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good afternoon everyone my name is john french i'm the director of university of toronto entrepreneurship uh i would like to thank you for making some time in your busy schedules to join today's session i know we all have a lot of options when it comes to what we look at our screens these days and i promise that the next hour with our fantastic panel will definitely be worthwhile uh in my role at ute i'm responsible for providing some connective connective tissue across all of the entrepreneurial programming that happens at u of t uh in mississauga and scarborough and at our st george or downtown campus prior to joining the university i spent about 10 years working for an organization called next canada which supports young tech entrepreneurs from across the country so i've had a lot of exposure to commercialization and innovation across the country before i hand things over to our our panel to introduce themselves i want to walk through a couple quick slides and explain why today's subject of the discovery of insulin and its legacy is important to my portfolio and to to ute um starting with the banting building so this is where my office is uh if you were to see uh just to the left of this photo up until about two years ago was the best building uh which is no longer there for very good reasons which i will explain shortly um but the banting institute or the banting building is almost as old as the discovery of insulin itself this building was was built in 1930 and it really is one of the hubs for innovation and commercialization and entrepreneurial activity at the university of toronto across three floors there are 15 000 square feet of co-working and hot desk and event space there are over 300 members 50 plus startups and a number of additional scale-up companies in the building we host over 100 events every year in the rbc innovation hub it's accessible to the entire u of t innovation ecosystem and there are a number of other tenants in the building relevant to the topic of commercialization today whether it's obayo my tax borealis ai rbc's ai research lab and it really is a hub for activity at the u of t one of the initiatives that our office has launched in collaboration with a number of other parts of the university that i'm hoping might come up in today's conversation has to do with intellectual property and the idea of protecting ip rights and using them to commercialize uh for both economic and social benefit and so for anybody who's watching today there is a course that's available for all u of t students alumni faculty researchers it's delivered through quercus which is uh ut's online education uh learning platform and it's also available to those outside of the university and educators via creative commons license uh through openu toronto any campus ontario it's designed for beginners or novices with no intellectual property education uh who are learning for the first time about the value and what they create whether it be a patent or trademark or a copyright and that ecosystem those those engines of innovation that i spoke about run from icube uh which is at ut's mississauga campus to the bridge and the hub which are in scarborough and then include about eight campus linked accelerators on the st george campus uh including the hatchery in the engineering faculty you test the university of toronto early stage technology program which has about 20 companies each year based exclusively on utip and among others h2i or the health to innovation hub which you're going to hear about a little bit during today's presentation from paul santeria and so if you believe that it starts um with innovation and insulin and the legacy of that discovery um goes all the way on through over 300 breakthroughs at the university of toronto there's a lot of reason for optimism uh after a hundred years and when when we talk to our panelists today obviously we'll be discussing diabetes research and insulin and breakthroughs in the legacy there but we're also going to be talking about how the university ecosystem and those around those that are attached to it and around it can support commercialization of the research that comes out of our hospitals and universities and then just to conclude as i look forward one of the reasons why uh why we're excited and to me this is the legacy of banting and best and and the others that we're talking about today is this new building this is an artist rendering of where banting is currently located at the intersection of college and university across the street from the mars building in downtown toronto and best is no longer there because they're pouring concrete for the new schwartz riesman innovation center which eventually across two phases will be 750 000 square feet of innovation space labs classrooms co-working space for startups and scale-ups the vector institute for ai research will be located there and and so to me as we talk about where we've come from and where we're going the the future is bright and i'm very excited that we've got three really impressive panelists uh who will talk a little bit about um commercialization innovation translation and uh and how it all fits together with this hundred year anniversary of this discovery of insulin and so i've asked the three panelists instead of me reading a a bio off of a computer screen or a piece of paper if they could each introduce themselves highlighting what is what is relevant to the audience and and so i'm really thrilled to start uh with and welcome um dr daniel drucker over to you dan uh good afternoon everybody and i hope everyone's doing uh well i'm an endocrinologist uh on the downtown campus work uh at the lunenfeld and um basically just trying to figure out how gut hormones work uh they control our metabolism and it's led to uh a bunch of discoveries that uh supported drug development in the fields of diabetes obesity and gastrointestinal disorders great thank you and next dr shaina kelly hi good afternoon thanks for joining us today uh i'm shane kelly i'm a faculty member at the university of toronto based in the faculty pharmacy also a member of the chemistry department and biochemistry department and our biomedical engineering program i run an interdisciplinary research group that focuses on the development of new diagnostic technologies and also platforms for drug discovery uh we're very translational i've been involved with inventions that have generated over 50 patents i'm a co-founder of four different diagnostic companies and i'm also the director of an initiative on campus at the university of toronto called prime which is focused on precision medicine very broadly defined it brings together over 70 of our our faculty members