Women Entrepreneurs play a pivotal role in Canada’s prosperity:

• They are one of the fastest growing business segments in Canada
• Canadian firms run by women create new jobs at four times the rate of the national average, collectively providing more jobs than the Canadian Top 100 companies combined
• Women create entire companies at double the rate of the national average
• The number of women incorporated businesses more than doubled during the last decade
• There are 821,000 self employed women contributing $18 Billion dollars to the Canadian economy

The Canadian Woman Entrepreneur Awards and RBC Royal Bank honour the achievements, innovation and vision and provide national recognition to Canada’s women entrepreneurs.

These awards aim to:

• advance their business and personal networks
• provide significant profile and visibility for them and their businesses
• create additional opportunities to actively participate on for-profit and non-profit boards, government committees and/or industry associations
• increase the number of role models and mentors for all entrepreneurs both male and female

Know an inspiring female entrepreneur? A trailblazer? A lifetime achiever?
Deadline for nominations is July 20th.

Insulin by BTMFM

This week, Technology Review published an article about a new imaging tracer which tracks insulin cell loss in diabetes. This is great news for patients, clinicians and pharmaceutical companies alike. Patients can be diagnosed earlier and more accurately, while clinicians and pharmaceutical companies can use this new technology for clinical trial evaluation of new drugs for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Created by Dr. Hank Kung at the University of Pennsylvania and presently being developed by Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Inc, this new marker can track progression and will help predict the onset of diabetes. Currently, diabetic symptoms are evident only after 50-90% of the insulin-producing cells are already lost. If this technology can see that a symptom-less patient has 20-30% cell loss, interventions can begin earlier and possibly delay or prevent onset especially for type 2 diabetes.

The marker can distinguish a healthy rat pancreas from a pancreas whose insulin-producing cells have been destroyed, according to results presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine’s annual meeting in Washington, DC, earlier this month.

The most interesting aspect to this discovery is that cells in the brain and pancreas share many markers. This means that research done in the neuroscience space may be increasingly implemented for diabetes. Neurogenic mechanisms have already been implicated in curing diabetes which will begin clinical testing soon (see previous MaRS blog, “Canadian Team Makes Stunning Diabetic Breakthrough”).

It will also be interesting to see this tracer used with the new state-of-the-art PET-MRI imaging systems and discover how far we can go in “seeing” and then curing diabetes.

MaRS Phase II unveiled to much fanfare
View other Phase II announcement photos

Yesterday was the day of buzz at MaRS: media, luminaries, sparkles — all fuelled by the excitement of launching Phase II of MaRS Centre development.

Construction sites are a prominent feature of the landscape in Toronto these days. So what is the big deal about this one?

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Hot dog stands: the harbringers of a changing
sociological tide? Photo courtesy of Richard Hsu

I attended the inaugural Open Cities Camp, hosted last Saturday by the Centre for Social Innovation to discuss adding ‘open’ into Toronto’s urban landscape. While ‘open’ seems to be as amorphous and philosophically charged a term as ‘convergence innovation,’ it roughly means energizing public life through collaborative, participatory initiatives. The idea is to challenge the austere ‘institutionality’ of the public sphere with enterprises that meaningfully engage citizen and community participation, and to transform the urban environment from the stereotypical ‘anonymous slab of concrete’ into a catalyst for meaningful social interaction and creativity.

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China: the future of pharma, photo by beardnan

Oh, if I had a dollar for every time I heard about the rise of China as the hottest new market in everything. What is quite possibly the most hyped, covered and documented economic trend certainly doesn’t need much more to bring attention to it.

However, I still found this report interesting in that it brings some actual numbers and predictions with respect to the pharma industry. Research and Market’s report, “China’s Pharmaceutical Industry – Porter’s Five Forces Strategy Analysis” predicts that China will become the fifth-largest pharma market by 2010, and the largest by 2050.

Obviously challenges remain:

“Investors continue to face a range of obstacles, many of which stem from the legacy of central planning of the industry. These include complex distribution, under-developed retail options, intellectual property infringements and pricing controls and pressures. At the same time, the continuing reliance of leading domestic companies on generic drugs has prevented the emergence of Chinese brands.”

So, seriously, what is your China strategy?

FierceBiotech, a biotech industry-oriented website, highlights 15 promising companies on their 2007 Fierce 15 list.These 15 companies were chosen because they “are all about the risks and potential rewards that lie in wait for any biotech company… All deserve close attention as they push ahead, breaking new ground in an industry that depends on a steady stream of innovations to keep advancing the promise of medical breakthroughs made possible through new therapies.”

