Research and Innovation : Innovation + Job News

While solar cells are becoming more common across North America, we are far from making the most of this green energy source. One challenge is increasing the number of people who choose solar over other energy sources; the other is that the solar cells most commonly in use come with several significant problems.

The dominant kind of solar cell right now is silicon, which itself is quite difficult to manufacture and relatively expensive to produce. Moreover, the solar cells which result are more fragile than the industry would like: they can be shattered by something like a severe hail storm, which limits their appeal and use. 

Among solar researchers, therefore, the big goal right now is to come up with something that is easier and cheaper to produce, and also more durable. One such candidate is what's called a colloidal quantum dot solar cell, which meets those goals—but comes with its own liability, At its current early stage of development, CQD cells are much less efficient than silicon solar cells.

Recently, however, researchers at the University of Toronto and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have made a breakthrough on that front, setting a record for producing the most efficient CQD cell ever.

Solar cells need to reach about 10 to 15 per cent efficiency in order to be commercially viable. As recently as 10 months ago CDQ cells were at about five per cent efficiency; now researchers, under the leadership of U of T engineering professor Ted Sargeant, have hit the 7 per cent mark—a 37 per cent increase in efficiency, and an important step along the way to make these much cheaper cells ready for the market. The results were published in the July 29, 2012 issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Liam Mitchell, Communications & Media Relations Strategist, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, University of Toronto

The GTA has always had investors ready to put their money behind local startups, but that community has never been more organized, more communicative, or more active, says Bryan J. Watson, executive director of the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO).

NACO recently released the results of a national survey it conducted to assess the level of activity among angel investors in Canada; they found that a whopping 80 per cent of all investments made in 2011 across the country were made in Ontario, with a large percentage of that activity taking place in the Toronto region. (NACO won't provide city-by-city breakdowns due to privacy concerns; the value of some specific deals might be identifiable if they did so.)

This is a marked increase over 2010, when 62 per cent of investments were made in Ontario.

"The biggest difference," Watson says, "is that the GTA [investment] community is much more organized say four years ago—even a year ago." It's only in the last year that angel investment "has gone from an activity that was one promoted... to one that started to occur naturally." (The full study results are available online [PDF].)

The most attractive area for investment, unsurprisingly, is in the information and communications technology sector, which Watson says continues to be "pretty hot." Following on Ontario's green energy push there is "still a lot of interest in clean tech—often with enabling technology, often with a little bit of web and control systems."

The technological theme emerged again in the third sector Watson cited as being attractive for those looking to invest GTA startups: medical technology: "Specficially the devices and diagnostics side of things." Toronto investors are also expressing "a lot of interest in web-enabled technology or big data tecnology—using online infrastructure and analytics" to develop new tools and platforms.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Bryan J. Watson, Executive Director, National Angel Capital Organization

For the first time in history, more people throughout the globe and in Canada live in cities than in rural areas. Cities are becoming more prominent in policy discussions, in setting environmental standards and in shaping the day-to-day lives of their billions of inhabitants. Cities, for their part, are still learning how best to cope with these demographic shifts.

Helping us to understand how cities work, and to explore the innovations which might make them work better, is a new institute that will open this fall at the University of Toronto.

The idea for the cross-disciplinary Global Cities Institute started about six months ago, says newly appointed director Patricia McCarney. The institute will be housed in a new campus building that includes a state-of-the-art visualization theatre, and the anchor activity will be work surrounding the Global City Indicators Facility (GCIF), which was created in 2009. GCIF's goal is to create a standardized "authoritative compilation of validated, self-reported, worldwide urban data"—information which allows researchers to compare cities across a large number of metrics. Until GCIF, says McCarney, "there [was] no common platform for cities to have a set of indicators." GCIF was originally funded by the World Bank (which chose Toronto to be the home of this indicators work) and has grown rapidly; it now has 200 cities belonging to it worldwide.

With that growth, McCarney says, came the need to process the growing cache of data: "We decided that we were at a turning point—we started to think about visualization of the data, to build analytics around the data and to start to think about how to build research into the university and to start to think about how to improve city mangement and city governance." And so the Global Cities Institute was born.

Governance doesn't just mean governments: McCarney sees international agencies, banks "and increasingly also industry partners" as playing a role in the cities of the future.