uh all united by their interest in research in drug discovery diagnostic development and and disease biology thank you shayna and last but not least dr paul santer so um i'm affiliated i'm a biomedical engineer affiliated with the faculties of uh dentistry engineering and tamerty faculty of medicine my area work is the area of development of polymers that are uh control innate immunity so that we can use them to do to undertake something called tissue engineering the building of brand new tissues to replace various types of organs and particularly we do a lot of work on vascular graft development through all that work over the past few years we have patented several of our technologies some over 70 different patents from around the world that resulted in the formation of multiple companies of which i'm the chief scientific officer for two of them interface biologics and ripple therapeutics we spun several others out of the lab with our trainees and from all that experience that has led me in the role of director for the health innovation hub at the tamartee faculty of medicine and incubator design focus on training our our postdocs our graduate students and undergrads how to go about putting an early startup together and and bringing the products to market terrific thank you paul and and maybe we'll stay with you um if you don't mind for kind of a high level overview of some of the things that you're seeing inside the faculty of medicine and with some of the companies uh that you're working with in h2i i mentioned the the the shrek the schwartz reisman innovation center which was the largest philanthropic gift the university had ever received until um the very recent announcement of the the the naming and and the gift from the temerity family um can you talk about what that means going forward as it ties into uh um to commercialization and what we're talking about today yeah i i think that's a that's a really nice pinnacle point of of what's been happening on the ground here for the both past uh two decades i mean when i arrived here at the university of toronto in 1993 i could count on my fingers the number of my colleagues who were who were building are involved with startup activities by the time i took over director of biomedical engineering in late 2000 i'd say 50 percent of our faculty of 40 had companies starting up that was around the same time that the mars facility medical related sciences facility was built right across the street from those amazing structures you've shown formed in order to to to harness the capacity that existed here in terms of research and the potential very shortly after that the campus-linked accelerators that you described started emerging out of the business school of arts and science and in 2013 the health innovation hub of the faculty of medicine um uh was initiated and uh other big initiatives that have supported the translation in a gigantic way around 2014 uh ted rogers from rogers communication and their foundation invested 130 million dollars into an effort on fixing broken hearts and bringing teams together it was very fascinating to hear the story earlier on today from gary lewis um on the importance of teams and this this ted rogers center for heart research is exactly that 10 very different scientists coming together to look at heart repair in a completely different way and then slightly on the heels of that michael sefton and peter zanstra and many others including shayna kelly here led an initiative called medicine by design which is a 114 million dollar investment by the faculty by the federal government to to bring about um innovations in molecular biology and regenerative medicine into the marketplace and and that's been very exciting and then just recently in 2020 uh the faculty of medicine was the recipient of the tamerty gift 250 million now a record a record philanthropic gift to a single uh departmental faculty unit on on a campus in canada so so a large industry are coming into play and we're hoping to capitalize on that through an initiative called health nexus which is a a call for about 130 million over the next 10 years to fill in a lot of gaps that exist in enabling the pathway to commercialization once it exits the lab so there's a there's a lot of excitement going on there's going to be a lot of activity to to rapidly fill up those new structures and you know we wish you could be around for the next 30 years even to see the transformation that's going to be happening here uh in the toronto area thank you a fantastic overview of what is happening in the space at the university and you mentioned medicine by design and shayna i know you're heavily involved with that it's a it's a pretty unique and special model um can you talk a little bit more about medicine by design and also just kind of what you see with regards to the mindset of researchers and students and those that are that are involved with with with that initiative sure so medicine by design as paul mentioned was funding that came from the federal government through the c craft program which was really designed to promote excellence at our major research centers and our effort uh is focused on regenerative medicine but very broadly defined um i think it's it's been an outstanding way to bring people together from across campus and also from within our hospital corridor it's a very collaborative program it's all team-based science that was already mentioned already in our panel how important that is everything that happens within medicine by design it happens within an interdisciplinary team it's biologists chemists it's engineers it's all these disciplines coming together to to really work on the next set of breakthroughs uh to bring regenerative medicine approaches into the the mainstream i think it's had a tremendous effect on our research profile internationally we've always been known as the center for regenerative medicine but i think this has taken us to the next level it's had a tremendous impact on our trainee base uh you know the opportunity to collaborate and to become more and more interdisciplinary really prepares them well for their careers that they pursue after they leave us and i think that's been tremendous um you know we're a little bit more than halfway through the program and so we're just seeing some of the the first breakthroughs and new technologies that have come out of medicine by design starting to go into companies and and to really start creating that impact um so it's something that i i have been really fortunate to be a part of and i i think the impact on the toronto ecosystem and beyond will be very substantial terrific thank you daniel you and your lab are globally recognized as a as a leader in diabetes research particularly type