Toronto: Desirable but expensive
Highly desirable but seriously unaffordable? That’s the Toronto Community Foundation’s verdict on Toronto.
In the annual Toronto’s VitalSigns report, Toronto scores highly on measures of innovation, diversity, creativity, education and environmentalism. But before we pop the champagne, the report also finds that housing, food and childcare, among other basic goods and services, are increasingly unaffordable, especially for new immigrants and seniors.
Doctors for innovation
Few physicians here in the Discovery District would disagree with the assessment that their involvement in the commercialization of health technologies remains sparse, if not non-existent. Most physicians are likely happy with this arrangement. They would argue that commercialization presents too many conflicts of interest, especially in light of recent reports of ghost-writing peer-reviewed articles by pharmaceutical companies and fraudulent research funded by medical device companies (see this article). Some would go as far as to suggest that physicians should not be involved at all in the medical innovation process.
However, as I recently argued in commentaries published in Nature and Science it is important to recognize why physician involvement that leads to the need to manage conflict of interest is so critical to advancing medical innovation.
Less radiation for thyroid cancer
Researchers from Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital have presented data at the ENDO 2009 Symposium (in Washington DC) indicating that lower doses of chemotherapy are just as effective as larger doses in adjuvant treatment of thyroid cancer.
Dr. Kumar and colleagues were able to reduce the radiation dose by 70 per cent and maintain the same treatment effect as the standard higher dose.
Image courtesy Ben Rahn/A-Frame Inc.
In his blog post for Xconomy today, Tim Rowe holds up MaRS as an example of what a city can do if they’re ambitious and just decide to make something very big happen. Like when Toronto decided that it wanted to gain ground in the science knowledge economy.
Nevermind that MaRS is again misrepresented as just a biotech incubator or place for research — I suppose there are worse things to be called. But still part of an ambitious, big-thinking plan to improve the science, tech and social outcomes of the economy. Amen.
Read “The Long Game” by Tim Rowe in Xconomy.
The social tech for social change week
Toronto is abuzz with innovators, social entrepreneurs, digital media developers and leading design thinkers, not to mention a swath of charitable organizations dedicated to social change.
Imagine if these communities were working together. It could be transformational.
