Merchant Scientists

Some have proposed the idea of a return on investment to the public in exchange for the taxpayer-funded research that is the basis for a marketed health product, but the idea hasn’t gained much traction. Others argue the necessity of taking a step back to consider how the products of research benefit individual Canadians. “So much investment has gone into producing new products, and almost none has gone into evaluation of the products, and it’s totally, totally out of balance,” says Patricia Baird, a medical geneticist and the chair of the 1993 Royal Commission on Reproductive Technologies. Canada lacks, for example, any organized system for tracking patients’ experiences with prescription drugs after they are marketed here — a huge gap that was underscored by the 2004 Vioxx scandal. And health technology assessment cannot compete with intensive commercial marketing of products.

Jean Gariépy’s office, on the seventh floor of Princess Margaret Hospital in downtown Toronto, is small and windowless. There are stacks of paper on every surface; it is grant-writing season, he explains, as he clears a spot for his visitor to sit. His lab is just down the hall from his office, and Molecular Templates Inc. is also on the seventh floor of the hospital, where it pays rent on a small laboratory.

It has been more than two years since he made his pitch to Genesys, but neither it nor any other venture capital company has significantly added to the relatively modest $2.5-million investment that launched the company, which has survived through bridge financing. There have been more promising results in animals, but Gariépy says the investment climate in Canada, never good for startups such as his, has deteriorated. Yet he is not discouraged and is now looking offshore for investors.

Gariépy started mti because, he says, “I hate to have an idea and it stays in a journal that is read by not enough people.” Meanwhile, he is resigned to the fact that eventually his company will have to merge or, if a first phase of clinical trials goes well, be purchased by a larger, foreign-owned company. “That is the logical exit for most small Canadian companies, even for larger ones,” he explains. Rocking back and forth in his office chair as he talks, Gariépy says his interest in creating a company is unusual in his department of medical biophysics, which has about 125 faculty but only “three or perhaps four” with entrepreneurial interests. “Most just want to do the science.”