February 2004
Cordiano positions Ontario as a hotbed for bio-business
Ontario's new Minister of Economic Development and Trade Joe Cordiano is aggressively promoting Ontario as a prime location for international investment in biotech.
Speaking to more than 300 European and U.S. biotech industry leaders in Switzerland, Cordiano notes that nearly all of the world's biomedical giants have operations in the province. "Ontario has everything bio-business needs to thrive: more than 38,000 industry professionals, leading medical education and research facilities, and some of the most valuable research and development incentives available anywhere," he said.
Ontario's biotech industry, which generates annual revenues of about $1.42 billion, is concentrated in a "bio-corridor" stretching from London to Ottawa, with centres in Hamilton, Waterloo, Guelph, Toronto and Kingston. This concentration of research institutions and biotech companies fuels innovation and provides a competitive advantage referred to as "cluster-power."
"Ontario has a long history of leadership in medical research, from the discovery of insulin through to the development of 3D imaging techniques," said Cordiano. He said the provincial government is working closely with the biotech industry and research institutions to build on this legacy "to make Ontario the best place to locate and expand a biotech business, turning leading-edge research into commercial reality."
The ORION network is seen as a critical infrastructure to enable to growth of biotech clusters in Ontario. In a recent address to the biotech sector in Ontario, ORION President and CEO Phil Baker emphasized the network's ability to connect research institutions with industry research. In remarks to a Networking Summit on the new Biotechnology Cluster Innovation Program (BCIP), Baker pointed out that Ontario currently has a competitive lead over other jurisdictions in the area of gigabit connectivity among other research and education institutions.
"ORION offers an ideal opportunity to establish virtual clusters of bio-medical and life science research, in partnership with ORION user institutions," he said.
R&D project methodologies are evolving rapidly to address new large-scale data and computational requirements. Access to large-scale data and computational resources in "real time" reduces researchers' wait time for data and results. Collaboration within and across regions is key to geography-based and virtual cluster development.
"ORION's gigabit infrastructure enables the seamless transmittal of data at this scale and magnitude and the degree of interactivity necessary for effective collaboration across distances. ORION gives Ontario a clear competitive advantage over other jurisdictions by deploying a telecommunications infrastructure of ORION's scope and capacity for R&E and R&D," said Baker.
Other jurisdictions are as far as 18 months behind Ontario in deploying this sort of infrastructure, he said. "We need to take advantage of this competitive lead."
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