Conférenciers

  • Portrait de Warren Chan

    Warren Chan

    Professor, Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto
  • Portrait de Natalie Dakers

    Natalie Dakers

    President and CEO, CDRD Ventures Inc. (CVI)

    Ms. Dakers is a leading figure in the Canadian biotechnology industry and currently serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of CDRD Ventures Inc. after having spent the last seven years as the founding CEO of The Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD), an innovative national organization with a mandate to address the commercialization gap between early-stage technologies arising out of university-based research and private sector investment opportunities. Under Ms. Dakers’ leadership, CDRD signed affiliation agreements with more than 20 major research institutions in Canada and around the world, and forged important strategic relationships with public and private sector partners including Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, Genome British Columbia and the Governments of British Columbia and Alberta. With over 20,000 square feet in specialized lab space and more than $15 million invested in state-of-the-art equipment, under Ms. Dakers leadership, CDRD built a team of over 85 employees, engaged close to 500 individual investigators, raised and secured approximately $115 million in funding, and was named a Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) by the Federal Government.

    Ms. Dakers brings to the organization many valuable years of experience in the commercialization of technology, licensing, and intellectual property protection. Prior to leading the establishment of CDRD, Ms. Dakers was President and CEO of Neuromed Pharmaceuticals (Technologies) Inc., a private biopharmaceutical company developing drugs for chronic pain, anxiety, epilepsy and cardiovascular diseases. As co-founder and CEO, Ms. Dakers built the company from inception and raised three rounds of venture financing totaling approximately $70 million. Prior to this, Ms. Dakers managed technology transfer for the Life Sciences sector at the University Industry Liaison Office (UILO) at the University of British Columbia, where she was involved in the creation and spin-off of more than a dozen start-up high-tech and biotech companies.

    Ms. Dakers is active in a number of business and scientific organizations, including Past Chair of BC Biotech (now LifeSciences British Columbia), the association supporting and representing the province’s biotech, medical device and life sciences community. Currently, Ms. Dakers is a board member of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), BIOTECanada, the International Science and Technology Partnership Canada (ISTP Canada) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Life Sciences Advisory Board. Previously, Ms. Dakers also served on the Boards of Genome Canada, Genome BC, and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. Ms. Dakers is an Adjunct Professor in UBC’s Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and a member of the Council of Canadian Academies’ Expert Panel on Business Innovation. Ms. Dakers received a Peak Award for Performance and Excellence in 2004. In 2009, Ms. Dakers was the recipient of BIOTECanada’s Gold Leaf Award for Industry Leadership.

  • Portrait de Aled Edwards

    Aled Edwards

    Professor, Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto
  • Portrait de Denis Garand

    Denis Garand

    Professeur agrégé, Département de management, Université Laval

    Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management Associate professor at Université Laval (Québec City), Dr. Garand is Associate Editor at “Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship - JSBE” and “Revue internationale P.M.E. - RIPME”. His research interests include HRM in SMEs (highly-qualified personnel), entrepreneurial vision, intent and strategies, cross-campus entrepreneurship education and coaching in UK, in Western Europe and North-America. Since 2002, he has created and implemented the Entrepreneurial Profile at Laval U., giving undergraduates enroled in 40 programs the opportunity to develop their entrepreneurial competences and realistic project before they graduate. Until 2015, he will be leading a major innovative pilot study (1.2M$) funded by Genome Canada, Genome Québec, several institutional and private partners : Boosting Entrepreneurial Skills & Training : BEST in genomics!

  • Portrait de Josette-Renée Landry

    Josette-Renée Landry

    Director, Business Development, MITACS

    Josette-Renée Landry received her PhD in Genetics from the Terry Fox Labs at UBC where she investigated the role of human endogenous retroviruses in normal genomes. While completing her doctorate she co-founded a consulting firm, BasePair Solutions, which provided bioinformatics services to the Vancouver biotechnology sector. She then moved to the UK for post-doctoral training at the University of Cambridge, where she studied the transcription regulation of normal and leukemic hematopoiesis. After relocating to Montréal, she co-founded a non-profit organization, MonBUG, which brings together student, professional and academic bioinformatics users in the greater Montréal for monthly gatherings. During that time, she also managed the functional genomics core service facility at the Université de Montréal.

    Josette joined the Quebec Mitacs team in 2010, as a business development director, where she has been responsible for program promotion and stakeholder management. She also facilitates new industrial partnerships with universities and targets the development of new program initiatives within the province of Québec. She is a past recipient of a CIHR Science to Business award and has recently completed her MBA at HEC Montréal. Josette is now the team lead for Quebec and Atlantic Canada.

  • Portrait de Chris McMaster

    Chris McMaster

    Professor, Pediatrics and Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Dalhousie University

    Dr. McMaster, PhD, is the Carnegie and Rockefeller Professor and Chair of Pharmacology at Dalhousie University where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Biosignalling. He is also co-director of the Cheminformatics Drug Discovery Lab at the IWK Health Centre. Dr. McMaster has twice been ranked first in Canada in national salary award competitions, as a fellow and a scholar, by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. He was also ranked first in the province of Nova Scotia as a Clinical Research Scholar and has been awarded a teaching excellence award by the Dalhousie University Student Union. Dr. Christopher McMaster is on a mission to bring new medicines to diseases for which there is an unmet need. To do so, he has built several teams of clinicians, scientists, and business experts to move Nova Scotia based discoveries into the clinic and market.

