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For Dr. John Evans, growing a strong biotechnology industry is much the same: cities must provide a nurturing environment where science and business can thrive together.

That's why Evans, former president of the University of Toronto and current chairman of Torstar Corp., is spearheading the $345-million Medical and Related Science initiative, or MaRS--a petri dish of sorts for commercializing science research. "A lot of intellectual property is being commercialized outside Canada," says Evans. "I think we've been slow in realizing just how important technology developments are to the economic future of the country. MaRS is an attempt to give this a kick into a higher gear." The centrepiece of the MaRS plan, which will officially launch May 12, is a 1.3-million-square-foot, five-building complex in downtown Toronto that will provide office and lab space for small and medium-size companies and incubators, including the not-for-profit Toronto Biotechnology Commercialization Centre. While Evans is reluctant to limit its scope, MaRS will generally focus on health-related technologies, from new drugs and genetic treatments to medical devices and imaging software. Branded a "convergence centre," it will also house a careful mix of support services: intellectual property lawyers, accountants, marketing experts, government funding organizations and venture capital financiers. Plus, start-ups will have access to all the latest equipment on site. For instance, MaRS is in talks with MDS Sciex to supply mass spectrometers, used in proteomics research.

But MaRS will be more than just a New Economy real estate development. Evans's intention is to funnel tenants' rent money into services--such as entrepreneurship seminars and angel-matching programs--that MaRS will offer to the broader biotech community. That's why MaRS's location is key: the centre will be built in the heart of what Toronto has dubbed the "Discovery District," a two-square-kilometre chunk of the downtown core, encompassing U of T and four major hospitals. From there, MaRS hopes to act as a network hub across Ontario, with links to research-intensive universities. "None of them," says Evans, "have the critical mass to put it all together on their own."

We don’t know for sure,” said Dr. John Evans, chair of the board of directors at MARS (Medical and Related Sciences) Discovery District in Toronto, and vicechair of Mississauga, Ont.-based NPSAllelix Biopharmaceuticals, one of the pioneers of biotech in Canada. “But we believe that if you could ‘type’ the patient processes of how he/she handles a drug, you could peel off those people who would be particularly sensitive to a drug. Then you could find a sub-population where the drug is safe and highly effective.” Evans used the arthritis drug Vioxx as an example. It helped millions of people battle painful inflammation, but was pulled from the market recently because of potential cardiac side effects in some people. “If the drug company could have predicted which patients would have complications from Vioxx treatment — through some genetic profiling — then a very powerful and effective drug could have been preserved,” Evans said. His company, NPS-Allelix Bio-pharmaceuticals, has been developing a product since 1989 that will be launched later this year. The drug secretes a parathyroid hormone for treating osteoporosis.

It builds up bone matrix and helps build bone, rather than just delay bone loss as other drugs do.

Three technology research centres in Ontario Monday said they have agreed to work together to help the province compete more effectively against countries like India and China.

Communitech is working with the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, an economic development corporation located in the nation's capital, and the MaRS Discovery District, a Toronto-based not-for-profit geared towards the commercialization of scientific and technological intellectual property.

The three organizations have agreed their partnership will function under the name the MaRS Network. MaRS is by far the youngest of the three organizations – Communitech is almost a decade old and OCRI is about 25 – but has become a business force since it opened last year.

Benecaid has named Jonathan Graff to Co-President, a new role in which he will share senior executive responsibilities with Marla Schwartz, who has been Benecaid's President since 2005.

Benecaid is a health benefits administrator that provides cost-effective, customized plan management for small and medium-sized employers and the self-employed. Its innovative approach has resulted in revenue growth of nearly 5,000 per cent over the last five years. Benecaid was ranked in the top 10 of Profit 100's Fastest Growing Canadian Companies in 2009.

In November, Skymeter moved into the incubator at the MaRS Centre, where marketing expert Peter Evans has become their mentor and godfather. "Being surrounded by other entrepreneurs is inspiring and enlightening," Hassan says. "MaRS is an amazing place, with excellent speakers and events that are open to the public."

The father of Skymeter Corp. – which developed a BlackBerry-sized device that uses GPS signals; placed in vehicles, it meters the use of roads, parking and pay-as-you-drive insurance

Skymeter's black box will be attached to the windshield of cars so the box has a clear view of the sky. (Grush has figured out how to cope with tall buildings blocking signals.) The box contains a GPS receiver, some memory, a processor and a telecommunications chip. The satellite beams down to the earth, the GPS receiver computes where it is and uploads its history to a data centre to generate the bill. The vehicle measures its own use; the bill is itemized like a cellphone bill. If you prepay, the bill can be calculated on board.