As for its location in Toronto, McCarney says:  "I work in cities around the world and they always look to Toronto as a successful city, they always look to Toronto as a demonstration of what is good in cities. Despite [the fact] that people complain—that we're slow, or whatever—we're still seen as having one of the best quality of life, high efficiency in services, creative talent, innovation. We're a great place to have an innovation."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Patricia McCarney, Director, Global Cities Institute

Several years ago the Ontario government began noticing a trend: major clinical trials were being conducted here less frequently. Pharmaceutical companies, it turned out, were increasingly choosing to run trials in developing nations, where costs are lower.

Clinical Trials Ontario is a new organization that hopes to combat that trend and attract major clinical trials back to Ontario. The nonprofit, which is right now fully funded by the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, wants to make us more competitive again, by making the most of our key advantage: the quality of our research and clinical practices.

"We are not going to compete with emerging economies on an absolute cost levels," says CTO executive director Ronald Heslegrave, "but we do have the support clinically… Quality is as important or more important than cost itself. If you fail on the quality side, the regulators will never approve your product anyways."

CTO's first step will be to streamline the regulatory hurdles that can make it onerous for pharmaceutical companies who need to conduct large-scale trials. Currently, if you want to run a trial with a large population distributed across multiple sites, for instance, you need to get separate sign-off for your trial procedures according to the approval process of each of those sites. Twenty sites? Twenty approval processes. This, says Heslegrave, is unnecessary. "We can devise a centralized approval process which maintains the highest standards in trial protocols, but make the process more efficient and easier to navigate." (Ontario instituted a centralized review system for cancer trials several years ago; CTO hopes to expand that centralized approach to cover other disease areas.)

If Ontario does see an increase in clinical trials, Heslegrave says, there are two key benefits that follow. One is that "we need clinical trials for the health of Ontarians—this provides access to investigational drugs prior to them being approved on the market." The other is a job creation spin-off. "If the trials are conducted here... they are more likely to be analyzed here as well." In other words, our biomedical research sector would grow to provide support for the trials.

CTO's board includes pharmaceutical industry representatives as well as academics and business experts. Collectively, they hope, they can make the case that cost shouldn't be the determining factor in where clinical trials are conducted.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Ronald Heslegrave, Executive Director, Clinical Trials Ontario

Co-location has, in recent years, become increasingly prevalent in the small business and non-profit sectors. It's a useful alternative for enterprises that are smaller or just starting out. Pooling costs for essentials like office space and phone service helps keep overhead costs down, not to mention cutting down the time time spent managing infrastructure and logistics.

Stepping into the co-location world is consulting firm Ideacia ONE Inc., which has just launched a space specifically geared to innovative businesses. The 3,000-square-foot facility is located in Markham, in an office tower at Woodbine and Steeles; they are currently accepting applications from prospective tenants.

Ideacia's aim, says co-founder Jennifer Powers, is to create a middle ground between "typical business centres where you can rent space, [but] if you walk through the aisles everyone has their door closed" on the one hand, and intervention-oriented government incubators on the other. Ideacia's Innovation Centre, if things go according to plan, will "bring [a] diverse group together into an environment that's very open… that will really encourage them to share ideas and support each other in their growth."

Powers says prospective tenants will be screened to ensure than none are in direct competition with each other. The founders hope tenants will eventually develop business relationships with each other as an organic outcome of sharing physical space.

Ideacia's current roster of clients—about 150 in total—ranges from companies that have worked with NASA to smaller entrepreneurs who want help streamlining their day-to-day operations. On this effort, Ideacia is specifically seeking technological enterprises and other small businesses that provide relevant support services.

As for the "innovation" in "Innovation Centre," Powers emphasizes that it's important not to invest the word with some sort of mythic weight. Innovation, she says, "doesn't necessarily have to be incredibly earth-shattering. People can absolutely use innovation in every sector, every business—it's really a mind-shift."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Jennifer Powers, Principal and Co-Founder, Ideacia ONE Inc.

The Hospital for Sick Children opened its new Centre for Genetic Medicine six months ago—quietly, and without much fanfare.

They had a good reason to wait: Sick Kids has just announced that it will be the first hospital in Canada to install cutting-edge genome sequencers, ones that will allow them to sequence a patient's full genome "in a couple of hours, for a thousand dollars."