    Dr. McMaster has assembled a team of Nova Scotia based scientists, clinicians, and business development experts is inherited ‘orphan diseases’. Dr. McMaster is the lead investigator of a $4.9 million Genome Canada project entitled Orphan Diseases: Identifying Genes and New Therapies to Enhance Treatment (IGNITE). The IGNITE team is united around the theme of improving the livelihood of orphan disease patients. While individually rare, affecting less than 1 in 2000 people each, there are ~7000 orphan diseases such that 1 in 12 individuals has an orphan disease. The cumulative effect is that ~50 million people across North America and Europe suffer the health impacts due to an orphan disease. Indeed, 90% of orphan diseases have no cure, 90% are life-limiting, and 50% affect children. The goal of the IGNITE team is to deliver new therapies for orphan disease patients in dramatically compressed timeframes at reduced cost.

    A second unmet need resulted in DeNovaMed, a Halifax based biotechnology company co-founded by Dr. McMaster to bring to the market the first truly new class of antibiotic in the past 30 years. Dr. McMaster has served as President of DeNovaMed since its founding in 2006. The DeNovaMed team has developed a platform of over 500 new chemical entities that comprise a truly new class of antibiotics. They developed this class using computer aided drug design and a variety of specialized drug synthesis approaches and biological assays. The breakthrough proprietary technology is an innovative family of small molecules (ie. new drugs) that kill bacteria by inhibiting an enzyme essential for lipid metabolism. DeNovaMed’s compound class has been validated in vitro for many Gram positive bacteria and in vivo versus the ‘superbug’ MRSA in a topical model of infection. With the increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistant superbugs current treatments are becoming less effective to the point that they may to be usable for the majority of infections in the nest 5-10 years. Indeed, MRSA was responsible for over 50,000 deaths across North America and Europe in 2011. The DeNovaMed team aims to have ‘first in human’ trials of their new class of antibiotics in early 2014 to bring to the market the first truly new class of antibiotic for the past 30 years.

  • Portrait de Vardit Ravitsky

    Vardit Ravitsky

    Assistant Professor, Département de médecine sociale et préventive, Université de Montréal

    Vardit Ravitsky is assistant professor in the Bioethics Programs at the Faculty of Medicine, Université de Montréal and Director of the Ethics and Health axis of the Centre de recherche en éthique de l'Université de Montréal (CRÉUM). Previously, she was faculty at the Department of Medical Ethics of the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a Senior Policy Advisor at the Ethics Office of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and prior to that, a consultant to Genome Canada on Ethical, Economic, Environmental, Legal and Social aspects of Genomics Research (GE3LS). Between 2003 and 2005 she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the NIH and at the Social and Behavioral Research Branch (SBRB) of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). Her research interests in bioethics include genetics, reproductive technologies, end-of-life, research ethics, health policy, and cultural perspectives. She is particularly interested in the various ways in which cultural frameworks shape public debate and public policy in the area of bioethics.

  • Portrait de Stephen Robbins

    Stephen Robbins

    Director, Southern Alberta Cancer Research Institute, University of Calgary
  • Portrait de May Shawi

    May Shawi

    BioTech Annecto

    May Shawi obtained her B.Sc. in Biochemistry from McGill University. She later obtained a graduate degree in Biotechnology at Harvard University and completed her PhD at the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University as a CIHR and Cole Fellow. She has published peer-reviewed articles in interdisciplinary fields such as genetics, immunology and oncology and has given presentations at the national and international level. May currently works in industry in medical affairs where part of her job is to assess investigator initiated studies. May is the co-founder and president of BioTech Annecto, an organization that provides networking and workshop opportunities to various professionals.

  • Portrait de David Syncox

    David Syncox

    Graduate Education officer, Teaching and Learning Services, McGill University

    David Syncox obtained his Master’s degree in education from McGill University in 2003 and joined McGill the same year. David has been developing, and facilitating graduate and faculty workshops at McGill since 2005. He has published peer-reviewed articles in the field of education with a focus on teaching and learning in higher education. He assumed his position as Graduate Education Officer in 2009.

    David manages the SKILLSETS program which was awarded The 2012 Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS) and Educational Testing Service (ETS) annual the CAGS/ETS Award for Excellence and Innovation in enhancing the graduate student experience. Initiatives focus on teaching competence, communication & presentation skills, and research management. The SKILLSETS program supports students in the development of skills that can be applied almost immediately and are transferrable and applicable to their future endeavors.

  • Portrait de Sophie Veilleux

    Sophie Veilleux

    Professeure adjointe, Entrepreneuriat technologique, Département de management, Université Laval

    Sophie Veilleux is currently a Professor of Technological Entrepreneurship at Université Laval and previously Professor of International Marketing at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her research interests include structural and behavioral issues of international strategic alliances with a special focus on high technology industries. Sophie Veilleux has a Ph.D. in management of high technology firms and an MBA in International Business. She has over ten years of experience in coaching technological entrepreneurs as well as economic development.