Dual Use and Defense: How Ontario's Life Sciences community is Engaging with the Defense Sector
One of the most substantive sessions I attended at BIO 2026 was "Dual Use and Defense: Ontario's Life Sciences and Clinical Trials Superpower" — a panel that did something rare: it moved past the buzzword stage of "dual use" and into the operational reality of what it actually takes for public/private alignment to build therapeutics that serve both civilian and military health needs.
Moderated by Maura Campbell (President & CEO, Ontario Bio/OBIO), the panel brought together Brad Sorenson (Providence Therapeutics), Brian Jahns (Vasomune Therapeutics), Jose Moran-Mirabal (TessellaBiosciences), and Ritu Banerjee (Interim Head, Health Emergency Readiness Canada/HERC, ISED). Here's what stood out.
Campbell set the scene by noting that Canada has moved quickly on the policy front: in February, the Prime Minister announced the country's first Defense Industrial Strategy, backed by $6.6B, and Ontario followed in May with its own 10-year Ontario Defense Industrial Strategy (ODIS). Worth flagging for anyone building a pipeline: NATO's Diana accelerator is currently running a 2027 cohort call focused on human survivability, closing July 3 — four of the five Canadian companies supported across Diana's two prior life-sciences cohorts are Ontario-based.
Three companies, three very different paths to "dual use"
What made this panel valuable wasn't the policy framing — it was hearing founders describe how dual-use applications actually emerged in their programs, almost always after the science, not before it.
Brian Jahns of Vasomune put it bluntly: the company's anti-vascular-leak molecule didn't change — what changed was the label. Vasomune is advancing the same compound against pulmonary/organ edema across a near-fully-enrolled Phase 2 pneumonia/ARDS program, a new initiative in acute burn resuscitation (≥40% TBSA), and dialysis-related neurologic injury. "It's the same molecule," he noted — military and civilian relevance simply track the same underlying biology toward different patient populations. His candor about funding (he didn't mince words: "money, money, money, money, and money") and the patchwork of non-dilutive support — NRC IRAP, two CDMRP/DoD grants totaling roughly $9.2 USD, a CRADA with two military hospitals, and a co-development deal with Japan's AnGes — was a useful reality check on how non-linear these funding paths still are, even for a clinically advanced asset.
Brad Sorenson (Providence Therapeutics) traced his company's dual-use identity back to COVID, when its mRNA platform — originally built for oncology, now leading with a pediatric brain cancer program launching in Australia — became globally relevant almost overnight. Jose Moran-Mirabal (Tessella Biosciences) described a more organic discovery: tissue-mimetic biomaterials developed for organ repair turned out to accelerate burn-wound healing with less scarring, opening a battlefield-medicine application the company hadn't originally targeted.
The government side: HERC is still building the plane while flying it
Ritu Banerjee was refreshingly direct about where things stand. HERC was stood up in November 2024 in response to COVID, sits within ISED but takes direction from the Minister of Health, and takes a broad "health security" view spanning pandemics through CBRN threats. Her clearest line: "We're all figuring out what dual use really means." She mapped the emerging federal architecture — the new Defense Investment Agency (now led by an external hire from RBC, designed to modernize defense procurement), DRDC's evolving role as Canada's closest analog to DARPA, and HERC's own still-small but growing program toolkit — while acknowledging the obvious tension: Canada's defense and health bureaucracies are genuinely collaborating for the first time, and that cultural shift takes longer than any strategy document suggests.
The candid part: what's actually holding Canada back
The panel didn't shy away from the hard parts. Jahns was characteristically blunt that excellent clinical trial infrastructure and strong academic research haven't translated into proportionate private and equity investment — pushing Canadian dual-use companies toward U.S. and international capital and licensing partners by default, not preference. Sorenson pointed to regulatory rigidity (particularly GMP requirements for early-phase trials) as a drag on genetic medicine and personalized therapeutics, citing Australia's more adaptive model as a benchmark. Banerjee acknowledged the structural challenge directly: clinical trials and healthcare delivery sit at the provincial level even as defense procurement is federal, and harmonizing ethics review and contracting across the federation remains unfinished business.
Why this matters beyond Ontario
For anyone working at the intersection of MCM, biodefense, and commercial biopharma, this panel was a useful field report from a country moving fast to operationalize dual-use policy in real time — funding mechanisms, governance structures, and all. The throughline across all three companies was consistent: dual-use relevance tends to be discovered, not designed, and the institutions meant to support it (HERC, DIA, DRDC, NATO Diana) are still actively defining their own lanes. That's not a knock — it's the honest state of an ecosystem that's moving as quickly as the funding and the geopolitics demand.
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