two um but what are some of the recent milestones findings discoveries that have come out of the lab and what areas are you focusing on now what are the what are the challenges that lie ahead so one of the uh hormones that i've been working on and patricia brubacher at the university for probably more than three decades is called glucagon-like peptide one and analogs of this molecule have become widely used now in the diabetes space the drugs also approved for obesity and to our delight it also reduces heart attacks strokes and cardiovascular death which is a major problem in these people so the industry now is saying well glp1 seems to be a good platform for treating diabetes and obesity it's safe it works well it saves lives if we want to make the next best drug how do we add to glp1 with combination therapy unimolecular multi-agonists and so you know our lab and others are basically trying to say glp1 looks good we've got 15 weight loss now with the newer glp-1 drugs coming through how can we make this better and again the gut is a source of a lot of hormones that normally work to control weight and people are sort of sifting through these one by one to see which are the preferred partners for glp1 right and for those of you that are are listening feel free to chat uh use the chat to share questions for the panel i'll be monitoring that um i want i would like to stick with daniel for my next question to start but then open it up to the other two panelists um dana you've got a lot of experience with regards to kind of taking the research and looking at the process of commercializing it protecting the ip making decisions or looking at this decision whether something should be licensed or maybe it is a fit for a startup um can you talk a little bit about that continuum and and some of the the decision points that are along the way sure so you know we heard already today uh both in the previous sessions and already in our session you know not only is science a team sport but commercialization is a team sport it's a very complex process the models whether it's a small startup a company a licensing deal you know we need intellectual property folks really smart lawyers business development people and then if you're going to go into manufacturing that's a whole you know different scale so i think the key message is you can't do it by yourself none of us has the training and the bandwidth and the smarts to do it so we need to surround ourselves and assemble a team and then ask ourselves you know who's the target audience is this really an improvement will people really pay for this uh and what is the competitive landscape look like and how should i finance this what's the best model and for each technology i think the answer is going to be different so there's a lot of homework that goes into trying to figure out what's the best way to move this forward to the marketplace paul or shayna um would you like to add add to that i'd like to let shayna go first there thanks paul yeah i completely agree that it it depends on the technology depends on the discovery what the best way is to to roll it out uh one of my mentors throughout my career has been david walt who was one of the founders of illumina and david told me when i was an assistant professor uh shayna nobody is going to care about your science as much as you do so if you have something that you think is really important and it's commercializable take it all the way you know get it out get get the tech transfer done stay as involved as you can as long as you need to and then when you have that you know great team there dan just mentioned ready to really take the hand off and run the rest of the way with it then you can go back to your your academic lab but it takes a lot of pushing and commitment and energy to get things out the door i think it's it's wonderful when you get a phone call from the tech transfer office and they say oh somebody you know just popped in today and wants to license your patent but that doesn't happen very often it's a lot more i think investigator pushing at least in in toronto to get things out there to get companies started to get companies interested and engaging um and that that's been my experience yeah i'll say yeah so shayna and dan both did a really nice setup here on the the importance of of being passionate about it and building it yourself and this is why the health innovation hub actually teaches by case study and the case study is your company when you walk in and teaching you all the elements of that we can put all kinds of people in seats and and preach to them about intellectual property or or a variety of things and it's it's good first knowledge but there's absolutely nothing better than being the entrepreneur yourself and driving it and being driven by that based on passion as um as um shayna said because there's there's all kinds of curveballs set to you as a as a scientist uh when we first started this with our first company interface biologics um i i was always in the opinion that the the biggest company who has the biggest market share is your best first partner but if they have the biggest market share it it also means that they have a product on the market that's already making a crap load of money for them and for them to rejig their whole market machine around that's that's a huge monumental push so we learned we learned very quickly the importance of finding the partners who were is driven to uh to be able to take your technology and drive it into the market and and those are those are often the people who have who are number two or three or even four and five in terms of market share down there because they're looking at being driven they're driven by the fact of being able to um introduce the new product and to to gain in market share and and unfortunately you need those big partners um who have the dollars to be able to to invest um within you um the other thing i learned is how challenging it is to set up clinical trials um in this particular country interestingly enough we found we've found with our companies now we've coached about 250 companies and it and it's so much easier to get your technologies in small community uh based hospitals as opposed to necessarily the big research hospitals i can't quite figure this when i would in the country there there doesn't be a big reward system to to engage in clinical trials in a big way in canada um nice examples um is our very first technologies we um our first hospitals to use these interesting pick catheters that we had developed were a little hospital in saskatchewan one in halifax and in ottawa and uh ripple therapeutics which is second company that we just run out we're doing the clinical trials in australia just because