Establishing a facility where academia meets business

The Toronto locale with the zigzag of a name - MaRS - could be likened to many things. But a St. Lawrence Seaway? A trans-Canada railway?

After all, physically MaRS is just a parcel of prime downtown real estate - a remodelled and vastly expanded former wing of Toronto General Hospital with its pale Edwardian face on one plot of land, two adjoining modern towers and a third 21st-century spaceship office tower being constructed next to it.

And yet when Ilse Treurnicht, MaRS Discovery District CEO, searches for an image of what to compare her organization to, she reflects, "It's something like a system on which trains run and boats can sail, and so I like the St. Lawrence Seaway or the across Canada railway image."

Not real boats or real trains, of course.

Rather, MaRS metaphorically is a kind of passageway down which research and technology can more effectively travel. It is where inventions and discoveries often begin as eureka moments in a lab, a garage or a basement, then voyage onward through possible patent applications and start-up companies, often navigating the rocky shoals of seed money and venture capital investment before making it to a port or station called a viable business.

That is the vision, but to understand why it exists and where it hopes to go, you have to get into the minds of a group of forward-thinking Ontario business, government and academic leaders. In 2000, when this group looked at where the province stood in terms of the translation of Ontario discoveries - in science, medicine, technology and beyond - what they saw was that the boats weren't sailing and the trains were stalled. And if the so-called trains did move, they often ventured southward to the sweeter trade winds and smoother tracks of the United States.

"We found that southern Ontario, with great universities and wonderful scholars, really had quite low rates of commercial translation by most measures," remarks Dr. John Evans, a physician, academic leader, biotech entrepreneur and founding chair of the board at MaRS.

This was particularly troubling because what the group saw in other places - in San Diego, Boston and Cambridge, England - were growing "clusters," pulsating interfaces between university research and industry in which the ships and trains of the knowledge economy were moving.

"And we asked, 'But why not here?'" Evans remembers.

The simplest answers, he says, were that there was neither a research translation push, nor research translation pull. There was no equivalent of a giant U.S. defense establishment and its demand for scientists to turn discovery into practical things. There were no large, international biopharmaceutical companies with their headquarters in southern Ontario hungering for research partnerships. And also absent were significant pools of venture capital.

But beyond that, there was a basic reason why 19th-century university science was conducted. One researched for the love of it, for promotion, for knowledge, for tenure, to benefit humanity, but not to make something you could sell.

"For academic institutions, commercialization of results wasn't a high priority. It wasn't their prime purpose. It wasn't how you got ahead or stood out," says Evans, who, among his many occupations, was chair of Allelix Inc., considered Canada's first biotech company.

So the Ontario group reasoned one had to come up with an institution the purpose of which was both to change the mindset of Ontario academic researchers and help reconfigure the provincial economy to correspond to how wealth was being generated in the 21st-century. The result would be MaRS - meant to imply a mankind-going-to-Mars-type audacity - a non-profit organization to be located within blocks of the University of Toronto, research hospitals and Toronto's financial district.

Laboratory space for researchers and research consortia would be situated there alongside offices where start-up companies and mature businesses, professional services (such as patent lawyers) and venture capitalists would be located. The hope was that through unconscious synergy and conscious effort - offering entrepreneurial programming and hands-on business advisory services to companies - a new paradigm for Ontario innovation would emerge.

So eight years after its conception, how is MaRS doing in its research translation and knowledge economy efforts?

The simplest answer is that perhaps the most outstanding proof of MaRS' virtues is simply that it exists when many in 2000 doubted it would. To start with, MaRS managed to beat out eight commercial bidders - bidders with condos and hotel office towers in their eyes - to buy the site of a former wing of Toronto General Hospital. "Everyone we talked to said MaRS was a good idea, but, 'You'll never pull it off because it is bold,'" Evans told the Toronto Star in 2001, after it was announced the group had acquired the TGH land.

The organization then managed to convince companies to sign early leases after viewing what Treurnicht describes as "a deteriorated old hospital that was in terrible shape."

"You had people who had to say, 'I am going to take a piece of our operation, move it to a new thing called MaRS, even though the lease is above market value and I can't even describe what the building is going to look like,'" says Treurnicht. "That could have been a real career-limiting move."

The group managed to convince private capital and city, provincial and federal levels to help fund the construction of Phase I. The doors opened on the architecturally arresting 70,000-square-metre MaRS Centre in fall 2005. Two years later, MaRS had found a business partner - California-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. - willing to invest more than $300 million in building its Phase II development and leveraged the Ontario government's $70 million investment into $700 million in total funds. Construction was expected to be completed in 2010. However, in late 2008, the project was recently put on hold due to the downturn in the economy.

The Toronto building will go ahead when the conditions improve. "It's as simple as temporary suspension in construction," is how Alexandria's John Cunningham describes the current state of affairs.

The present facility has 70 companies and organizations as tenants, with 19 of them being start-up companies that can "incubate" in what MaRS calls "plug-and-play" office and laboratory facilities.

Leading research groups from the University Health Network and the Hospital for Sick Children, as well as the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, are located there, bringing the total number of people who go to work at MaRS to approximately 2,000. And more than 100,000 people attend meetings, conferences and other events at the site annually, which in 2006 won the Intelligent Building of the Year award from the Intelligent Community Forum - for its use of advanced information and broadband technology.

In 2008, a new federally funded partnership was launched called MaRS Innovation, an initiative that aims to increase the quantity and speed with which research in 14 Toronto-area institutions is brought to market. MaRS also runs a suite of Entrepreneurship Education programs, including the hugely successful Entrepreneurship 101 course to teach commercialization skills. "When we started that course, we didn't know who would show up. Three hundred people came. This year we have over 2,000 registrants and online participants. It's typically students who are in science or in philosophy but know little about business," Treurnicht says.

And yet, this is Ontario, Canada. This is a country whose national motto could well be "as cautious as a Canadian." This is the province that developed the first effective electric wheelchair and gave its manufacture to the U.S. and the home of the first music synthesizer, which went on to be developed elsewhere. So when you talk to Treurnicht about what hasn't worked at MaRS and what will be the true measure of MaRS' success, her tone gets solemn.

"I think we still have a cultural reluctance to 'think big,'" she says after a moment's pause. "There's almost an instinctive reluctance to embrace a big vision and go global, to say, 'We are one of the best research communities in the world. Why can't we also be one of the best translational communities?'"

The true destiny of MaRS remains to be achieved. "This work takes time and requires sustained effort and investment. There is no magic bullet here. There's no question in my mind that, ultimately, people will look at MaRS and say, 'Show me the companies that have come out of here that you have either started directly or materially influenced their trajectory and that have become globally competitive companies,'" she states.

When - and, indeed, if - that will happen still remains to be seen, she cautions.

And at this juncture, it is pointed out to Treurnicht that her name in Dutch means "lament not" and wasn't that just too symbolic? She laughs. "And that is what I think partially MaRS is becoming. We're not lamenting our past failures. MaRS is a project based on the belief that Canada has incredible strengths in biomedical research and beyond, and we are going to play a serious role in developing it. We are going to control our destiny. We are going to build jobs for our children and grandchildren. We are," she says, and as she does one can almost see the research boats coming down the MaRS seaway.

Almost hear the whistles blowing on the MaRS train line.

Almost hear the captain or engineer announcing, "All aboard - and lament not."