Ross Wallace, director of strategic partnerships at the MarS Centre, which brings together scientists, entrepreneurs and investors, has seen a lot of P3s at their best.

Wallace was as baffled as everybody else. But he believed a business model could be created that would connect medical discoveries coming out of universities and government labs with the money available from private foundations.A year ago, he won one of six fellowships offered by the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation to young people eager to tackle global problems. His research led in an unexpected – and welcome – direction. It turned out that he didn't have to invent a new business model. One already existed."I found some really exciting collaboration going on," he said. "A new breed of partnerships had emerged that completely transformed the development and delivery of pharmaceuticals for neglected diseases."

So Wallace redefined his task. He would look for ways to bolster these fledgling P3s.They have a very short history. The first grew out of a program launched by the World Bank in 1999 to pull together money and talent for research on tropical diseases. But it remained buried within the global bureaucracy.

This is Toronto's research district, a maze of concrete and glass where the finest minds collaborate, turning the city into a global centre of biomedical discovery.

Nine research institutes employing 5,000 university faculty members, 2,000 graduate students and 1,100 postdoctoral and clinical fellows lie within a 20-minute walk of each other. This biomedical cluster at the heart of Toronto is one of the largest on the continent, and is one of the 10 largest in the world.

Tom Hudson from Montreal; cell biologist Ben Neel from Boston; and stem-cell biologist Gordon Keller, who came to Toronto in 2006, just months after New York magazine named him one of the scientists that city could not afford to lose. Toronto is also home to Tak Mak, who discovered the "key to the immune system" T-cell receptor, and John Dick, who discovered the first cancer stem cell in 1994 and last year grew a human cancer in a lab mouse for the first time.

MobileBiz BootCamp (http://mobilebiz.ca) September 16, 2009 From garage start-up to corporate start-up, at the MobileBiz BootCamp you will earn your stripes by learning from the best in the business. An intensive full day of key insights and fast-track tips delivered by experienced mobile industry leaders, vendors and supporting organizations focused on creating exponential value for all delegates to accelerate profitable growth in their mobile business. Featured speakers from Wind Mobile, Summerhill Capital, Polar Mobile, MaRS, Ontario Centres of Excellence and more. Additional MOBILEINNOVATIONWEEK activities are the ilovemobileweb party - the ultimate mobile industry networking event of the year - and the Mobile ThinkTank where industry experts come together to envision the future of mobile in the global economy. Evening receptions are sponsored by the CWTA, the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC) and the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF).

MOBILEINNOVATIONWEEK from September 12-16, 2009 in Toronto.

The Caldwell Partners, Deloitte and National Post are pleased to announce the appointment of Gordon M. Nixon to Canada's Outstanding CEO of theYearTM Advisory Board for 2009.

Mr. Nixon is Chairman of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Chairman of MaRS Discovery District, and is on the Board of Directors of The Hospital for Sick Children, The International Monetary Conference, Catalyst Canada and is on the Advisory Board of Mercedes-Benz Canada.

Canada has always had to fight hard to attract talent and investment

MaRS Vital to Toronto's life sciences vision is MaRS (derived from Medical and Related Sciences) a non-profit organisation and business centre located in the heart of the city. Its core function is as a biotech incubator and business park, known as MaRS Discovery District. The venture was first established in 2000 to help foster and accelerate the growth of successful Canadian businesses and, after some uncertain times, it is now gathering momentum. A separate technology transfer office, MaRS Innovation, has also been established that, it is hoped, can be a world beater in its own right (see Turning good ideas into world beaters below). The location of the MaRS building in central Toronto is important, as it is just a stone's throw away from an existing cluster of universities and academic hospitals. MaRS has many links with other research-based organisations, including collaborations with three local universities, 10 academic teaching hospitals and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. MaRS occupies the Old Toronto general hospital, where insulin was first discovered by Best and Banting in 1921 and then developed for use in human trials. The 21st Century organisation can build on this heritage in patient-focused discovery and development. Formerly the head of venture capital firm Primaxis, Ilse Treurnicht is chief executive of MaRS Discovery District. She acknowledges the crisis in venture capital funding, and says Canada's sector has always had less access funds through this route than other countries. This is one of the drivers behind the search for a new approach. Treurnicht says the old models of building biotech and life sciences businesses have to be discarded, as they have failed to build companies with critical mass. She says MaRS' new 'Convergence Innovation' strategy of bringing science, capital and business together will pay off.