australia has set up an amazing incentive system to have its hospitals engaged in these processes so so there's all these these things you we we think all the elements are all just sitting there in a line but there's all these different curve balls that are set for you and you've got to figure them out uh in real time as you move along and canada i think as a country is in is is doing is doing well it's certainly a giant that has woken up it is a very educated uh country lots of lots of knowledge and intellectual property based here and we're just beginning to mine it and uh and i think what's happening in toronto here is a is a nice example of what a great mind could be and and we hope that we can continue to grow it and learn and teach each other uh how to do it faster and better daniel do you want to build on to that with regards to how canada is doing where we can do better whether it's with regards to clinical trials or um i mean that goel professor goel spoke about the legacy of the the cannot lab and and our ability to uh produce uh pharmaceuticals and vaccines in canada um in in their current context yeah so i think when i said build a team you know we often think of building a team means you go to somebody on the floor above you or you go to somebody across the street but building a team might mean that you talk to people in new york boston san francisco london uh and beijing and find the best people with the best resources be that financial intellectual to help you accomplish what you want to accomplish and i think you know part of the challenge we have here is and paul mentioned this so we're not always aligning our incentives with what we think our goals might be so when it comes to getting clinical trials done downtown of big hospitals we have a huge emphasis appropriately so on patient safety but we never incentivize irbs to get these protocols approved to implement the trials to get them done better and faster than anybody else that's just not part of of the mix and so it really depends on where you place the incentives and you know canada i think has the intellectual talent that's second to none in regard to harvard or san francisco we don't have the same pools of financial talent and we don't have the same culture for fostering commercialization it really varies tremendously if you go to you know pharmacy or engineering you probably have a huge amount of startup commercialization activity once you start getting into the clinical faculty there's almost a disincentive be very careful be don't talk to to companies etc so we really have not aligned our incentives fully across the university to take advantage of the talent we have it just takes time and it takes leadership and any anything else to add for either university or hospital or or policymakers that might be listening in on on what we can do to improve improve the system yeah i mean i think we've come a long way when i first moved to canada this was 2007 a couple years later i wanted to start a company based on some diagnostic technology we had developed and i called our tech transfer office and said hey i want to start the company and they said you want to do what why would you want to do that and things are totally different now and and our ecosystem has come a long way and i think the culture has even come a long way but it still has a long way to go but what we're still missing i think it's really the the resources to start companies it's hard to get a company off the ground in canada and to find that seed capital or to find a grant to give you enough money just to to do that first little bit so that you can then get investors in and i to me that was one of the biggest shocks when i i got to canada after having done a company uh in the us that there were just so few places to go and and early stage capital it's hard to get everywhere um but it's really hard in an ecosystem where you don't have an sbir program that you can go to to to really jump start something that you're trying to get out of the lab so i think that's always been a gap and it's it's still a gap that's the one thing that i haven't really seen change and and i think we need to change i mean we're we're getting some great momentum we've talked about all the exciting things that are happening all these philanthropic donations that are coming in that are going to allow us to do incredible research but we still got to figure out how to get it out there and and how to build once and for all a really robust biotech system yeah on that last point john i think a very important element that has changed in the landscape in the past decade and a half is is you had to go after venture capital to get uh um even a million or two and and venture capital has now moved far away from those kinds of numbers and the the good news is is that there there's a there's a big angel community there's a lot of pent-up money sitting in this country and there seems to be um individuals now who are who are coming in and who are a little bit more savvy on the health care sector and are interested in in making those uh one and two million dollar and three million dollar initial initial funds to get those proof of concepts uh off the ground that uh shaina is is talking about because those types of things are just not funded by our tri council our our ncirc and our cihr and our shirk uh councils and there is no other agency like the sbir program that you talked about that's down the stage there's no equivalent of that in this country so we're going to be relying for a little while until those types of programs start on on this um this angel community getting going uh in the picture and and hopefully we can marry that to some of the the great philanthropic uh vision that we have seen from the rogers the tamartees and and individuals like that who actually want the commercialization element built into the to the research programs and and those things will help as well i i find that either because of covered or despite covet i'm still not sure which one it is but there's been incredible momentum with a number of u of t startups securing funding acquisitions having exits and when i look at most of them they do have a connection to life sciences and and health tech paul through through h2i and kind of your level three level four companies are you seeing that kind of interest and do you have any uh kind of examples of some of the startups that have gone through or going through h2i that are having really big impact in this space yeah so just so just to kind of enable uh uh the audience here to have a little bit of context of what john was meaning by level three and four the health innovation hub actually runs this uh four level program uh taking in students who and trainees who know