TBI Bioscan Newsletter - May 2008
Message From The Chair
Creating the best possible business environment for our province’s life science companies is important to all of us here at The Biotechnology Initiative, and one of the things I’ve spent a great amount of energy lobbying for over the last few months has been bringing change to the tax credit system for research and development in Ontario and making it more in line with the tax credit systems of the other provinces.
It seems this message has finally been heard with the provinces recent budget announcement that increases the Ontario Investment Tax Credit from $2 million to $3 million. With this change in the program, it means for individual companies a tax credit that could net up to 50% more real money for our companies, and increases their potential return from $185,000 up to $280,000!
While I personally would rather have seen the cap totally removed, (as is the case in Quebec, where there is no cap on their refundable amount), the decision to up the cap is great news for Ontario and I am proud that The Biotechnology Initiative had a role to play in this achievement. What really makes this news all the more significant is that it shows that if we keep talking about the things that need to be accomplished and communicate this to the right people, eventually change will come about.
Similarly, you’ve heard me talk a lot about the Life Sciences Coalition, a collaboration initiative that hopes to uncover common issues and priorities across life science organizations in Ontario. Over the past few months we have sent out a number of letters to people and asked them to participate and the response by the industry side has been wonderful with regard to people calling in and saying that they’d like to participate in the interview process. At this stage the interviewers haven’t found anything startling from the process but two interesting comments that have come up so far is that firstly, Ontario as a cluster is quite different from all the other clusters in North America, which are typically cities. Secondly, in all those other jurisdictions pharma and biotech are the number one industry, while here in Ontario we compete with the auto industry. And as expected, a key point brought up in these preliminary talks is that we need to work harder in bridging the gap to commercialization.
In the last month I have met with Sasha Bhatai in the Premier’s office and Paul Chisolm Genest of The Council of Ontario Universities to talk about TBI and the Life Science Coalition, getting the message out, trying to build partnerships and to let people know what we’re doing with the coalition. We’ve also had two of our board members, Dale Patterson and Jason Locklin meet with Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation representatives regarding a pre-Bio event that TBI will host with Premier Dalton McGuinty and Minister John Wilkinson.
In this light, the Premier’s office would like to know what policies we need to put in place to really help move commercialization forward and one thing that we’ve done on our end is we’ve created a CEO group which is headed by Anthony Giovinasso of Cervelo Pharma to talk to CEO’s about what needs to be done to advance commercialization. We expect all interviews to be completed by the end of this month and we should be able to share results by the first week of June.
Plans for National Biotech week are also coming together for Ontario. One of the things that we’re looking to try to do is to put together a biotech/life sciences related products basket. If anyone has any ideas of things they would like to put in the basket we’d love to hear from them. For further information contact Kristan Beard at kristin.beard@agrohealth.com.
In April, the C-Level Committee, comprised of a diverse and hard-working group of individuals, organized the "Building a Biotechnology Company – How to Leverage Partnership and Collaborations?" C-Level Forum, which took place on April 22, 2008, at The Estates of Sunnybrook. With 50 attendees, the day was a fantastic opportunity for biotech leaders to hear from high quality C-Suite executives and industry professionals on some of the key issues for early stage companies in driving valuation and navigating a course for growth. This highly successful forum was profitable for TBI, with sponsorship and registration fees exceeding total event costs.
Lastly on May 15, after our monthly breakfast meeting we will be holding our annual general meeting. Here we will present the financial statements, report on our different committees and what they do, and of course elect the officers and directors for next year.
We have five new members running, among them Janet Lambert, ED, Ontario Long Term Care Providers; David Young, President & CSO, Arius Research; Bonnie Kuehl, ED, Scientific Insights Consulting Group; Denis Ferkany, President, International Consortium of Anti Virals and Anthony Giovinasso, President & CEO Cervelo Pharma. Greg Hines and Stan Shapson are retiring from their roles.
It’s a good opportunity to come out and see who the board members are and all TBI members are encouraged to take part. We hope to see you there.
Up Coming Events
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TBI - NOTICE OF ANNUAL MEETING
Notice is hereby given of the annual meeting of the members of TBI to be held Thursday May 15, 2008 at 9:30 am.
For more details click here |
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Connect And Join The Fun
The 2008 TBI Golf Classic
Copper Creek Golf Club August 12, 2008 You are invited to join us at the 8th annual TBI Golf Classic. |
News
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C-Level Forum is a huge success
The C-Level Committee, comprised of a diverse and hard-working group of individuals, organized the "Building a Biotechnology Company – How to Leverage Partnership and Collaborations?" C-Level Forum took place on April 22, 2008, at The Estates of Sunnybrook.
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TBI Breakfast meeting April 17: Central Nervous System Disorders
As scientists begin to unravel little by little just how much of an effect an individual's genetic make up has on the efficacy of a drug, the field of pharmacogenetics continues to gain momentum as a mainstream science.
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TBI Breakfast March 20: Genomics in Ontario and TBI announces its new ED
The Biotech Initiative breakfast meeting for March kicked off with a major announcement as TBI introduced Michael Stinson as its new full time executive director.
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February 21 TBI Breakfast
This month’s TBI breakfast meeting marked yet another informative session.
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TCP comes to TBI
They say the dreams of cats are filled with mice. Well, the January TBI breakfast meeting was surely one that would have had the cat drooling.
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Industry Events
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BIO International Convention
June 17, 2008 San Diego
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Click here to view more events
www.ontbi.org/Events
CONTACT US
To include your announcement on TBI’s web site or upcoming Bioscan newsletter, send your release to news@ontbi.org
Please forward all releases as word documents.
