David, what is your role at BioDiscovery Toronto?

BioDiscovery Toronto comprises nine of Toronto's leading research universities and hospital research institutes.  I was hired one year ago to manage BioDiscovery and deliver on its mandate to enhance technology transfer and commercialization based on Toronto's world-class biomedical research.

Describe your career journey that brought you to BioDiscovery Toronto?

I became involved with biotechnology as it was first emerging in Canada in the early 1980s.  My expertise is in “early-stage” deals and arrangements that take technology into commercial development and application. That’s really where my passion is. I have always stayed close to innovation and early-stage development, for technologies that have a chance of making an economic and industrial impact.

In the early 1980s, I was responsible for Canada's National Biotechnology Strategy and building research and corporate capacity while employed with Industry Canada.  Subsequently, I served as Counsellor, Science and Technology at the Canadian High Commission in London, England. After that international experience, during the 1990s I took the role of Senior Executive and Commercial Director of the Canadian Genetic Diseases Network; headquartered at the University of British Columbia, part of Canada’s Networks of Centres of Excellence system. By the turn of the century I was in the private sector,  and became the founding President and CEO of Milestone Medica Corporation, a seed venture investment and management company, working with Canada's top biomedical research centres. 

I’m intrigued with your experience in London, England.

Part of my job in London was to understand what policies and organizations were emerging in the UK, and more broadly in Europe, that were central to adoption of the emerging ‘strategic’ technologies including Bio, Materials and ICT.  One role I particularly enjoyed was serving as a Governor on the Board of Imperial College – the committee equivalent to the Board of Directors. Imperial had a very distinguished and experienced Governing Board with representatives from major UK and world-wide industries such as Roll-Royce.  Imperial also had a very fine technology transfer organization which has recently evolved into a publicly listed company. The universities in England, in general, have done a very good job of trying to move discoveries to the commercial plain. They are ahead of Canada in that regard, although Canada’s younger organizations are now rapidly catching up. I was able to get a pretty good view of policy development as well. One major difference between Canada and European countries is the emergence of the EEC as a major driver of policy and programs.  Major EEC resources have been used to drive innovation policies and programs in many countries such as Ireland and England. In Canada, we do not have this kind of superstructure and the associated financial clout.  

Tell us about the vision, history, and mission of BioDiscovery Toronto.

Around 2003-2004 the senior management of our major hospital research institutes decided that they had to work more closely.  That was the beginning of BioDiscovery and MaRS. In fact, the founders of BioDiscovery Toronto were instrumental, along with others in the community, in founding the original MaRS incubator. BioDiscovery Toronto continues to this day with the core philosophy to bring expertise and management together and raise new resources to overcome the challenges of technology transfer, technology development, and commercialization, and to work with ‘Hi-tech’ companies.

BioDiscovery Toronto's vision is to maximize the commercialization of research by linking research, industry and capital and provide a central interface between the Toronto research community and industry, and facilitate cross-institutional activity. After serving my first full year as Executive Director, I am excited as ever about the potential of Toronto’s biomedical research enterprise that constitutes a top ranked scientific cluster - comparable to other top clusters in the US and Europe.  It is not widely known, for instance, that the biomedical science productivity and quality of University of Toronto and affiliated research hospitals is ranked consistently among the top 3 North American institutions and is actually number 1 in terms of public universities.