Toronto Rising

 
Last week's issue of Nature has an interesting article on biomedical research in Toronto [Toronto Rising].

The area around my building contains one of the densest populations of researchers in the world. The problem is that hardly anyone knows about it. Toronto isn't on everyone's radar in spite of the fact that there's a lot of high quality work being done.

Most of this basic research is concentrated in Toronto's city centre. Within two kilometres of the intersection of University Avenue and College Street, on the University of Toronto campus, there are nine research hospitals, roughly 5,000 principal investigators, and research budgets totalling about Can$1 billion (US$990 million) a year. Since 2005, 93,000 square metres of research space have been added in this zone, with twice as much more planned.

The main research engine is the University of Toronto, along with its affiliated research hospitals, including the Hospital for Sick Children, St Michael's, Sunnybrook and Mt Sinai. Also downtown is the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which employs 100 research scientists and is building an 110,000-square-metre site at the cost of Can$380 million.

There are problems with having so many labs—too many seminars! There's also a lot of internal competition for the best young scientists. (5000 P.I.s is a bit of an exaggeration. I think it's more like 1000.)

Where Toronto has had less success so far is in commercializing its academic research. Ontario has more biotechnology companies than any US state with the exception of Massachusetts and California. But judged against the amount spent on basic research in Toronto, the region generates only about half the commercialization opportunities it should, compared with successful biotech clusters such as Boston, says David Shindler, executive director of Biodiscovery Toronto, an organization that commercializes research.

"When you look at University Avenue and the billion dollars spent there annually, you're sort of saying, why aren't we the size of San Diego? Where are all the companies?" says Grant Tipler, chair of the Biotechnology Initiative, a non-profit organization committed to promoting the growth of biotechnology in Toronto and the surrounding region. He says there are a number of reasons Toronto has lagged — a research culture that values basic research more than entrepreneurship; lack of government funding for applied research; and a shortage of venture capital for early stage companies.

Since when did putting more emphasis on basic research become a bad thing?

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