It's the kind of advancement in medical technology we last saw when MRIs became common, and researchers hope it will usher in a new era in pediatric medicine.

One feature that's distinctive of pediatric patients: a much higher proportion of them are being treated for chronic illnesses compared to the adult hospital populations.

"70 per cent of the patients at Sick Kids come in with chronic disorders that have some kind of genetic component to them," says centre co-director Dr. Steve Scherer. Because such a high percentage of Sick Kids' patients are ill at least in part due to genetic factors, genomic sequencing has the potential to be especially beneficial in a pediatric setting—it is there that genetic research may have its greatest impact.

The long-term goal, Scherer says, is "to sequence the genomes of all of the children who come in the hospital."

That's up to 10,000 genomes a year, once things are fully up to speed. For the first year, the sequencers, supplied by Life Technologies Corporation, will be used in clinical research testing, covering maybe 1,000 patients. The hospital will then incrementally cover more and more of its patients. They are also hiring clinical geneticists, counsellors and other support staff (such as computer scientists with a background in biology or medicine) to manage the large influx of new information they will be processing.

"In a way it's a big experiment," Scherer says. The hospital will inevitably learn as it goes—as, hopefully, will the researchers who have a massive new influx of information to help them provide individualized medical care.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Dr. Steve Scherer, Co-Director, Centre for Genetic Medicine

Increasing the amount of energy we get from renewable sources—an aspiration that was once the province of idealists—has become a much more common goal in recent years, one trotted out by politicians of many different partisan stripes. But as the pressure to move to sustainable energy grows, so too do the technical challenges in implementing the needed new technologies effectively, and on a large scale.

One of these challenges: because renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, are less consistent and predictable than their traditional counterparts, energy companies are reluctant to rely on them for a significant percentage of their power. How do you manage on a cloudy day or a still one, if you need constant source of power to keep the grid up and running?

Hoping to help solve this is Prolucid Technologies, a Mississauga software engineering firm that has just received nearly $900,000 in funding from Ontario's Smart Grid Fund. That money will support a two-year demonstration project in which the company will install its power grid management platform, including both hardware and software, at Exhibition Place.

"The goal," says company president Bob Leigh, "is to monitor the state of the local grid, keeping tabs on both the amount of energy being used as well as the amount being produced by the various local power producers—solar panels, wind turbines, or other."

This effort will help combat the problem power companies face with managing the more erratic renewable energy sources.

"By actively monitoring the system and having the ability to control its various components on the fly, we hope to increase the amount of renewable generation that can be connected to the local grid beyond the current low limits," says Leigh. Exhibition Place, he explains, makes the perfect testing ground because it already has a mix of energy sources on-site, most famously, it's large wind turbine.

Prolucid currently has nine staff members, and will double in size to manage this new project: they are currently hiring for five positions, and expect to hire for an additional three later this year, when the demonstration period begins. They have also announced the creation of a new offshoot, Prolucid LocalGrid Technologies Inc., which will work on bringing the company's technology to market.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Bob Leigh, President, Prolucid Technologies Inc.

The Ontario Brain Institute was founded in 2010 to foster collaboration among brain researchers, and develop relationships between those researchers and industry partners who can bring innovations to market.

Helping the institute make good on that goal is the federal government, which recently announced an $11-million investment in OBI. The money will aid the commercialization of 14 separate projects, devices and therapies, and is bolstered by an additional $11 million in private investments OBI has already raised.

A sampling of the projects that will supported by the funding:

- A study of the potential benefits of deep brain stimulation in the treatment of Alzheimer's, led by Dr. Andres Lozano of Toronto Western Hospital
-  A clinical trial of a "site-specific and sustained release-microparticle technology platform" that can deliver drugs directly to the brain, a collaboration between Dr. Robert and Edge Therapeutics Inc.
- Bringing Smarter Kids, a learning tool for pre-school children, online through a variety of virtual platforms, a project coordinated by Dr. Sylvain Moreno (Baycrest Centre for Brain Fitness) and Cookie Jar Entertainment

A total of 28 partners are involved in the projects supported by this funding, including both nonprofits, local private companies and five multi-national corporations.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Michele-Jamali Paquette, FedDev Ontario

Ontario has been making a concerted effort to develop its clean energy sector for a number of years. Now a new venture will help that sector take its innovations around the world. This month the provincial government, in partnership with MaRS Discovery District, announced the creation of the Clean Energy Institute.

