Vancouver has two top-ranking universities – UBC and SFU – which means the city’s tech sector should be poised to grow with access to local graduates, but this is not happening, said Ali Tehrani, CEO of Vancouver-based biotech Zymeworks.
Instead, he said in a radio interview with Business in Vancouver May 30, graduates are looking to the U.S. for jobs that generally offer stronger wages and a higher-value dollar.
Retaining local university graduates will be key to developing more anchor companies, Tehrani said.
“We are not meant to be an incubator,” he said. “We’re meant to train the best, but more importantly, retain the best. We need more anchor companies and we need more companies that decide to stay, as opposed to, ‘I will go where the money is.’”
On May 1st,Business in Vancouver reported Zymeworks, which develops computing tools and protein modeling to better evaluate other drugs and tune them to identify and target cancerous cells for treatment, raised US$58 million through its initial public offering (IPO) and about US$150 million in total from investors.
In last week’s radio interview, Tehrani said the future of therapeutics is in personalized medicine that is tuned to an individual’s needs.
“It’s better to have a drug that works on a limited number of individuals, perfectly and 100% of the time, than a drug that works on a small set of population, but on a limited basis,” he said in the interview.
“Our tools, our capabilities and our approach give us that opportunity to develop fit-for-purpose therapeutics, which is a step towards personalized medicine.”
While there are provincial and federal initiatives – such as the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED, pronounced "shread") tax credit and the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) grant program – in place to help grow local tech businesses, they’re not equipped to support companies in the growth stage, Tehrani said.
“SR&ED was designed to only benefit early startups and just when you get to the growth stage, that program no longer supports you,” he said. “Why not extend that to growth-stage companies? Why are we punishing growth-stage companies by saying, you’ve gotten past all the difficult parts and as soon as things are getting interesting, we’re going to back off supporting you?
“We have to wake up and realize that we’re really good at a knowledge-based economy, except we haven’t made the transition, and we haven’t gotten to the courageous point of doing something about it. It actually doesn’t take a lot. Change SRED, expand IRAP, look at growth-stage companies and support their success as opposed to punishing them.”
