The building has two floors dedicated to undergraduate teaching, and two for research laboratories, a layout that Hough says gives students much more exposure to research. Hough is hoping that many marketable developments will spring from the university's new Life Sciences building, which opened in 2012, funded by $70 million each from the federal and Ontario provincial governments and $15 million of private funds. “Some academics want to be completely independent, others want lots of help,” says Margaret Hough, director of research and international relations in the Faculty of Science. Letting individuals take the lead, or guiding those who are interested, are also strategies at York University in Toronto. The new Life Sciences building at York University in Toronto should yield new innovations. From the Launchpad, start-up companies can progress to the Accelerator Centre, a joint enterprise with the University of Waterloo, where the students can access further expertise, capital and business networks. Since the scheme started in 2011, 62 groups - around 170 students - have been accepted into the programme and 28 start-ups have been founded. “It helps students prepare for when they may start their own company from the innovations that are coming out of their own research.”įor those students who are ready to make the leap from the classroom to real business experience, the university offers the Laurier Launchpad, which mentors students through the process of launching their own company. “We have entrepreneurship across the curriculum,” says Goodrum. In response, the university has developed a highly applied business school, with around 600 students from business and non-business streams currently enrolled in entrepreneurship courses. Goodrum says that when staff at Wilfrid Laurier canvassed leaders of the technology sector in Canada, they consistently spoke highly of the innovation pipeline and praised the creative talent, but acknowledged a lack of business acumen. “What's missing here isn't the science, it's the entrepreneurs,” says Abby Goodrum, vice president for research at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. Industry leaders acknowledge that many scientists lack the expertise and guidance to turn an idea into a business. The MARS heritage building, home to MARS Innovation and its sister organization MARS Discovery District. The challenge is how to bring that research out of the lab and onto the market place. “There is lots of untapped potentially commercializable research here,” says Benjamin Neel, director of the Ontario Cancer Institute, the research arm of the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto. This entrepreneurial story is one of many emerging across Canada, and especially in Ontario province. The inventors are preparing their device, now at the prototype stage, for HIV testing in developing countries, and adapting it to detect other diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis. Dou is now Chief Technical Officer, and in 2013 the company recruited James Fraser - a former Médecins Sans Frontières doctor and co-founder of the medical organisation Dignitas International - as its CEO. CD4+ T cells are the immune cells destroyed during HIV infections, and their concentration is a measure of how urgently an HIV patient needs treatment.Īitchison and Dou wanted to see their innovation put into practice, so they initiated a technology transfer process with the university and founded start-up company ChipCare in 2009. When University of Toronto scientist Stewart Aitchison and his PhD student James Dou developed a portable, hand-held device that analyses CD4+ T cell levels from a single drop of blood, they knew their ‘laboratory on a chip’ had the potential to improve public health. Abby Goodrum, vice president for research at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo What's missing here isn't the science, it's the entrepreneurs.
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