"The overall goal," says Jonathan Dogterom, the practice lead for cleantech at MaRS, "is to be able to put a bit more of an economic development focus on energy technology."

Which is to say: the institute's key objective will be to help the community of clean energy innovators that has started to cluster here by creating new export opportunities that will allow them to expand their businesses in foreign markets.

"Energy represents a huge market around the world," Dogterom says, "and we have some of the best innovations in energy technology."

We don't, as of yet, have the international presence to match.

The project is still in the very early stages of development. MaRS and the Ontario government will be reaching out to industry stakeholders in coming months to get input into the project; they also expect to add some private partners as the Clean Energy Institute takes more concrete shape. Their immediate goal: develop a detailed plan for setting up the institute over the course of a year.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Jonathan Dogterom, Practice Lead (Cleantech), MaRS

While stem cell research garners a lot of buzz, the science of taking developing effective therapies from research is still very new.

Hoping to make contributions in this area is Bay Street-based biotech company Actium Research Inc., which has just entered into an agreement with McMaster University to take some of the research being conducted there and use to it bring new cancer drugs to market. While we're used to thinking of stem cells as they pertain to healthy cells in humans and other animals, it turns out the stem cells in this case are cancer stem cells.

A tumour is not made up of just one kind of cell, says Actium president Helen Findlay. In addition to the rapidly multiplying normal tumour cells are cancer stem cells, which "can escape from many forms of treatment and they are the ones that are responsible for cancer recurring or spreading."

Dr. Mick Bhatia, scientific director of McMaster's Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute, has found a way to grow cancer stem cells and also to do research with normal, adult human stem cells (rather than working, as many researchers do, with embryo or animal stem cell sources). Bhatia's work involves screening both kinds of stem cells against a library of drugs and therapies, to see which target the cancer stem cells, and which might help repair damaged tissue.

For its part, Actium will be working on the development process that will allow drugs—both newly developed ones and existing therapies which have not previously been used in cancer treatment but are found to be effective with this research—to pass through the regulatory process and come to market. Actium will be hiring in a number of areas. Findlay says they "need people with skill sets that do things like look at drug manufacturing, clinical research, designing studies" as it works to raise initial funding.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Helen Findlay, President and Chief Operating Officer, Actium

At the intersection of increasing health care costs and growing public comfort with medical information lies Mihealth Global Systems Inc., a company founded on the idea that if patients had quicker, easier ways to communicate with their physicians everyone would benefit. Mihealth provides a secure web portal through which patients can access their medical records, and a smartphone app which lets patients take that information with them wherever they go.

Last week Mihealth announced a new partnership with American company Preventice to expand those digital services. The technology the companies will be implementing falls into the category of body telemetry, a growing category of medical service which allows physicians to keep watch on patients from a distance.

Typically, body telemetry mechanisms have tended to be cumbersome (keeping users from bathing, for instance), but this new one will make the process vastly less burdensome, says Mihealth founder Dr. Wendy Graham.

Graham says it will consist of a "disposable patch the size of a Band-Aid, and a tiny sensor," which will transit information via Bluetooth. Physicians will be able to monitor blood pressure, heart rate and respiration; a later iteration of the device will provide for motion sensors as well, to check sleep patterns and ensure patients are appropriately active.

Like any new medical device, this one will need to make its way through the standard regulatory and approvals processes; Graham hopes that Ontario residents will have access to it within a year. It's a way of saving the health care system money, she points out, by allowing faster, easier patient monitoring, in addition to providing patients with greater freedom.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Wendy Graham, Founder and CEO, Mihealth

Sunnybrook Research Institute, along with Western University and 19 private sector partners, is the beneficiary of nearly $7 million in funding awarded recently by the federal government's Economic Development Agency (known as FedDev). The money will go to developing four imaging technologies Sunnybrook has been working on, and will help accelerate plans to bring those technologies to market.

The medical imaging tools in question have a range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications in the treatment of cancer, strokes and heart disease, and specifically will help facilitate the use of non-invasive treatment methods. These include ultrasound surgery to target and destroy tumours, early monitoring of the effectiveness of chemotherapy, and using magnetic resonance imaging to guide surgeons as they unblock arteries.

