At the Cutting Edge of the World

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BY DEBORAH KOMLOS

Canadian biotechnology shone internationally in late January with representation by Mississauga, Ont.-based MDS Proteomics Inc. at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum.

Held over six days in Davos, Switzerland, the forum assembled close to 2,500 participants from 102 countries under the theme “Building Trust,” and incorporated five main discussion themes: corporate challenges, global economy, global governance, security and geopolitics, and trust and values. These themes were covered among 270 sessions, and included presentation of the forum’s Technology Pioneers (TPs) Program, which originated three years ago in partnership with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

The forum defines TPs as “chief executives of companies that develop and apply the most innovative and transformational technologies.” Up to 100 TPs are chosen annually, and since the program’s inception, five Canadian firms have received the TP accolade, says Sohini Chowdhury, community manager of the program. This total now includes Frank Gleeson, president and CEO of drug-discovery firm MDS Proteomics Inc. (MDSP), who was selected as the sole Canadian TP among the total of 40 named for 2003.

Contributing to the TP recognition is MDSP’s unique proprietary proteomics technology based on expertise in the functional analysis of proteins, as well as the firm’s several active research collaborations underway. A recent accomplishment was serving as the proteomics partner for the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (Cambridge, MA) in identifying a gene that causes the fatal inherited disorder, Leigh Syndrome, French Canadian type (LSFC).

“It was pretty powerful, pretty mind-blowing actually,” Gleeson says of the forum. “In many ways, the most interesting thing to me about the forum is the level of thought. It’s an extremely thought-provoking environment.”

The audience, the panelists and the presenters were all extremely accomplished people and very stimulating, Gleeson says. In hearing the speeches, including that of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, and several Middle East leaders such as His Majesty King Abdullah II Ibn Al-Hussein of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Gleeson says he gained an appreciation for how intelligent such world leaders are.

For instance, he says, Powell came across as a very articulate individual who has human compassion but can also be tough. “You sit and listen to him being challenged in an open forum by the head of Amnesty International, by major European leaders and major European business people.”

In this regard, “to rub shoulders with people who are massively accomplished in various fields and have to deal with issues that are far more weighty than any issues I have to deal with,” was a humbling aspect of the forum, he says.

Biotech and Benevolence

The conference also fed one of the goals that originally motivated Gleeson to join MDSP and help build the company: to improve the world.

“One of the most powerful aspects of being involved in biotechnology, in being involved in proteomics, and in being involved in therapeutic development, is the potential to do something to improve the human condition, to improve human health,” Gleeson says. “If anything, a forum like the World Economic Forum really reinforces just how valuable that mission is and how important that mission is, and sometimes you lose sight of that in your day-to-day activities.”

Gleeson says his initial reaction to having been selected as a TP was that he wanted to learn more about the program. He says he discovered that the forum’s intent to acknowledge technologies, companies and individuals that have been instrumental in creating innovative platforms — ones that can change the world — coincided quite nicely with MDSP’s mission. Gleeson defines his firm’s goal as one “to create an enabling technology, an enabling capability that can revolutionize the industry, and improve human health as a direct consequence of that.”

Thus, upon really understanding the program, “I actually became quite a bit honoured that we were selected, that we were recognized,” Gleeson says.

A subsidiary of MDS Inc., MDSP originated formally in 2001 as the product of two collaborations, explains the company’s CSO, Mike Moran, PhD. One partnership was between MDSP’s sibling company, MDS Sciex, and a group of researchers based at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, including internationally renowned scientist Tony Pawson, PhD. This arrangement involved applying MDS Sciex’s mass spectrometry technology and some of its innovations to studying proteins. Another similar arrangement was between the sibling firm and European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, led by Matthias Mann, PhD.

Novel Directions

Using a unique mass spectrometry approach, the teams set out to understand how drugs affect cells and phosphorylation, which, “we believe, is probably one of the best read-outs of what’s happening physiologically in cells and tissue,” Moran says.

MDSP currently has four facilities, the largest of which is in Toronto, and Moran says the company’s focus has been on concentrating its efforts into proteomics, to address the needs of the pharmaceutical industry.

