With systemic factors at school age restricting pathways into genomics and science for talented children, we need to think holistically about removing these barriers to unlock the full potential of genomics for Canada.

Summit sessions

Scaling the Impact of Precision Health

“We’ve got all of these components and all the right ingredients. But we’re not stringing them all together and making them all work together, and that’s really where I think Genome Canada can play a huge, huge role in coordinating and bringing that real effort together, right from start to kind of finish.”

Nancy Tout,
Chair, International Scientific Advisory Panel, Global Institute for Food Security at the University of Saskatchewan

“We still need to get down the cost of genomics to have an impact in real life for patients.”

Catalina Lopez-Correa,
Chief Scientific Officer, Genome Canada

One of the chief promises of genomics and the bio-revolution lies in the realization of precision health care. As Nada Jabado, a Professor at McGill University, neatly captured, genomics can help realize modern healthcare marked by “less cost and better treatment.” 

Over the past 25 years, developments have made this a reality for some, including Genome Canada’s own Chief Global Strategy Officer Catalina Lopez-Correa. Diagnosed with cancer in 2023, Lopez-Correa “had the fortune to benefit from all these wonderful advances we were making in genomics,” including having her treatment plan guided by genetic testing of her and her tumour. 

Unfortunately, this is the exception rather than the norm for patients in Canada right now. As The University of British Columbia Professor Laura Arbour noted, while we have transformed diagnosis with next generation sequencing, “we still have a ways to go because we still need to make sure that every patient gets the opportunity for the same level of diagnosis.” 

Upton Allen, Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Professor of Pediatrics at the Hospital for Sick Children, characterized it as a three-part challenge. “It’s important to recognize the importance of the ‘genetic code,’ but at the other end would be the ‘postal code’ that represents the social demographics of the situation. And in the middle are the clinical characteristics, and the three need to come together.” Differences in postal code still play too large a role in determining health outcomes, with Lopez-Correa noting the “big challenge we have with interprovincial variability” in access to testing and treatments.

We need to make sure that the patients and the communities trust the system to allow their data to be collected.

Upton Allen,
Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Interim Director, Transplant and Regenerative Medicine Centre, and Professor of Pediatrics at the Hospital for Sick Children

Data also remains a barrier to scaling up access to precision health care. This includes collecting genomics data and connecting it to clinical and other data. Regarding our genomics data, Lopez-Correa said we have “a pressing need” for diversity. Asian genomes, African genomes, Black genomes and Latino genomes are not represented.

Arbour also stressed the importance of Indigenous data sovereignty with projects such as the Pan-Canadian Genome Library and the Indigenous Background Variant Library underway that incorporate that. “It is very important that Indigenous Peoples have the right to govern and understand where their data is, how it’s being used, and where it’s going.”

Gearing up for the hard work of actually delivering precision health care to all will be essential. Jabado argued, “People have to understand that not everything is immediate. Genomics, even though it’s a beautiful tool, cannot bring miraculous answers. It can for some, but oftentimes it takes more time than that.” 

Sustaining funding, engaging with the public, facilitating equitable access by dismantling interprovincial variability and working hard for equitable genomics data and Indigenous data sovereignty are key, and all require deep and enduring collaboration. As the panel’s moderator, Paul Hébert, President of CIHR, said, “The way we work together will forge our future.”

Learn More

Launched in March 2025, the Canadian Precision Health Initiative will sequence more than 100,000 human genomes representing Canada’s diverse population and fueling precision health solutions

Summit sessions

Cultivating Canadian Resilience: Bouncing Back and Going Beyond

“Resilience is about bouncing back and going beyond, and genomics is our path for navigating many of the challenges we face.”

Cami Ryan,
Chair of SIAC, Genome Canada | Senior Business Partner, Industry Affairs and Sustainability, Bayer CropScience Canada.

If precision health care is one of genomics’ main impact areas, another is increasing our resiliency. As Dana McCauley, CEO of the Canadian Food Innovation Network, argued, genomics is “foundational” for “looking after the environment, biodiversity, food systems and food supplies.” 

Ensuring the resiliency of natural ecosystems and agricultural systems across Canada and globally is a key application of genomics. And we are already feeling a real impact in this area. 

Agriculture has long been at the forefront of our scientific understanding of genetics and where that knowledge has been applied most readily—even going back to the selective breeding of almost every plant and animal that comprise our diet today. But, as Christine Baes, a Professor and Acting Associate Dean at the University of Guelph, pointed out, the depth of genomics knowledge we have now is changing the game. “Whereas 25 years ago our focus was almost exclusively on production traits—things like milk production in cows or breast meat yields in birds—we can now improve the health and the welfare of our livestock unimaginably,” including selecting traits for resilience such as cattle’s heat tolerance.

The same holds for how we approach protecting the biodiversity of our natural ecosystems. Loren Rieseberg, a professor at The University of British Columbia, pointed out, “If you’re going to be spending a lot of money protecting ecological communities or species, you really want to know what’s there.” Genomics allows us to do that, enabling a level of analysis and precision previously unknown. Rieseberg cites the work on kelp populations in Puget Sound. While warming and other environmental factors were speculated as causes of their struggles, genomic testing identified an underlying lack of genetic diversity. This knowledge means that kelp can be introduced from neighbouring populations to boost that diversity and make the plant more resilient.

“Genomic approaches can not only identify maladapted populations and the particular risks that they face, but they also can suggest solutions.”