In awarding the grant, local MP John Carmichael says the government hopes to help "develop new technologies that will increase the competitiveness of the medical imaging industry in Canada, help diversify our economy, and create high-value jobs."

These tools will also help provide more efficient and in many cases more comfortable health care, increasing the number of procedures that can be done on an out-patient basis and speeding up recovery times. The funding will provide both research and business support as the partners work towards the commercialization of these technologies.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: John Carmichael, MP, Don Valley West

Way back in 1995, the company that would become Destiny Solutions was founded as Destiny Web Designs, putting the best practices of the then emerging World Wide Web to work for Toronto business clients.

"One of our clients was the University of Toronto's continuing education department. We built out their site in the late 1990s and realized there was a huge opportunity in creating applications for this new market in higher education," says senior vice president Jonathan Tice. The needs of continuing education departments are different than those of traditional "tuition cohort" models, and new administrative tools were needed to help grow the potential of those departments. 

He says that U of T was the first university in North America to put its systems fully online in 2001, and the reputation the school's then-president, Mary Cone Berry, had as an innovator gave the newly born Destiny Solutions a great advantage. "That relationship made it easy to make Stanford our second client."

Eleven years later, the Yonge and Eglinton-based company is the leader in providing specific administrative solutions for non-traditional learning departments at some of North America's biggest and most prestigious schools, including Georgetown, Duke, Penn State, Stanford and University of Toronto. It's a market that has begun to rapidly transform education itself. Tice cites US education department executive Richard Culatta's impression that "this is education's Internet moment."

"We're growing quite quickly," says Tice. Currently at 40 employees, the company is hiring for nine positions now. Tice says they've been growing their staff at a rate of about 25 per cent per year—revenue growth has significantly outpaced that. "We really can't hire fast enough, but we're very specific about who we hire. We serve clients who are the best in the world, and we're really looking for A-players."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Jonathan Tice, Senior Vice President, Destiny Solutions

Toronto entrepreneur Katherine Hague has been involved with startups since she was a teenager. Last year, she designed a theme for the celebrated Ottawa online retail startup Shopify, and then wanted to sell some T-shirts of her own in a Shopify store.

"I realized it would look pretty silly in a storefront, with just one product," she says. The cost, hassle and time involved in setting up an online shop for a single product—in order to achieve the level of professionalism she wanted to project—convinced her she needed an alternative. Looking around at the options for ultra-small-scale vendors, mostly eBay and Craigslist, convinced her she'd need to create that alternative. Shoplocket was born.

"We wanted to make it as easy for people who had something they wanted to sell as it is to post a video or a photo," she says. "The challenge for us was knowing what to leave out, so it would be optimized for the majority of users who need the service." Those users include people who don't want to learn any code or to design and maintain a storefront. They just need a way to sell things that looks professional and is easy and quick.

Working out of the Extreme Startups accelerator at Yonge and King, Hague and her partner Andrew Louis officially launched Shoplocket in open beta late last month. Hague says they have attracted 4,000 users in those few weeks, and have hired a Canadian manager and brought on two co-op students. Hague expects Shoplocket will close a funding round sometime this summer.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Katherine Hague, CEO, Shoplocket

Two years ago, Yonge Street reported on a $27.9-million expansion planned by Therapure Biopharma of its biomanufacturing facility in Mississauga. Late last month, that facility officially opened to pursue research and manufacturing of protein-based bioproducts to meet global demand to treat infectious diseases.

The facility was completed with the help of a $4.2-million grant from the provincial ministry of Economic Development and Innovation. "Ontario's support for Therapure has built upon our strengths in research and manufacturing to help its global clients bring new, innovative medical treatments to patients," said Minister Brad Duguid in a statement.

The company expects the new capacity will double its staff over the next two years to about 200. The company has long been on a growth trajectory: from 13 employees in 2007 to 100 today. "Therapure is thrilled to officially celebrate the opening of its additional Custom Biologics Manufacturing Wing, which will enhance the company's ability to be an international leader in biomanufacturing and meet the needs of a growing market," said company president and CEO Nick Green in the announcement.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Office of the Minister of Economic Development and Innovation Brad Duguid; Thomas Wellner, former president and CEO, Therapure Biopharma Inc.