In one month, Toronto will play host to some of Canada’s most ambitious health companies.
“The global healthcare market is fracturing, and Canada urgently needs to determine its ‘middle power’ identity.”
Louise Pichette, MaRS
On April 23, MaRS Impact Health will convene over 1,000 entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, and policymakers from across Canada’s health innovation ecosystem. Occurring across two stages, MaRS Impact Health features live panels, pitches, networking and breakouts. The long-running event hosted at MaRS Centre will showcase some of the country’s most promising startups solving challenges across biotechnology and life sciences, digital health, and medical devices.
As one of North America’s largest innovation hubs, MaRS Discovery District has helped Canada’s health startups bring their technologies to market through lab space, expertise, and industry connections. This month’s summit builds on that nearly 20-year effort.
According to Louise Pichette, Director of Health Sciences at MaRS Discovery District, the event is also a chance for Canada’s health innovation ecosystem to think seriously about how it can compete globally.
“The global healthcare market is fracturing, and Canada urgently needs to determine its ‘middle power’ identity,” said Pichette.
Amidst rising protectionism and intense competition between the United States and China in areas like biotechnology, Pichette believes Canada can harness its natural strengths in research, talent, and AI to create a dominant global position in healthcare.
“As a middle power navigating this environment, Canada’s strategy shouldn’t be to compete on everything, everywhere,” Pichette added. “We must actively align our founders, investors, and policymakers to double down on our world-class centres of excellence.”
She said MaRS Impact Health is forcing that alignment.
One of the key themes of this year’s summit is addressing the market failure in rare diseases. “Historically, there has been extreme hesitancy from venture capital in this space due to the high clinical risk,” Pichette added. “However, Canadian innovators are taking novel approaches to tackling these problems and drastically improving patient outcomes.”
The summit is putting some of these approaches on stage this month. One session, led by Brad Sorenson, founder and CEO of Calgary-based Providence Therapeutics, will showcase what Pichette called “staggering” results from mRNA vaccines targeting rare childhood brain cancers and highlight the company’s decision to run clinical trials in Australia. A panel on accelerating access to rare disease therapies will feature Terry Pirovolakis from California nonprofit Elpida Therapeutics, Handol Kim from Variational AI, Peter Sampson from Agora Open Science Trust and Karen Heim from Alexion, showcasing how open science models and AI-driven drug discovery can generate compounds for new therapies.
Pichette isn’t shy about the challenges companies face at home. According to data from the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, Canada’s life sciences companies raised $837 million in 2025, the lowest amount since 2018. Average deal sizes also shrank to their lowest level since 2014.
“While we still see outsized mega-rounds—like Kardium’s $340-million CAD financing or Aspect Biosystems’ $165-million CAD round—the everyday reality for most founders is that growth capital is incredibly tight,” Pichette added.
While dwindling capital and long procurement cycles have delayed commercial validation for many startups, Pichette believes partnerships will play a key role in changing that picture. This year, MaRS Impact Health is offering a number of networking opportunities throughout the day to put Canadian entrepreneurs in front of potential partners and capital providers.
“Bringing these groups into the same room moves us from theoretical discussions to actual term sheets,” she added.
Pichette believes Canada’s healthcare institutions and technology success stories have given startups a strong base to build from. “If we can align our institutional capital to fill our growth funding gaps and play to our national strengths, Canada will become an indispensable node in the global healthcare supply chain.”
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MaRS Impact Health brings together innovators across digital health, medical devices and biotech to commercialize new breakthroughs, empower our healthcare workers and improve patient outcomes. Register now.