Loren Rieseberg,
Professor, The University of British Columbia

A key part of enabling the growing impact of genomics is how much costs have fallen. Michael Lohuis, Vice-President of Research & Innovation at Semex Alliance, points to the invention of the SNP Chip as the biggest accomplishment of the last 25 years. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are key to understanding disease susceptibility. The fact that it is possible to get up to 100,000 data points from a single $20-25 SNP Chip has “democratized genomic selection.”

 

Yet other barriers to mass adoption and use remain, especially when prioritizing genomics for resilience. As Lohuis pointed out, if you are trying to convince a cattle farmer to select for reduced methene emissions, they will ask, “Okay, uh, that’s probably a good thing to do, but why should I select for that? It doesn’t help me.” Lohuis argues that “there’s got to be a business value as well.” To make that case, it is necessary to collaborate across the supply chain, such as with dairy processors and dairy retailers wanting to reduce scope through emissions to ensure that farmers are incentivized. 

 

Differing approaches to intellectual property can also be a barrier to adoption in industry and across academia. Rieseberg points out how, from his experience, some agricultural sectors “have a much more nuanced view of what IP is useful, and which when it’s not” and, as a result, are more willing to engage in pre-competitive collaboration while others do not. 

 

IP can also be an issue when industry collaborates with universities. While some universities are “very understanding of the need to protect IP and very reasonable in terms of what that’s worth and how much it costs actually to commercialize something,” said Lohuis, others “have a very naive approach to what something’s worth, they don’t consider the cost of bringing it to market, which is where most products fail.” 

 

Despite these challenges, the panel was united on the possibility of leveraging genomics to support Canada’s resiliency. Since returning to Canada from the U.S. eight years ago, Lohuis has “seen a research environment that has done a great job of supporting not just universities but industry as well.” New funding from the federal government as part of the Canadian Genomics Strategy, paired with advancements in adjacent fields such as machine learning, means that the prospects for strengthening our resiliency are bright.

“There are so many things to be excited about, and there are so many opportunities right now. The implications and integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are going to be fantastic. Precision agriculture is going to be fantastic. Microbiomics is going to be fantastic, but none of those things are fantastic unless you have the people trained to be able to integrate them and weave them into application.”

Christine Baes,
Professor and Acting Associate Dean of External Relations | Ontario Agricultural College, University of Guelph

Summit sessions

Shaping Regional Futures

“It’s really the push and pull tension between the regions and between the federal government and those regional priorities that leads to a true national approach.”

Rob Annan,
President and CEO, Genome Canada

The regional institutions and diversity of the Canadian genomics community mark it as unique amongst any other sector or emerging technology in Canada. Genome Canada’s Rob Annan noted while each organization was “created at the same moment and with very similar conditions, over the last 25 years, there has been an adaptation to diverse local conditions, and because of that, each center has its own flavour.” For Annan, this diversity “adds up, much like Canada,” to become more than the sum of its parts. 

Since 2000, this evolution has reflected the needs and opportunities of Canada’s different regions. This can be seen in the variety of programs among the regional Genome Centres. 

In British Columbia, a significant focus has been on the accessibility of genomics, especially to aspiring talent. For Suzanne Gill, Genome BC’s President and CEO, enabling “equitable access to participate in the research and ensure that you have access to benefit from the tools and everything else that’s going to come out of it is probably job number one.” This has been reflected in programs such as Geneskool, which has reached thousands of students across the province, including in rural and remote areas and Indigenous students, since its launch in 2006. “That tool has been invaluable for us to get in front of the next generation of scientists, and we even have alumni from that program actually teaching the next generation,” said Gill. 

Other provinces have tackled issues such as how to get genomics from the lab and put it into actual world use. Josette-Renée Landry, President and CEO of Génome Québec, highlighted the Genomics Integration Program that has funded over 75 proof-of-concept projects across the province that “help the companies and the end users integrate genomics into a wide variety of different applications in different sectors.” 

Accelerating the rate of research and adoption of genomics is a priority across all provinces. As President and CEO of Genome Prairie, Mike Cey said, “There are no shortcuts in biology, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go there faster.” 

Barrier reduction has many flavours across the country. Steve Armstrong, President and CEO of Genome Atlantic, spoke of the work being done to tackle the “genomics literacy challenge” among policymakers and the public in the region through a range of approaches, including embedding regulators early into projects and co-creating projects with organizations “that would otherwise not use genomics technologies” to help create space for innovation. 

Meanwhile, Genome Alberta’s president and CEO, David Bailey, described the scale of the challenge of “building the talent pool to analyze these large data sets” of genomic data being generated. There are tremendous opportunities, but “do we have the people power to do that?”

The new Canadian Genomics Strategy sets the stage for the field’s next generation of impact, and the potential is immense. Ontario Genomics’ Interim CEO Stephen Cummings argued, “We have a huge opportunity in Canada to promote this research and bring GDP to the economy.” The next step is to carve out a path for success.

The “menu of opportunities” for Canadian genomics grows every day, argued Armstrong and the key question is “how we are going to evolve to deliver greater impact”. For him, “If 25 years from now, we’re still doing sector education events and being the first Canadian funder to invest in a private sector investment, I’d say we failed. We have to change that model and do something more. From my perspective, it’s more exciting to imagine how our business model needs to evolve.” 

After 25 years of evolution, Canada’s genomics community is poised to pick up that challenge and deliver ever more impact for the country and the world.