It is early July 2005, and Gariépy, fifty, is in the thirtieth-floor boardroom of Genesys Capital Partners, a Toronto-based venture capital company. He wants Genesys to invest in his company, Molecular Templates Inc., which is trying to harness the natural cell-killing abilities of bacterial toxins to create an anti-cancer agent. Early results have been encouraging. mti’s technology, a rapid platform for testing candidate toxins, is a big selling point. But it needs money to take the next step, to move into clinical trials on animals. After the pitch, two of Genesys’s founders, Kelly Holman and Damian Lamb, pepper Gariépy and then mti executive director Randal Chase with technical questions. Witnessing it all are six representatives from local university and teaching hospital technology-transfer offices.
Twenty years ago, that scene would have been unimaginable. Back then, with the exception of the fields of chemistry and engineering, relations between academia and industry were frowned upon, and tech transfer officers a rarity. Support for Canadian science was also at a low ebb, and bright young scientists were leaving the country in droves. All of that changed in the late 1990s when Canada began to reinvest in university research. The reinvestment was substantial — by 2006, Canada ranked second among oecd countries for the ratio of higher-education research and development to gdp. But it came with strings: the granting policies of major federal or federally created bodies began to require that researchers obtain co-funding from industry. One expert federal advisory committee went so far as to recommend that innovation be enshrined as a core mission of universities — in addition to teaching, research, and community service.
The doctrine of innovation had taken hold — “innovation” narrowly defined as the route to commercializable products and services. Innovation would allow Canada to “compete in the knowledge-based global economy,” and universities were seen as a key source of the discovery and invention that would pave the way.
The turnabout is most evident in the life sciences, mainly thanks to the revolution in genetics. The ability to identify and then transfer specific genetic traits from one organism to another, together with the awarding of patents on genes, cell lines, and the processes and technologies used to alter them, has enormous commercial potential. Health research has become a key plank in Canada’s industrial policy, and now accounts for nearly 25 percent of all R&D; expenditures in Canada, up from just 14.3 percent in 1989.
Fields such as engineering can bring products to market much faster than health-related sciences, where the regulatory process of proving safety and efficacy for drugs and devices is lengthy and onerous. But there is something reminiscent of the search for the Holy Grail about the global quest to be the first to grow custom-made organs or find the magic bullet for cancer, heart disease, or obesity. Potential profits are huge, and there is international competition for supremacy in research and for fostering domestic biotechnology companies. Every country wants a Silicon Valley. Every country appears to believe that the biological revolution will be as transformative as the Industrial Revolution.
The process of commercialization at Canadian universities has been formalized at a “very fast pace,” and success is hard to measure, according to Martin Cloutier, a professor in the school of management at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Cloutier argues that it’s easy to count the increased number of patents and licensing agreements at universities, and the spinoff companies, but much harder to evaluate the impact in terms of businesses and jobs created.
The shift in the perceived role of universities has taken place almost entirely in the absence of efforts to engage or inform ordinary Canadians. Indeed, major programs that further the commercialization agenda have been introduced without even parliamentary oversight. Yet the change is not without cost and risk. Perhaps most obvious is the tension between the academic norm of openness and commercial imperatives of confidentiality and secrecy, with the attendant risk being that university-produced, publicly funded know