absolutely nothing about uh entrepreneurship and brings them along on this 10-point program puts them almost on a conveyor by belt and starts uh plugging uh smarts uh business smarts to them as they move along and so by the time they get to a level three they're in a monetizing phase um so the um last year uh the the mid-level three and level four companies actually generated about 45 million uh dollars in in economic value into the toronto area here so by that i mean there was about 39 of that that was angel investment so 5 million was sales of products and services and about a million roughly of non-diluted funding which just just emphasizes the point that shaina was making uh a minutes ago about how little the uh the amount is that's that's coming from the um the governmental component to to support this translation side in terms of exciting companies that are emerging um i mean there there are venture capital backstories uh we have one of them ripple therapeutics in the middle of covid 19 with not a single face-to-face meeting with venture capital capitalists is in the midst of closing a pretty major venture deal um with a strategic from europe and that should be announced very shortly out of the health innovation hub uh this past year we've had three or four companies that have have done you know two to two to three million again the health innovation hub is focused on uh early startup so by the time they move to the venture stage where a 10 10 million 15 million or so would be invested in them they are going into other incubators and and they typically have their own advisory board supporting them so a big deal for us is in the two two to three million dollar range uh uh there's um lsk uh which is a uh a very innovative um um uh sensor technology that has emerged out of the faculty of medicine and keep parties group that is now incubating both in waterloo and within the health innovation hub that is turning some heads very cheap um sensor technology that has been actually able to take advantage of the uh of the kovid 19 crisis uh and the urgency to to develop rapid testing in those particular systems as an example of what's emerging fantastic it's a long list shaina or daniel any other startup companies before we talk a little bit about industry uh partnerships and opportunities any other companies that you're seeing in the ecosystem that you're really excited about i think there's a lot of activity uh within the research institutes and we know mars has some incubator space in the johnson johnson group and i think there's a lot as jenna said a lot more going on now than 10 or 15 years ago what some people don't remember because maybe i'm a little older is that 15 or 20 years ago if you uh wanted to get a million or two million dollars from the ontario government we had an ontario uh research and development challenge fund that would match private sector money and you could get two three four five six million dollar matches or a five hundred thousand 000 match insert had a huge matching program for commercialization 15 or 20 years ago so surprisingly uh you know things are tougher now in terms of getting government leverage funding to match private sector dollars and we need to have better conversations with government about their important roles in the equation yeah i i would definitely agree with that i mean i i think we're continuing to see mechanisms go away and nothing is replacing them i mean the nce program was just shuttered which was a really nice way to bring together academic and industry groups and so the number of options is just narrowing which is is unfortunate um and at the same time though we've seen you know the biggest ipos in history in biotech from canadian companies having happened over the last year some of the biggest acquisitions to have ever occurred it happened over the the last year so there's just no doubt that there's you know a huge amount of energy and potential in the industry but we have to find a way to do more bottom-up i mean i think this is is very much connected to the situation we find ourselves in with the vaccine right it's it's not just that we can't manufacture the vaccine in in canada it's that we don't have that whole ecosystem there we don't have biotech in canada the way that it exists in the us and the uk and germany and all these other places that we're seeing much better position that are going to get vaccinated much earlier than we are because we lack this so i i i also wish that we were having more conversations with government about how can we do we have to do something different we can't just kind of keep taking programs away and then just hope people will figure out some way to start companies and get the breakthroughs out there um i think we have to have some some new very creative mechanisms to take advantage of the fact that that we we do have a huge amount of momentum and there's a nice example just on that last point as a nice concrete example john you know canada more traditionally uh back a hundred years ago when this this great discovery was made was a was a raw materials supplier it it its mining community and its natural resources is fun is is amazing and the canadian government built a national railway to be able to move all those raw materials everywhere now i would argue that a new raw material that has been created in this country is a very educated society a very creative society the the the number of intellectual property patents emerging out of our universities is is skyrocketing and it is time on shayna's point it is time for the federal government to build the equivalent of the national railway to start to to enable this technology to move not only across canada but to move around the world and there's huge opportunity and and industry leaders are ready just to stand up to to do it the health innovation hub has 75 industry mentors ceos of corporations and whatnot who are willing to sit down with the companies and coach them and mentor them along the way so it really is time for the federal government to to put into action federal and provincial governments to put in action an innovation agenda with the infrastructure needed to complement what's going on on the ground here and there's huge opportunities here you know the areas of diagnostics and centers sensors are are undergoing amazing development the combination of artificial intelligence and drug discovery is is uh just unparalleled um to to other jurisdictions in the world and uh the opportunities to develop and what's being developed in the services area based on um on the digital technologies uh coming out of our young startups is is really amazing but but there is a need for that um for that buoyed support to be able to move things um onwards and