In June, the U.S.-based Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) announced it would hold its 2002 conference and exhibition in Toronto next summer, expecting a draw of around 15,000 and an estimated economic impact of $9.6 million. But savvy biotech folks in Ontario know what kind of impact they're having on perhaps the sharpest of cutting-edge industries.


      "BIO recognizes Canada's and Toronto's leadership role in biotechnology around the world," said Janet Lambert, president of BIOTECanada, of the event's announcement.
      Biotechnology in Canada is expected to be a $3.2 billion business by next year, and much of its activity is unfolding in Ontario. Last year, the total amount of money raised by Canadian life sciences companies was $1.6 billion. Of the 360 companies in the country, roughly a third have locations in the GTA alone, backed by North America's fourth-largest biomedical cluster. Ottawa, too, has its biotech cluster, perhaps a natural outgrowth of its high-tech zones.
      The Ontario biotech sector generat ed more than $383 million in revenue in 2000, with about a third of that spent on R&D. The sector showed 5.9 percent growth in real GDP in 1999.
      Projects abound. The Ontario government has awarded an Ottawa consortium $3.5 million to establish two incubators for biotechnology startup firms. In genomics, the federal government is funneling $87 million toward 22 research projects at Canada's five genome centers. Genome Canada is also considering a second round of applications to spend an additional $105 million in matching funds on large-scale research projects.

LIFE SCIENCES     A survey released by Statistics Canada last February showed that the life sciences sector spent $532 million on R&D in 1999, while the number of companies grew by around 25 percent from the year before, including gains in such areas as aquaculture and natural resources. Around 75 percent of the country's biotech firms have fewer than 50 employees, making their real estate concerns easier to manage than more monolithic sectors. Forty percent of biotech firms are involved in human health, 25 percent in agriculture.

      It's only appropriate that such an event as BIO 2002 choose Toronto for the biotech field has chosen the city for some of its most astonishing advances, among them the creation of an anti-rabies vaccine and the invention of insulin at the turn of the previous century. Since then, a community of 7,000 researchers and 100 hospitals and medical research institutions has made the city the leading biomed cluster on the continent.
      Companies like Applied Biosystems Canada, Innova Technologies and Biogen flourish in the area. Toronto-area investments of recent vintage include a $224 million investment by Pasteur Merieux Connaught for an international cancer research center and a $64 million expansion by pharmaceutical firm Apotex Inc.
      A $64 million Medical Research Sciences Discovery District is coming soon, as is the $51 million Center for Molecular and Biological Research. And a 100,000-sq.-ft. (9,290-sq.-m.) commercialization center is on the horizon to take advantage of all the ideas that aren't already competing in this growing marketplace.
      Those already there are certainly busy. Medical research and manufacturing in Toronto generates more than $2.6 billion in revenue and employs more than 80,000 people. Strategic Health Initiatives President and founder Borys Chabursky, for one, is excited that BIO 2002 is returning to Ontario, giving the province "a global pulpit from which to tell about our successes and our opportunities."
      Chabursky's company is the largest biotechnology consultancy in the Canadian marketplace, and the man himself wears enough hats for a whole board of directors. But he just can't keep his excitement over biotech's possibilities within the confines of one job description.

Toronto-based Celestica was named the overall winner in the recent Tech 100 rankings by Canadian Business.     IBM Canada, which runs a software development lab in Toronto and is opening up another new facility, employs the most tech R&D personnel in the province, with right around 1,400 professionals. One of Big Blue's many spin-offs may be the country's most successful ICT story: Celestica. The company is among the top three firms in the global electronic manufacturing services industry, estimated to be worth $100 million now and as much as $500 million by 2005. The Toronto-based firm was named the overall winner in the recent Tech 100 rankings by Canadian Business. Next on the company's list: letting Japanese companies in on the outsourcing action -- perhaps with a pilot facility or two -- and proceeding toward the goal of $20 billion by 2003.

      "We analyzed 4,000 international companies that potentially could invest in Ontario biotech, narrowed them down to 350 hot prospects, contacted all of them at the senior level, and had a 35 percent response rate, which is amazing," he reports. "We've raised around $42 million in capital for academic institutions in the last 18 months, with another $64 million being raised right now."
      Chabursky is also the CEO of the Toronto Biotechnology Commercialization Center, which is a consortium of the University of Toronto and all the city's hospitals and one of three such centers in the province (the others are located in London and Ottawa) to receive a total of $13 million in funding. He's also involved in a venture called BioBrokers, which exists to bring together Canadian researchers with international investment dollars. It's just another way to build clusters.
      "People used to stop at the border, and now they're starting to take a look and say, 'This is an exciting environment,' " he says. "Biotech is estimated to be a $111 billion global sector in five years, so that's why we're going after it."
      One crucial element Chabursky has noticed is the education level of potential investors, a high-caliber mix of business acumen and scientific insight. Those people are interested in two life sciences streams: established areas like medical devices and pharmaceuticals, and emerging areas ("the wild stuff") like bio-photonics (where light activates drugs), pharmaco-genomics (which will eventually be matching drugs to individual needs) and the subatomic -- but economically stratospheric -- world of nanotechnology.
      "All of it really leads to efficiency or new thoughts in therapeutics or diagnostics," says Chabursky. "Ontario has taken the incredibly bold step by saying, 'We will be among the top three biotechnology clusters in North America within a decade.' "
      One reason he cites for Toronto's coming preeminence is the status of its research institutions and the individual researchers themselves: "Amgen has set up an institute in Toronto, around $6.4 million a year for 15 years invested, all because of one researcher -- that's the power of academic research," he says. "The discoverer of the cystic fibrosis gene is a researcher at the Sick Kids Hospital." Ontario has 62,000 total R&D personnel.