Usha Srinivasan, Director of Market Intelligence
Moderator James Sbrolla said it best: It figures that a panel of three brilliant women would be participating in a session on market intelligence. Last month’s “Growing Your Business” session hosted by the RIC Centre and OCETA saw Usha Srinivasan, Director of Market Intelligence at MaRS, Christine Konig of Konig & Consultants and Isabel Alexander, founder of Phancorp Inc., discuss the topic of “Using Market Intelligence as your Strategic Weapon”.
PubMed, a favourite research tool of biomedical researchers around the world, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. First released as an experimental database in January 1996, it was officially launched as a free Web-based version of MEDLINE (which itself turned 35(!!) years old this year) on June 26, 1997. Its first month of official service saw some 2 million searches for the entire month. Current statistics indicate usage typically exceeds three million searches a day.
For more details about PubMed’s history and key milestones, see this National Library of Medicine press release.
I’m trying to imagine life without PubMed – can you?
BioEntrepreneurship: Market Assessment
After last month’s general overview session on the business of biotech, this month saw the focus of BioEntrepreneurship narrow down on the subject of market assessment.
In this session, Kelly Holman and Damian Lamb from Genesys Capital, a local life sciences focused early stage venture capital firm, shared their thoughts on how to assess early stage biotechnologies. Unfortunately, such as with most things in a life, there just isn’t an easy answer. But then again, if it was easy where would the excitement be?!
Damian ran through what to take into consideration when looking at early biotechnologies, such as:
One of his biggest takeaways is to remember that early stage technology is competing against not only current standard of care, which you must significantly surpass, but also all the other new technologies that are emerging in your field. Be sure to familiarize yourself with what the major pharmas and biotech have in development (Pre-Clin, Phase 1, Phase II), as well other academic researchers, as they are going to be your competitors when your product hits the market 10 years out.
Kelly switched gears a bit and gave a quick look at how a VC assesses early stage opportunity. Making the point that early stage evaluations are as much an art as a science due to numerous unknowns (Will the technology really work? Will the team be able to make it happen? How big will the market be? Regulatory? etc), Kelly concluded that an evaluation will ultimately result in a negotiated price, not a formula. However the evaluation exercise, while imperfect, is an important one to go through to help you understand where others perceive the sensitivities and risks in your project.
Downloads
Kelly and Damian are also standing by to answer questions on in this blog… so fire away!
Be sure to join us Dec 4th to learn about IP Strategy.
As a librarian, I spend a considerable chunk of my workday online, searching for information. MaRS has invested in licenses for a broad range of databases, which I supplement with the electronic resources I can access via the University of Toronto, courtesy of my cross-appointment. As a result, I have access to premium, quality content that meets most of my research needs. However, it’s a rare day when I don’t still wind up surfing the ‘free’ Web, on the hunt for a nugget or two. And when I’m out on the hunt, my default search engine is Google. I give some of Google’s competitors out there a whirl from time to time, e.g. Alltheweb.com, Vivisimo, Ask.com, but I keep coming back to Google.
So, when I heard rumblings that Google was going to take on health early in the New Year, I was intrigued. How would it stand up to PubMed? Or Scirus? In May, Google Health was soft-launched as a ‘topic’ under the Google Co-op umbrella. It now has an impressive list of partners, including the National Library of Medicine (the folks behind Medline and PubMed), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even the Medical Library Association. Basically, the model is a cooperative one (hence the Co-op tag): specialists, including the partners listed above, label web pages relevant to their area of expertise while users subscribe to these pages for more refined search capabilities. For a more detailed overview, see the Topics Developers Guide.
And the results? Well, let’s just say I won’t be dropping PubMed from my list of bookmarks. Given Google’s stellar performance in other areas of search, maybe I was just expecting too much. But for someone who needs more than consumer or patient-oriented information and who wants the ability to access published peer-reviewed research and to perform relatively sophisticated search strategies, Google Health ain’t cutting it. However, it’s still early days and given Google’s track record, maybe Google Health will be my destination of choice on the Web at some point. What do other folks think?
Report: The State of Science & Technology
On September 12, the Council of Canadian Academies released its inaugural report, “The State of Science & Technology in Canada“. Commissioned by Industry Canada, this report details the findings of a 10-member expert panel tasked with assessing Canada’s S&T strengths and identifying areas with the most potential for growth and economic benefit.
The four S&T clusters identified as being particularly strong were natural resources, ICT, health & life sciences, and environmental and related sciences. A ‘top 50′ list was also produced, with energy and mining specialities dominating the first 10 spots, with medical genetics coming in at #11. Some of the areas flagged as promising were:
Canada is apparently quite weak in “transportation” which is interesting (disconcerting?). Canada is such a huge country, you’d think we’d be better at it.
In the report’s discussion of existing support for commercialization, four programs were highlighted:
Wonder how MaRS would score . . .
