Keep on Growing

PERFORMANCE PLANTS INC. PRESIDENT AND CEO DAVID DENNIS, PHD KEEPS HIS EYE ON WHAT’S IMPORTANT

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By Amber Lepage-Monette

Success means staying focused: focused on your customers’ needs, and on meeting them.

That is advice David Dennis, PhD received early on in his career as president and CEO of Performance Plants Inc. (Kingston, ON), and he says it’s still some of the best advice he ever got.

“You’ve got to look at a product right from the start. Is there something in this that, at the end of the day, you could sell and put on the market,” Dennis says.

“It’s no good just doing good research or having good genes, or whatever technology it is that you think you’ve got. It’s basically whether this stuff’s going to be produced and sold,” he says. “A lot of advice that we got was, find out what people want, not what you can get money from. That’s probably the best advice we got.”

Customer Appreciation
Though it may not be good enough to just have good genes — those are exactly what Performance Plants now works with.

Branched out of research conducted by Dennis and fellow Queen’s University (Kingston, ON) researcher Dan Lefebvre, PhD, Performance Plants initially set out to explore how plant enzymes work, studying oil synthesis in castor beans.

Dennis says the idea to translate this research into a company came while he was chatting with someone in his office one day, bemoaning the level of funding this area of research was getting.

“I was complaining that if we really wanted to compete with the guys down in the States, we needed much higher funding,” he says. “And they said, well, why don’t you form a company and try to get people to invest in it if you think that eventually it would produce products that people would sell. So I thought, neat idea.”

In those early days, the advice about staying focused came from Pete Desai, PhD, who was with DowElanco Canada Inc. (Calgary, AB) at the time. Desai told Dennis not to ask for money, but to find out what potential customers need.

“He said, well, there’s so many of you professors (that) come out, and they ask for money and they go do some research, publish some papers, and they’re never heard of again,” Dennis recalls of the conversation. “He said, go out and ask people what the problems are and what their needs are and design a company around that.”

Though Performance Plants started out looking at oil synthesis, Dennis says early potential products in this area didn’t have agronomic potential, so the company didn’t pursue them.“One of the concepts we developed early on was that we should work on a technology and evaluate its potential,” he says. “And if it looked like it was probably not going to have agronomic potential, you dump it and find something else.”

Good Genes
The company’s current work on genes was born out of research conducted by the laboratory of Peter McCourt, PhD at the University of Toronto (Toronto, ON).

A student of McCourt’s was studying seed development in radiation-treated Arabidopsis, a plant commonly used in genetic research. As Dennis recalls, the student had left for a period of time, such as a long weekend, and forgot to water the plants. When the student returned, the control plants were dead, but the mutant plants had survived.

“Of course the student was all upset he’d ruined his experiment, and was going to throw them all out,” Dennis explains. “And Peter said, don’t you think it’s interesting that your mutant plants that you were working on seed development for are also drought tolerant?”

McCourt’s research on seed development led to the discovery of the gene that caused the drought tolerance in the plants. That was the point at which Performance Plants started to work with McCourt and the drought gene.

“So we knew what the gene was that was giving these plants drought tolerance, but the plants were sort of sickly and weren’t very well, and the seed yield was low,” Dennis says. “So what Performance Plants started doing was saying, can we take this gene and manipulate it to get rid of the side-effects . . . and this is what we’ve managed to do, first of all in Arabidopsis, and then in canola.”

Dennis explains that when plants are faced with a drought situation, a chemical signal called abscisic acid, or ABA, is sent from the cells to the pores in the leaves. Upon receiving the signal, the pores close to reduce water loss. Performance Plants works with transgenic plants to make this system more sensitive to the ABA signal.

In nature, Dennis says, plants that are experiencing drought will drop many of their seeds in an effort to increase the chances of seed survival.

“If it starts getting the signal that it’s beginning to lose water, what it does is abort most of its seeds, drop most of the flowers, and produce a small number of seeds, which it can probably manage,” he says. “But if it tried to produce 100 per cent of the seeds, it would probably lose the whole lot.”

While such a strategy in nature helps ensure the plant produces at least some seeds, in an agricultural setting it is a disadvantage, Dennis says. Through gene manipulation, Performance Plants’ plants abort fewer seeds than the control plants.

Valuable Experience
Dennis came to his position at Performance Plants with plenty of previous experience.

Dennis completed a B.Sc. in botany, and graduate work in biophysics at the University of Leeds (Leeds, U.K.). He then moved to Ottawa, Ont. to work for the National Research Council of Canada before completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (Los Angeles, CA).

Following his studies at UCLA, Dennis returned to the U.K. to work for Unilever PLC (London, U.K.), and worked on making plants last longer post-harvest. However, after three years with Unilever, he found that he had been changed by his time away from Britain, and decided to make another move.

“I had become a North American, unfortunately,” Dennis jokes. “And I wrote to all the Canadian universities and said, if there’s a position open, let me know.”

Dennis got word of an opening at Queen’s, and moved back to Canada.

“With the thought I’d probably stay here two or three years, or five years and move on. But I’ve stayed here forever,” he says.

Dennis started teaching at Queen’s in 1968, and was head of the Biology department from 1984 to 1992.

Dennis says he enjoyed his years teaching and working at the university. And while he says his work at Unilever gave him better business experience, his time at Queen’s has also proven beneficial for his work at Performance Plants.

“A head of a department has really got to be a diplomat, because you really have got little power over a professor. They’re employed by the university, not by the department,” he says. “So in trying to get a team of people working well together, I think that’s something I learned as a head.”

In the end, Dennis’s move from academia to business was quite serendipitous. In December 1995, the year Performance Plants was established, Queen’s offered an early retirement package for staff over the age of 50.

“Of course it was ideal for me, because I was slightly more than just over 50, but certainly quite a number of years from retirement,” Dennis says. “But it did allow me to become full time in this job.”Dennis says that for a while, Lefebvre kept his position at Queen’s, and Performance Plants bought his time from the university. But eventually Lefebvre decided to go back to Queen’s full time.

Though Performance Plants was incorporated in December 1995, Dennis says it “hung around as a company in name only,” until the big event in September 1996, when the company received angel funding.

“That allowed the company to become established, and it was really great because the angel investor . . . has put his money in as an investment, but he was patient,” Dennis says. “He said, you guys get this thing rolling, and he kept his eye on us all the time but really gave us a lot of freedom as well.

“And it’s just a superb situation that you feel that this person is doing all they can to help you to get the thing going, but ultimately he’s not asking you every few weeks what’s happened to his money.”

Dennis says over the next few years, this initial angel investment ended up bringing the company $2 million. In September 2003, Performance Plants completed a $1.45-million financing with VentureLink Brighter Future (Equity) Fund Inc. (Toronto, ON) and VentureLink Fund Inc. (Toronto, ON), which will be used to bring the company through further field trials.

Some of the company’s upcoming milestones include working on genes relating to water stress, looking to put these genes into corn and then soybeans. It is also researching means to make plants more resistant to heat.

Fittingly, Performance Plants’ research has also managed to come full circle, working on increasing oil in plant seeds.

Having a lot of potential products in the pipeline not only makes good business sense, but is something that makes Dennis feel more at ease.

“My big concern is we’ll do drought, and somebody will buy it off us and then we’ll sit there and say, what next? So we always try to make sure there’s something in the pipeline, saying, hey, this is better than the last one,” he laughs.

“We’re pretty sure we know where we’re going with these things, and that’s reassuring to know that Performance Plants has got work to do for quite a number of years.”