The list includes:

• Anacor Pharmaceuticals: Anacor’s work in boron chemistry has produced 20 patent applications. To date, Anacor has focused on applications in dermatology, including a mid-stage therapy for onychomycosis, a fungal infection of the nail and nail bed.
• Archemix: Archemix focuses on aptamers, nucleotides that bind to proteins with specificity. It has five compounds in development, including ARC1779, which reduces platelet aggregation and thrombosis by inhibition of von Willebrand Factor.
• PTC Therapeutics: PTC Therapeutics’ lead candidate, PTC124, was effective in treating a particular group of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy triggered by nonsense mutations, and may also prove to be effective in dealing with the nonsense mutations involved in other genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis and Hurler’s disease.
• Syndax Pharmaceuticals: Syndax is a “virtual biotech company” that outsources the bulk of drug discovery work and then in-licenses promising therapies.
• TargeGen: TargeGen’s development program is based on early research into an Src kinase inhibitor that could prevent edema, or leakage from blood vessels.

To see the complete list, click here.

Hailed as a turning point in diagnosis and therapy, Siemens Medical Solutions has unveiled the world’s first imaging system that can capture the most advanced structural images and simultaneously capture functional images by both magnetic resonance (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) respectively. This breakthrough will increase survival times dramatically since it can identify specific diagnoses more accurately and quickly.

This system will provide more detailed images, shorten imaging time, increase patient throughput, reduce healthcare costs, decrease errors, and give a more full picture for those diagnosed with neurological disorders, stroke and cancer. It would be an ideal technology to unravel difficult scientific mechanisms such as those involved in prenatal drug damage.

The MRI and PET (relatively new imaging technologies that are already being used in clinics) have never been combined into one entity until now. Image fusion is the way of the future, as the best structural and functional devices are brought together to see depths and details never before realized.

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PwC’s critical report on the state of pharma

Last week, consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers released a surprisingly critical report on the state of the pharmaceutical industry. “Pharma 2020: The Vision - Which Path Will You Take?” indicates the current industry business model is both “…economically unsustainable and operationally incapable of acting quickly enough to produce the types of innovative treatments demanded by global markets.”

Among the fundamental changes the report forecasts for the industry are:

• a shift in focus from treatment to prevention
• pharmaceutical companies will provide total health care packages
• a move from the linear R&D or pipeline process to in-life testing and live licensing, in collaboration with regulators and health care providers
• the disappearance of the the traditional blockbuster sales model
• expansion of the pool of basic research which pharma currently taps, particularly that which exists in Asia

More:

• press release: “Global Pharma Market Predicted to More Than Double In Value to $1.3 Trillion by 2020: Industry Must Transform to Capitalise On Opportunities”
• executive summary*
• download the full report *
• podcast *
  

*Free registration required for access

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How can developed economies like the United States and Canada prosper in a borderless, “flat” world defined by the rising science superpowers of China and India?

Some important innovation groups are struggling to answer these enormous and essential questions — and one of the reports I find most intriguing is Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. The report’s proposals cluster around three themes:

• Increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 math education. The “10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds” initiative would see robust four-year scholarships offered to 10,000 science and mathematics teachers — each of whom would presumably go on to impact 1,000 students over the course of their careers. Additional programs would improve the training and education of 250,000 teachers and increase the pipeline of students graduating high school with international baccalaureate (IB) standing in science and math courses.
  
  

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“Scientific research has not been hindered significantly by a recent proliferation of technology patents and licensing agreements, according to four groundbreaking international surveys completed by AAAS’s Science and Intellectual Property in the Public Interest (SIPPI) project.

Some experts have feared that a rise in intellectual property (IP) protections could stifle discovery because the protections would bar too many scientists from using IP research tools. But in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, tools from software to genetically modified organisms ‘remain relatively accessible to the broad scientific community,’ according to the reports.

‘While it was not possible to do direct, country to country comparisons, all four studies suggest that intellectual property rights had little negative impact on the practice of science,’ said Stephen Hansen, SIPPI project manager…”

More:

• Press release: “Research Not Slowed By Intellectual Property Protections, AAAS Surveys Find,” June 1, 2007
• Full reports: “Publications by or for the Project on Science and Intellectual Property in the Public Interest”