Medtech accelerator centre needed

With Canada’s 3rd largest tech sector in Waterloo, Murray Gamble sees an opportunity

WATERLOO REGION — The technology sector here, already the third largest in Canada, needs an accelerator centre for medical-related startups, says a veteran entrepreneur and engineer.

“We have been talking about this for a long time,” said Murray Gamble, the president of the C3 Group of Companies, during a panel discussion Wednesday at the third annual Waterloo Region MedTech conference.

“We need to do this for a bunch of reasons,” said Gamble.

Large corporations and government agencies work to minimize risk, often thwarting innovation in the process, so they turn to technology accelerators and incubators to take the early risks, said Gamble.

A med-tech accelerator would be a safe zone where the health care industry, budding startups, biotechnology companies, mentors, advisers, financial services and rapid-prototyping come together, he said.

“It is not a coincidence that the communities that have already done that are the leading communities for successful med-tech startups,” said Gamble.

In short, this region should do for med-tech startups what it has done for information-communications technology. Communitech, the University of Waterloo’s Velocity program and the Accelerator Centre in the David Johnston Research and Technology Park have produced a long and growing list of successful

startups.

But medtech startups face unique challenges, including long approval processes by government regulators, complex manufacturing, costly pilot programs and a funding system for health care that often discourages innovation.

Most if not all of these challenges have been solved by other startups in the past, and a med-tech accelerator would tap into the expertise, saving entrepreneurs time and money.

“That would be the number-one thing we could do to solve a lot of the issues that have been brought up this morning,” said Gamble.

There are many medical related startups currently in the region. About 20 per cent of the startups in Velocity and 30 per cent at the Accelerator Centre work in that field.

“We need to co-ordinate that,” Gamble said in an interview after the panel talk. “Help get some of these young companies through what I call the bureaucracy that is really limiting things right now.”

Health-care regulators are absolutely needed to protect the public, and that only underscores the need for a medtech accelerator that can take chances and weed out bad ideas.

“When startups come out of an incubator they already have some good proof behind them,” said Gamble.

At the other end of the Toronto Waterloo Corridor is the MaRS Discovery District, a large technology accelerator that commercializes medical related discoveries coming out of the University of Toronto.

Gamble said a med-tech accelerator in Waterloo Region should take an engineering-first approach instead of pursuing ideas that originate within the medical community.

“I think there is value in a different approach where innovation is coming from technical people, engineeringbased solutions applied to a medical problem,” said Gamble.

Bringing together engineers and the medical community, which understand the regulators and approval processes, can only speed up the introduction of new technology for hospitals, doctors and health-care companies, he believes.

“It is really about building a critical mass that attracts more companies, more startups, more people, more capital,” said Gamble.