Improving access to lifesaving biotech products and encouraging homegrown innovation in poorer nations are long-standing problems. Key challenges are how to galvanize investment by firms in the industrialized world in startups and companies in emerging economies (North-South partnerships), but also how to encourage the private sector in developing nations to generate its own products that are relevant to needs locally and in neighboring countries (South-South partnerships).

The former North-South challenge has received considerable attention in recent years as companies seek to 'off-shore' or outsource certain R&D capabilities or clinical trials. Indeed, next spring, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH) will host the first “The Partnering for Global Health Forum,” with the specific aim of “fostering new collaborations” between biotech firms in industrialized countries and those in developing countries.

But rather than focusing on what the developing world can do for you—and to a lesser extent what you can do for it—surprisingly little attention has been paid to what developing countries can do for themselves. This is what made a conference entitled “Mobilizing the Private Sector for Global Health Development” that took place at the MaRS Landing incubator in Toronto this May so interesting.

The conference, organized by the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, placed center stage >70 life science firms from over a dozen countries across the developing world. The idea was to provide a forum that enabled these firms to find and form fruitful partnerships—not only with US and Canadian biotechs, but also with ventures in other developing countries that share some of the same problems and business constraints. Equally important, through the support of Genome Canada, BIOTECanada, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, BVGH, Wulff Capital and Burrill & Company, the registration costs were defrayed—an important consideration when thousand-dollar registration fees and the price of an airfare often represents several times an average monthly salary in many Southern Hemisphere countries.

Providing mechanisms to encourage South-South partnerships is going to be very important in accelerating and broadening access of the world's poorest to biotech's products. North-South partnerships certainly have a role to play, but progress has been slow; for example, it is sobering to realize—despite years of discussion of the concept of advanced market commitments—that the $1.5 billion fund set aside for a pneumococcal vaccine by Italy, the UK, Canada, Russia, Norway and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation earlier this year is the first and only of its kind. In the meantime, local entrepreneurs in developing countries are finding solutions of their own. On the evidence of the Toronto conference, there is more than enough talent and ingenuity in developing countries to make that happen.