Canada's Best

By Jason Hagerman

Canada can’t match the volume of venture capital and government funding allotted to science in the U.S. But that doesn’t stop scientists and entrepreneurs across the country from making significant contributions to the global biotechnology sector. Here, we reveal the most notable Canadian scientists, biotechs, and technologies from Newfoundland to British Columbia.

Prince Edward Island
Dr. Russell Kerr

"Our lab has been developing a marine natural products bank, a collection of material of value from the marine environment,” says Dr. Russell Kerr, Professor of Chemistry at UPEI and Canada Research Chair in Marine Natural Products.

The bank contains microbes, bacteria and fungi, a sustainable source of bioactive natural products.

“The parent sponge might not be a sustainable source, but we can ferment more of the bacteria or fungus taken from that original source,” says Kerr. “We don’t need to farm that sponge again.”

In March 2011, Nautilus and UK chemical giant Croda were awarded an Atlantic Innovation Fund Grant. The partnership,
with matching funds from Croda, will work to identify and quickly commercialize products from sources like marine mud.

“We’ve known for decades that terrestrial soil is a great source of antibiotics,” says Kerr.

Microbes living in the natural environment generate effective antibiotics to ward off neighbouring bacteria and fungi.

“The marine environment is even more complex than terrestrial soil,” says Kerr. “Marine microbes have to come up with hugely complex defence mechanisms. They must produce antibiotics and antifungals.”

Newfoundland
Dr. Terry-Lynn Young

For decades, families in Newfoundland have recognized that “our men don’t last long.” Men in many families were dying seemingly out of nowhere. In fact, the genetic code passed through these families carried defective genes, genes that caused sudden cardiac death due to lethal arrhythmia.

In 2008, Dr. Terry-Lynn Young, Associate Professor of Genetics at Memorial University, discovered the gene responsible for arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, or ARVC.

“Fifty per cent of the men, with an average age of 43, were dying seemingly out of nowhere.”

Today, Young has the ability to predict who among the family lines associated with the disorder are at risk for ARVC and provide treatment in the event of heart failure. Those at risk are implanted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD.

The ICD fits under the skin on the chest and attaches to the heart via electrical ledes. The device senses the onset of a potentially lethal arrgythmia and shocks the heart back into a normal rhythm.


New Brunswick
Dr. Thierry Chopin

Fish farming, like much of Canada’s agriculture sector, relies largely on monoculture practices. In monoculture, a single crop envelops an entire agricultural plot. Beef farmers raise hordes of cattle, wheat farmers grow acres of wheat, salmon farmers nurture schools of fish.

“If I am only a wheat farmer or corn farmer and it gets too dry or too wet or I get a disease, my whole crop is gone and I could be in trouble,” says Dr. Thierry Chopin, University of New Brunswick physiologist and biochemist.

Diversification, Chopin says, reduces the risk inherent in raising crops and creates a more sustainable agricultural system.

Salmon aquaculture produces significant waste in the form of nitrogen, phosphorous and organic particulate. Small biofilter cartridges capture the waste and fill garbage containers on farm sites.

“In order to become sustainable we have to start looking at waste in a different light,” says Chopin.

Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture simulates a natural ecosystem to create a sustainable fish farm with greater economic value than its monoculture predecessor. New research at Chopin’s lab indicates seaweed can also be used to create a loop-style ecosystem. The aquaculture industry increasingly looks to land-plant protein to feed fish.

“Seaweed does not competing with the corn and soy markets, it doesn’t cause deforestation, the ocean doesn’t need irrigation and I don’t need fertilizer because the fish do the fertilizing,” says Chopin.

Chopin’s team is modifying a seaweed-based feed formulation that could provide the nutrition required to raise aquaculture. If successful, fish waste will feed seaweed, and seaweed will feed fish.


Quebec
Dr. Howard Bergman

Due largely to the efforts of Dr. Howard Bergman, Vice-President of Scientific Affairs at the Fonds de la recherché en sante du Quebec, the Quebec government announced a provincial personalized health care initiative with a five-year investment of $20 million.

Personalized health care represents a diversion from the established practice of medicine. Trial and error therapies are replaced with targeted treatments based on knowledge of patients and their genetic profiles as well as environmental factors, behaviours and medical histories.

The initiative was shaped by consultations involving more than global 140 leaders in the health and related sectors.

“This strategy is one of the initiatives planned by the FRSQ and all sectors of the agency’s research community, from fundamental work to service management and translational, clinical and social research, are therefore invited to take part. The support announced as part of the provincial budget renews health research funding mechanisms beyond institutional and sectoral boundaries,” says Bergman.


Nova Scotia
Dr. Jason Berman

Jason Berman received the Cancer Care Nova Scotia Peggy Davison Clinician

Scientist Award, securing grant funding of $100,000 per year for three years to build cancer knowledge. Berman studies white blood cell development, mast cell biology, leukemia and solid tumours using the zebrafish model.

Berman plans to develop accelerated screening methods for patient-specific cancer therapies using zebrafish, which share genetic information in the area of 80-90 per cent with humans.

“Down the road, we hope to use the fish model in real time,” says Berman. “We will take a tumour tissue sample from a patient undergoing treatment and inject those cells taken from a biopsy into the fish. We will then treat the fish containing the patient’s tumour with drugs. We will see the response to different therapies and use that response to help gauge whether we should go forward with a treatment or not. That would be technically challenging and costly to do in a traditional mouse system. In a fish, however, it’s cost effective and easier to do and may give us insight into tumour drug sensitivity.”

