Merchant Scientists

When Bob Hancock began teaching microbiology at the University of British Columbia almost thirty years ago, it was understood that “if you interacted with business, you were sullying science.” But in his role as founding scientific director of the Canadian Bacterial Diseases Network — one of the first of the government-created Networks of Centres of Excellence, which aimed to promote commercialization — he felt obliged to set an example and, in the early 1990s, co-founded Micrologix Biotech, a company built around his and the network’s research. Micrologix sought to prove the effectiveness of a particular peptide for sterilizing catheter insertion sites to prevent infections. The company, later renamed Migenix, eventually licensed the peptides to another company to develop.

In the course of establishing his first company, Hancock discovered that there are some “not tremendously honest people in business” who are quite happy to do well at a company’s expense. “Scientists by and large are not motivated by money,” he says, “and it is very hard for the neophyte to detect the difference between honest and dishonest.” But the experience didn’t discourage him. Hancock is fuelled by his conviction that he is working on one of the most pressing issues in medicine today. “We are in an era of great threat. Infections are still the second-leading cause of death in the world. We had the antibiotic era, but the bugs are fighting back.”

With the support of ubc’s University-Industry Liaison Office, he went on to co-found Inimex Pharmaceuticals, which aims to treat infections by boosting natural immunity. Its lead candidate targets a broad spectrum of life-threatening hospital infections, many caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The company raised $12 million in seed and angel financing and next year plans to proceed toward clinical trials. Like the most prominent of the merchant scientists, Hancock has also excelled at his academic work. Last year, he received the Killam Prize for health sciences, and in 2006 was named Canada’s Health Researcher of the Year by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Between thirty and forty researchers work in his lab at any given time.

While Hancock, now fifty-nine, came from Australia to Canada in the 1970s and stayed, the subsequent decades were relatively lean for Canadian science. Then, in 1997 and 2000, two major initiatives were launched — both funded from government surpluses and outside of parliamentary control but under the responsibility of Industry Canada, and both with fixed terms.

First, the Canada Foundation for Innovation was introduced to help fund new equipment for research scientists. The cfi contributes up to 40 percent of the cost of a piece of equipment, with the balance to be raised by the university or institute from other public or private sources. The program received an initial $3.65 billion in federal funding and has thus far committed a total of $3.8 billion (accrued interest accounts for the higher payout).

Then, in an effort to jump-start Canadian genomic research, Genome Canada was born. To date, it has funnelled more than $700 million into research, with the expectation that projects would be wrapped up over a five- to ten-year period. But Genome Canada requires researchers to raise matching funds from other “partners,” either private or other government sources — a real sticking point. One letter to Science in 2005, signed by forty Canadian scientists, followed by an online petition signed by almost 1,400 scientists, decried the requirement: “In particular,” states the letter, “co-funding is often biased against fundamental research that is far from commercialization and so at odds with the short-term goals of industrial partners.”

Indeed, the partnership model works only for a few scientists, acknowledges Dr. Michael Hayden, a professor of medical genetics at ubc whose research has led him to spin off three companies. Hayden didn’t sign the letter but notes that even he, with his entrepreneurial bent, finds the search for partners a time-consuming strain. “The partnership funding mechanisms have created a lot of stress,” he says, “and, I think, diminished creativity because of that.”

The cfi, Genome Canada, and to a lesser extent the Networks of Centres of Excellence all fall under the auspices of Industry Canada, as does the Canada Research Chair program, introduced in 2000 with $300 million per year to be used for salary support, to attract and retain the best researchers in many fields at universities. Industry Canada is also the architect of the Canadian Biotechnology Strategy, and while agricultural biotechnology has received the most public and critical attention, about 70 percent of all biotech companies in Canada are in the human health sector. Indeed, of the key agencies that fund health-related university research, only the Canadian Institutes for Health Research falls under the responsibility of Health Canada.

The cihr provided $800 million in research funding in 2006–07 and, unlike some of the newer funding bodies, distributes most of its money after peer review. But it, too, sees part of its mandate as being to “encourage innovation, facilitate the commercialization of health research and promote economic development.”