and out daniel if i could just pick up on two points so one i'll just follow right on what paul said so paul basically talked about railroads but we make much larger investments from the government side into the private sector in the auto industry and subsidizes jobs in the auto industry to the tune of you know well over billions of dollars a year in ontario um but we don't make the same sort of huge investments uh in the private sector that would support commercialization in life sciences and we're not i think second to mit or harvard or ucsf in terms of the talent that we have as outlined but our taxation incentives in this country to be controversial perhaps for a minute are not as aligned with commercialization incentives as they might be in other jurisdictions and we've seen the power of taxation incentives there's a reason why quebec for decades has been a much larger hub in terms of life science industry development and a lot of it is tied to taxation at multiple levels so canada needs to realize that we are in a very competitive global landscape and we need to align our incentives not just on the education side which we do a great job on but on the commercial side where i don't think we're always as competitive as our competitors and there's really good incentive when it when a country spends 10 percent of its national gp gdp on health care you know putting aside all other sectors clothing food you know oil manufacturing and and what not one single sector owning 10 percent of the national gdp and when we look south of the border if we want great opportunity to be to be able to to to to make return on that manufacturing the us it's 20 percent you know take five dollars out of your pocket and cut one dollar away uh that goes into health care services and and products so it to to for canada to not be there um on an industrial level in the life sciences actually makes no financial sense at all and and daniel i don't think it's a good panel if it's not a little bit controversial and i don't think your comments are even uh that controversial in their nature i think i think we should get our friends at the uh the rsc to to share a version of this uh video with some of the key decision makers at various levels of government um and so having spoken about the public sector and government a little bit what are some of the best practices and the things that you're seeing where industry is involved in commercialization of research in the healthcare sector and how can industry do more and i don't know if anybody wants to lead on that that's an open one i'll just pick up on one of the points that i think paul made a very important point about um when you're deciding to you know expand your commercialization vision and who do you choose as a partner and paul said i think very correctly that it's not always the market leader and the biggest giant in the field that's your best partner because very often as paul said that person has already a large market to protect and very often the largest partner in the space is the best partner that may just take what you've done put it on the shelf and copy it or simply take what you've done put it on the shelf and never develop it and so i think you know when you enter into negotiations with partners you need to be very careful about the types of contracts you enter into and make sure there are clauses that allow the technology and the rights to come back to you if there's a failure to develop make sure there are clauses that deal with this competitive aspect in the space etc so i think there's a lot of thought that needs to go into partners i think canada has excellent uh you know sort of private sector partners in many of the life sciences spaces but often the decisions are made not in canada most of the head offices are not in canada so i think one really has to do a lot of due diligence and just like you do when you do your own science you need to say what are the last 15 or 20 deals that this company has done in my space what's happened to those deals what happened to the inventors and the partners and you know it takes as much effort to make commercializations successful on the business side as it does on the science side and if you're not really interested in doing that develop a team that will do that for you shayna yeah i would just add that picking a partner um it's like picking a romantic partner i mean you want to pick one that you really can see eye to eye with and there are companies in the same exact space that operate completely differently and there are some that will put terms in front of you that are really onerous and difficult to uh work with and then there are others that really want to see the research get done and really want to see the breakthroughs get made and they want to share in you know whatever benefits come from that with you so i um you know i think it always makes sense to to look around look broadly look at lots of different potential partners i completely agree that the biggest partner is not necessarily the best you want your project to have attention and resources and if it's the biggest partner it's probably not going to get that and it's it's all about relationships too you know you have to find somebody within the scientific part of the organization that gets what you're doing you have to find somebody within the the business side of the organization that is really a champion and and that's what allows things to to progress so it's it's a lot of work it's not something again like it's it's not that your phone is ringing off the hook if you have a bunch of patents and there's all these you know partners just waiting to to work with you um it's a lot about relationship building and and finding the best partners and and then you know just trying to make a as educated of a decision as you can about who to work with so i'll tackle your partner's question from a different angle and perhaps consider the partners for the ecosystem to enable our ecosystem to to to grow and succeed and create the environment that teaches our are our young startups um the types of things that both shayna and daniel uh just uh mentioned here you know our again our government leaders need to be sitting down with companies like rogers johnson and johnson that set up j labs in mars and schwartz reitzman and asked these people why were they compelled to make such significant investments in um in the technology sect in a in a sector to to grow not only grow science but enable science to move out of the lab uh and into the technology business sector you know what did they what have they seen that are our our leaders are not seeing and there could be a lot to be learned there because there's been significant investment with j labs has created