Berman is the MSC Clinician Scientist in Pediatric Oncology. His work continues at the IWK Health Centre and Dalhousie Medical School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.


Ontario
YM Bioscience

Canadian biotech companies need to look beyond Canada’s borders if they want to thrive in an increasingly global industry, according to Dr. Nick Glover, President and CEO of Ontario-based YM Biosciences.

“I’m proud of our Canadian heritage and I don’t see why we can’t be a globally active and recognized Canadian company,” says Glover. “We have operating subsidiaries in Australia, we have a U.S. subsidiary, we have a scientist working in London, we have a joint venture in Cuba and we have partnerships in Japan and Southeast Asia. We’re playing the global development game and I don’t see why we can’t fly the Canadian flag while we do that.”

In 2010, YM acquired Cytopia Limited, an Australian biotech with the rights to two cancer targets called JAKs, CYT387 and CYT997. “JAK is a new target on the block,” says James Smith, Vice-President of Corporate Communications. “It’s a signal from the outside to the inside of most cells. If you can pick up information on immune signals and affect the signal sent around the cell, you can affect cancer.”

Following YM’s acquisition of Cytopia, investor interest, primarily from institutional investors in the U.S., skyrocketed.

Currently, YM boasts a market cap value of around $300 million and was named Life Sciences Ontario’s Emerging Company of the Year in 2011.

“We feel this is recognition of us emerging as a global company,” says Glover. “We’ve been resilient and survived through successes and letdowns. We’ve also been pragmatic about raising capital and we see that when you’re operating in a global industry like biotech, you can reach out to the global community without leaving your foundation behind.”


Manitoba
Dr. Grant Pierce

Peripheral Arterial Disease is a disease in which arteries throughout the body are clogged by plaque, calcium or cholesterol. It occurs frequently in aging populations and in tandem with coronary artery disease. Most of the damage happens before a patient is diagnosed.

In March, Dr. Grant Pierce, executive director of research at St. Boniface General Hospital, concluded a two-year, $2 million study into new therapies for Peripheral Arterial Disease patients.

The study followed 250 patients suffering from Peripheral Arterial Disease as they consumed three tablespoons of ground flax daily. Based on animal data, Pierce believes flaxseed can alleviate pain associated with the disease and avert abnormal heart function that could lead to stroke or heart attacks.

By September, about six months after human trials concluded, Pierce hopes to have tangible data showing the effect of flax on human patients.

If successful, the test bodes well for Canada’s flaxseed growers. About 80 per cent of the world’s flaxseed supply comes from Western Canada.

Pierce returned to Canada from a successful post-doc career at the University of California, Los Angeles with an agenda.

“You want to contribute to your home,” says Pierce.

Pierce’s study holds the potential to contribute to human health and economic prosperity in Canada.


Saskatchewan
Canadian Light Source

When the NRU reactor at Chalk River shut down, Canada experienced a drawn out shortage of isotopes. In 2010, the Canadian Government announced a $35 million plan to explore alternative methods of isotope production. The Canadian Light Source, located at the University of Saskatchewan, led the charge with a proposal to develop an isotope production program using an electron linear accelerator.

The Canadian Light Source is one of the largest science projects in Canada. With a price tag of $174 million and five years of construction, it made Canada one of only 15 countries using synchrotron science to investigate matter.

The process uses photoneutron reaction to create isotopes. A linear accelerator propely electrons to nearly the speed of light and collides them with a metal filter, producing x-rays. The x-rays irradiate a target made of molybdenum-100, with each of the the X-rays removing a single neutron from atoms in the metal, making molybdenum-99. The molybdenum target containing both toe –100 and –99 is dissolved in a liquid and shipped to hospitals, and the molybdenum-99 decays to technetium-99m, the isotope useful in medical imaging. Once the molybdenum –99 is removed, the molybdenum-100 is recovered and recycled into additional targets.

The process produces no nuclear waste and limits the amount of isotope lost to decay during transport.


Alberta
Oncolytics and Dr. Matt Coffee

Starting as early as 2013, Calgary-based Oncolytics Biotech Inc. wants to treat cancer with a virus.

Reolysin is the company’s formulation of the human reovirus. The virus is believed to inhabit the respiratory and bowel systems in humans and is found naturally in sewage and water supplies. By age 12, half of all children show evidence of exposure CANADAand almost all people show signs of exposure by adulthood.

During research at the University of Calgary, Dr. Matt Coffee, Chief Scientific Officer at Oncolytics, discovered the virus reproduces particularly well in various cancer cell lines.

Reolysin replicates well in tumour cells bearing an activated Ras pathway, a mutation that may play a role in more than two thirds of all human cancers.

The drug is in human clinical trials alone, as well as in conjunction with chemotherapy and radiation. The company hopes to start clinical trials in as many as 11 countries in the coming months.


British Columbia
Dr. Michael Hayden

Using genetic markers from rare patients with natural insensitivity to pain, Dr. Michael Hayden, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and Director of the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the Child & Family Research Institute, developed a therapy to induce insensitivity to pain without the addictive side effects of morphine.

“We recognized early that if we can understand why these patients feel no pain, we may have a new pain treatment for the rest of the population,” says Hayden. “These patients were shown to have a loss of function in a particular gene. So if we caused loss of function in humans with a drug, we could treat pain. Right now we have phase-two clinical data that is very promising.”

Hayden believes the drug development process is flawed, evidenced by substantial drug failures as late as stage-three.

“There’s not sufficient validation of the target to prove that moderation of a target by a certain drug will solve the problem,” he says.

Hayden employs genetic and genomic technologies to validate patient targets before moving a therapy into trials.