"We call our strategy 'Convergence Innovation' and what we are trying to do is move away from the old linear model of academics struggling in their spare time to build companies or entrepreneurs doing this in a very incremental way."It takes time and it has many risk points along the way. So using this Convergence centre model to create a much more dynamic organisation which can help accelerate good ideas towards the commercialisation." But she says Canada's geography and demographics are always going to be a challenge. "This is a very large country with a small population. If you think in terms of clusters and hub regions, Canada's business hubs are separated geographically, and there is not much in between in terms of people."That means we can't try to be a little United States, because we just won't show up on the radar. We have to take a different approach. We have to think about collaboration as our potential competitive advantage - that means using networks and associations to solve problems and build businesses."So as new opportunities emerge, we can take them to market faster and hopefully with a higher success rate." The centre currently accommodates numerous start up companies, as well as those providing legal and financial services to them. AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline also have offices on site. In all, MaRS provides mentoring for over 200 different companies across Ontario, and runs courses on entrepreneurship and preparing products for market.

Market research leader IDC Canada has featured MaRS client Mensante as one of its "Ten Canadian Health Companies to Watch" in 2009.

Leading international psychiatrists, family physicians, psychologists, work place mental health experts and mental health economists developed an innovative web-based mental healthcare system called FeelingBetterNow(R).

Dr. Ozersky, Mensante's CEO, was selected by the Canadian Association of Health Informatics as recipient of the 2008 Community Physician Leader and Innovator of the Year Award.

But though piezoelectric technology is gaining momentum as the search for greener energy sources intensifies, it's not likely to replace more traditional power sources anytime soon, said Tom Rand, a project leader at MaRS with a background in electrical engineering.

"Everyone knows piezoelectricity works," he said. "The question is whether it's cost-effective."

"Everyone knows piezoelectricity works," he said. "The question is whether it's cost-effective."

Closer to home, Toronto recognized a few years ago that it was losing ground in the sciences, so it deleted two-square kilometers of its downtown and replaced it with the Mars Discovery District, a vast collection of intertwined university research facilities, commercial research space, and the best biotech incubator space I’ve ever seen—and I’m an incubator guy.

The Premier’s Summit Award builds Ontario’s research prowess by recognizing exceptional medical researchers and helping them expand their programs. These winners are internationally recognized leaders whose work is transformative in their fields. Each winner will receive up to $5 million over a five-year period: a $2.5 million contribution from the award program matched by $2.5 million from their sponsoring institution. As the following profiles demonstrate, the Premier’s Summit Award supports researchers who have made a substantial contribution and show promise to do even more.

Dr. Benjamin Neel The Campbell Family Cancer Research Institute at the Princess Margaret Hospital, University Health Network Toronto

Dr. John Wallace McMaster University Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute Hamilton

the Chief of Research at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, collaboration is the key to the future.

That's why Dr. Janet Rossant is so enthusiastic about the work being done in the MaRS Discovery District - a unique zone in the city where innovations in science and technology are commercialized through partnerships between researchers and private enterprise.

"The MaRS Centre and biomedical community have seen tremendous growth over the past few years," says Dr. Janet Rossant. "And it continues to grow." "This growth is attracting the world's best scientists to come work here, which is very exciting."

Fight for the Planet, made by Colin Carter, a 16-year-old student at Northern Secondary School on Mount Pleasant Rd., will premiere tonight at the MaRS Auditorium in downtown Toronto.

Tony Pawson has been studying how cells communicate for more than 30 years.

Scientists had long known that cells communicated, but no one knew the exact mechanisms until Pawson and his team pinpointed the specific protein interactions controlling cell signals.

Since his initial discovery, Pawson has been inundated with every possible award for biomedical sciences, including the Gairdner Foundation International Award (considered the baby Nobel), and, in 2007, was named to the Order of the Companions of Honour, one of only nine Canadians to receive the award from the Queen

The temple has a conference room equipped with state-of-the-art audio-visual aids. Its board of directors includes several leading software billionaires and their wives, providing it with money as well as connections.

The monks are entrepreneurs as well as holy men, one moment talking about reincarnation and the next about sustainable delivery models.

he temple provides 200,000 local schoolchildren with free meals every day.