a little micro lab environments to be to allow these companies to to solidify their intellectual property get the proof of concepts out and and they're rolling you know they're rolling investors in on a weekly basis to to introduce and meet with these companies and and help uh prime them and and prep them uh going forward uh the ted rogers uh you know has invested in the echo program which teaches uh young entrepreneurs and exposes them to to successful entrepreneurs um in order to expand their their network and schwarz reitzman is is building this amazing facility that is going to enable a lot of startups to get a foot off the ground at um at um you know protected rent uh in in protected rent environments so that they can plow most of their money that they have into the advancement of the technologies these people are visionaries these organizations these foundations have seen something that some that somehow our politicians can't can't see right now and um i think it would be great for the rsc as you said to um to be able to bring those two elements together and uh and forge a partnership that changes the landscape forever in this country well said well said um another question for you paul because we talked about the the the the insulin legacy and the cannot labs and you're uh a recipient of the cannot award um can you talk a little bit about that and how it's impacted kind of you personally but also how it's had an impact on our ecosystem yeah i think that's a it's an amazing story you know at the end of the day i think i think uh the the return on on revenue on the cannot endowment is somewhere between one and two million dollars a year and not sure but the university of toronto has has pretty much split that up into initiatives that drive paradigm shifting ideas on the science side but has took the taken the other half and has invested it in labs that are moving uh science and innovations out of the uh out of their out of the labs and and producing minimal viable products and and and activities on the commercialization side so that fund um works on an annual basis for this community of 96 000 people um the the vision that we have for a new initiative that that is with the advancement office called health nexus is moving towards the goal of having somewhat of a of a of a hundred cannot type companies uh at any point in time into the equilibrium system and just imagine if if cannot produces two million dollars a year as a result of benefits coming back to the university of toronto through those very early days uh that if you had a hundred companies uh producing even at uh at a one to four percent royalty return to the university of toronto imagine the impact and the legacy that that would have in the system so so the drive to to to create these companies and have them exist in this ecosystem doesn't stop at the the value of the product and the revenue for the company it creates a company that needs to continue accessing innovative research tools uh innovative minds key opinion leaders and and they will stay here anchored in these uh these ecosystems they will continue to hire our are what we call uh highly uh hqp highly qualified professionals and keep them here in canada to be able to grow these companies and so on for so the spin-off cycle is is substantial and for cannot you know for me personally it was a 30 000 uh award when i first got here got my lab off the ground you know that lab subsequently went on to produce some some some 70 plus patents i i think we're you know my own our own research lab generated well over 50 million dollars in in in our career time and the companies that have spun out of there are pushing close to 100 million dollars generated and spent in the ecosystem so imagine that 30 000 small investment ultimately was the pathway to a legacy that hopefully will be able to give on its own back uh to the system so um the cannot program is significant and imagine what it would be like if we had a hundred cannot um uh funds i'm well said what what an ro what an roi on that uh initially right um we're i'm conscious of time we're starting to run out of time just a reminder for anybody that does have questions throw them throw them into the chat i've got a couple more and then we'll uh allow each of our panelists um to to make a bit of a closing comment and i'll kind of guide them with a with a question or two um but at the university of toronto this is for you again shaina and and daniel um i believe the numbers around 75 percent of research-based startups uh have a faculty student collaboration involved with them um why why is that so important and how can we facilitate more of more of that in in the university ecosystem so i'll start so you know in medicine we have this very silly saying which is c one do one teach one uh and i think the same thing applies on the inventorship side i have no doubt that people working with dr kelly who see her sees her passion for technology startups patents etc they're in that environment and they're going to say wow i i think i could learn how to do that that seems really cool and exciting and i'd like to do that myself and so i think you know part of our uh obligation is to teach that culture to our trainees as young as possible that's how i learned i didn't know what a patent was in 1984 until i saw my notebooks disappear and off went my supervisor into a meeting with some lawyers etc and then i said i think i better learn about this and today there's a much easier environment to to teach but i think you know one of our the great things we have is that there's so many outstanding bright trainees that come through our environment we learn from them they can pick up stuff from us and that's how the next generation gets even better than what we're doing now shayna yeah i would just add i mean i'm i would be surprised if the number that you cited was that high in the life sciences it's hard in the life sciences to take a freshly minted phd and have them take a company out and juggle all of the things that that you need to juggle i think it can be a little bit easier in other sectors but we are starting to see it happen and i think we we've got to give a huge credit to paul's organization and our other campus-led accelerators that are teaching students you know just taking them through the paces there's a lot to learn it's it's very complicated um but but our you know our trainees are the best equipped to take things forward and that's what has to happen for our ecosystem to really rev up i mean i can only start so many companies at one time and be the cso and try to you know do everything there run my lab do everything else and you really have to have this network of trainees that then you know run with things um and that's