Through one of its first and founding industrial partners, IBM, Moran says the firm was able to establish a backbone to handle the massive data influx generated via their analyses. “So we have this infrastructure in this supercluster computer that allows us to analyse vast amounts of raw protein-sequence information, relate that to the whole world of genomics information that’s out there, and then try to make biological conclusions,” he says.

Concerning MDSP’s recent distinction at the forum, “I think it’s something that reflects really well on Canada in terms of its ability to really translate basic science borne out of the whole academic infrastructure and to commercialize that, and to support that into a really competitive industrial effort on an international scale,” Moran says. “We’re just one example of that. But Canada has a really strong foundation in many of the sciences that we rely on — the biology side, the analytical-chemistry side, the mass-spectrometry side,” he says. “So we felt all along that we were in a strong position in bringing all that together into an integrated platform.”

Selecting the TPs is the task of an external Selection Advisory Committee, which this year had 21 members, Chowdhury says. The members came from around the globe, covering a range of sectors, with representatives from member and partner companies of the forum, executives specialized in the selection categories (biotechnology/health, IT, energy and environmental technologies, and new business models), and media and academia with interests in technology.

The process works, she explains, by gathering the pool of candidates through nominations from a variety of sources, initially from the advisory committee, and assessing how the firms fit the selection criteria, which include: innovation, growth and sustainability, proof of concept, leadership, potential impact and status.

Among the criteria, this year’s forum gave more weight to innovation and potential impact, Chowdhury says. “We were really interested in companies that have a potential to really transform either the way business operates or the way society in some way operates.”

Deciphering the Hype

Chowdhury says that with the abundance of discussions regarding biotechnology through the media and elsewhere about what the field can and cannot do, there is quite a bit of misunderstanding about what it entails. “We wanted to focus on companies that are really doing something that makes an impact, and exploring the discrepancies between the hype and the reality of a lot of these technologies,” she says.

Having the overarching forum theme of “Building Trust” did not necessarily fall into the biotechnology bid, Chowdhury says. However, there were a number of sessions that centred on significant relevant topics, such as understanding the implications of nanotechnology and of designer drugs. “We were trying to make it clear because there is a lot of hype and a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about these technologies,” she says.

In her estimation, the forum was very successful, Chowdhury says, because it showed that people are interested in technology. The bursting of the dot-com bubble has not meant the end of that interest, “although they’re probably more wary and they’re a bit more cynical about what the effects are, how long things will last,” she says. “But I thought there was a lot of curiosity, which I think always bodes well.”

For Gleeson, the fact that MDSP was the sole Canadian TP firm chosen was of particular significance and a sign of success regarding biotechnology. Many of the other companies came from the U.S., with one or a few from each of Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. “So I felt that in many ways that being there I was representing not just MDS Proteomics, but also science in Canada,” he says.

Canadians’ thinking can at times be somewhat limited, Gleeson believes, and they wonder why people are not recognizing them for being Canadian. The forum brought the advantage, he says, of honouring internationalism. “Being there in a forum in which technologies that have the potential to change the world were being recognized is very powerful,” Gleeson says. “And the fact that that (MDSP’s work) has come from Canadian science, I think that’s the real message, that it’s come from Canadian ingenuity.”

A Fundamental Framework

Also particularly beneficial was exploring the theme of trust, which Gleeson says is of utmost importance in the realm of technology.

“Trying to make a new technology work requires many disciplines to come together, many disciplines to work together, and that can only be done by bringing people together and creating teams, and teams only work if they trust each other,” he says. Such functional and healthy relations are also pivotal when moving to the macroscale-level of drug development, he adds, which is built in part on checks and balances but also in a large part on trust.

“If we were to develop drugs that have flaws in them and if we were to put them into humans, that wouldn’t be a very good thing,” Gleeson says. “So, there’s a massive amount of trust that’s built through the whole system, that people deal with integrity, that people deal with the interests of others.”

An additional aspect of the forum that Gleeson feels was important and contributed to the venue’s success, and is promising for the future of biotechnology, was hearing the discussions of other firms in relation to their respective specializations.

“There were other biotech companies that are approaching the problem of developing better medicines from other perspectives, which is important because biology is extremely complex and there are many diseases that need to be attacked and there are many aspects of how disease occurs that have to be addressed,” Gleeson says.

“We should actually all hope as people that there are many approaches.”