how the other big centers work you know in boston you know bob langer is somebody who's probably started more companies than anybody else i know he doesn't start them himself he's not the the cso he has an army of postdocs an army of phd students that then lead the charge and take things out and that's how you really ramp up activity and i'll just come back to the point that that paul made i mean this is really what we need to get things off the ground and take it to the next level because in addition to having many many more companies and you know revenue generation and all of this stuff you know the probability says that we will eventually have a google an amazon a microsoft you know something something that will fundamentally change the economic outlook for toronto and canada and jobs and and all the rest so i i think the trainee part of it is is incredibly important it it we we can't do what we all envision doing without having these mechanisms to empower the the trainees to to lead paul any uh final thoughts on that yeah the the the trainee pathway is critical for us to get it right statistic after statistic for the past decade and a half has shown that 80 percent of our graduate students will uh will not pursue an academic path and that's not because they they don't they don't believe it's important they they they really value the education that they get at the university of toronto i've never met a graduate student that has not told me they have come here because of the the deaf of a visionary uh thought and and hypothesis thinking and strong research however they have they they have come here they are passionately in love with gaining that knowledge but they have told me you know firsthand many of them and again statistic activists tell us that 80 of our graduates want to go do this in industry so for the university of toronto to actually not be active in this area to not actually be enabling programs like h2i and integrating translational uh thinking and opportunities and experiential learning on the entrepreneurial path in their programs is actually counterproductive to attracting the very best talent to this school because 80 stats tell us 80 of the the most brilliant minds are coming to train at the university of toronto and and want to go the next step to to being the you know the next shana kelly that stan drucker on in terms of moving their intellectual property out the door but they're willing to do it in a slightly different way than they and i have have done not as an academic but as as perhaps um in the early days perhaps the ceo of that company but what invested in perhaps the the vp of product development and and so on and so forth we have a young master's student who was um who told me point blank when she finished her her graduate studies um that um she wanted to do to go into industry and she was the first lead uh product development lead for interface biologics uh today she is um after that company sold off their surface modification technology to evonik and international multi-international uh became the uh the senior um product development program manager here in canada for this this international firm interacting with with amazing research and product development centers in the biomaterials field internationally so there's huge huge opportunities for these people and and if we train the bright they become strategic partners they become the strategic link to partners for us to industry and industry industry government uh funding programs you know are are are going to be ever more important in the future so it does us a service on so many fronts uh to to be investing in that education component fantastic we are just about that time but i want to give everyone a final 30 seconds and and uh in 2020 we can use optimism and and positivity looking for the future so in 30 seconds uh as we celebrate this this anniversary what's one thing that you're looking forward to in the commercialization space i'll start with you daniel well i'm going to change the message so two messages listen to what shauna says about champions both you are the best champion of your own work and make sure when you move to the commercialization side that there's somebody equally powerful as a champion and my second message which we haven't talked about today it's okay to fail it's okay to follow disclosure and not have a patent it's okay to file a patent and abandon that patent it's okay to raise a few million bucks and then ultimately abandon the venture because it wasn't going as well it's better to try and fail than never to try at all fantastic uh and and if we're going to share this video parts of it with the uh have the rsc share with government stakeholders i want to share that last part with the the entrepreneurs that paul and i in particular serve and support um shaina yeah these are great thoughts it's been a great discussion i'm very excited i mean i think we're building a lot of momentum uh even through a really difficult time um and i think the message about risk is is a really important one we have to take risks as individuals to make an impact you know try things that are really uh you know never been tried before to see if we can have a breakthrough but we also need our government to take more risks and support this type of you know high-risk high-reward type effort that uh you know they have us to to mobilize to to make the breakthroughs and and so we we need that support to be able to do it 30 seconds yeah i i'm always half full so you know while it took the example of um insulin uh 100 years to to spar our our our thirst for innovation translation i walk at the i look at the transformations in the past decade here uh in terms of um of new company startups and the value that they've created and it's moving at warp speed compared to to the speed that we heard the insulin happened uh in the earlier talks today so i can only imagine that the the the timelines are going to be even more condensed um for us to see even even bigger uh successes emerge if we keep the course of action keep the focus that we're on today so and with that a huge thank you to daniel shayna and paul for sharing their their passion their experience their expertise with all of us uh we say it at the end of every good panel but we could honestly keep going and talking about this important subject and so a genuine genuine thank you and also uh thank you to the rsc for hosting and shining a light on this and other important um leadership excellence examples during this week for those of you that are watching i've been asked to let you know that there's a it's a 12-minute break now before the next session starts at 4 o'clock and enjoy the rest of the day and thanks again everyone all the best thanks thank you