Neelam Bance is a health care entrepreneur who spent most of her career in the pharmaceutical industry, in sales and marketing across diabetes, mental health, neurology and oncology at companies like Eli Lilly and Sunovion, before moving into health technology and precision medicine. She co-founded MedGeneius, a software platform that translates pharmacogenetic test results into guidance that helps clinicians choose the medications most likely to work for each patient. She is now co-founder and CEO of ODINsight Canada, which aims to securely connect Canada’s health data contributors and beneficiaries to fuel breakthroughs, accelerate innovation and drive economic growth. She is also Director of Business Development, Specialty Therapeutics, at Auxilium Health. Neelam founded the Asha Alliance, sits on the board of Yellow Brick House, and holds an MBA from the Schulich School of Business and a biology degree from the University of Toronto.

Neelam starts with what pharma taught her, and why it began to feel like “rinse and repeat”: global teams set the strategy, and Canada localized it. A sudden personal upheaval made her fearless. She asked herself what the worst that could happen really was, and for the first time in her life she took a chance on herself.

She then takes us inside pharmacogenomics, where she says 99% of people, including many physicians, don’t know what the test is. Pharma launches drugs with armies of reps and medical science liaisons. Pharmacogenomic companies have to raise awareness across every specialty with a fraction of those resources. She explains why payers look at the cost of a cheap antidepressant instead of the cost of a patient who never gets back to work, and how Ontario began funding DPYD testing only once the evidence of patients dying from a common chemotherapy drug became impossible to ignore.

The conversation turns to building a company outside the university grant system. Neelam bootstrapped while juggling three jobs, and promoted the only product she had at first: herself. Her advice to academic founders is blunt: nothing sells itself. She explains how a chance conversation at a MaRS event with a Canadian who had advised the White House led to ODINsight Canada, a consortium designed to let private health data holders, from clinic medical records to insurers and start-ups, share what their data contains without handing it over. The aim is to make Canada a place where pharmaceutical companies want to run their trials.

Her one lever for success is trust. Building it takes time, conversations and the right people in the room, which she calls “the Canadian way.”

This is Breaking Innovation Paralysis: research for a book on why Canada keeps losing the cures, capital, and companies it builds. Not a promotional platform, an honest look at the structural gaps: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility.

If this shifted how you think about Canada’s innovation gap, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

🎧 New episodes weekly. Subscribe for more honest conversations with the people building, gatekeeping, and navigating Canada’s innovation journey.

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#BreakingInnovationParalysis #CanadianInnovation #HealthData #PrecisionMedicine #Pharmacogenomics #DigitalHealth #LifeSciences #ClinicalTrials

Bob Mighell is a serial entrepreneur who has spent nearly four decades building, scaling, and exiting companies. His first, Edge Snowboards, launched in 1985 at the start of the snowboard revolution. He then spent 20 years running World Medical Equipment, which outfitted surgical suites with high-end capital equipment and made the Puget Sound Business Journal's list of fastest-growing private companies eight times. He went on to found Tilting Motor Works to commercialize his own patents on tilting three-wheeled vehicles, sold it to publicly traded Arcimoto, and set two FIM world land speed records for three-wheeled motorcycles at the Bonneville Salt Flats. After nearly three years as entrepreneur in residence at the University of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business, he did something unusual: he moved to Canada. He is now founder and CEO of Chondros Bio, a UBC spinout developing a regenerative hydrogel implant to repair cartilage and bone, and mentors startups with Creative Destruction Lab and Entrepreneurship@UBC. He holds engineering degrees from Dartmouth and an MBA from the University of Washington.

In this conversation, Bob and Natalie start with what two decades of selling into operating rooms taught him. In the US, he sold directly to the OR supervisors who held the purse strings. In Canada, buying decisions sat at the provincial level, and offering refurbished equipment at a third to half the cost of new, with an equal or better warranty, got no traction at all. He then takes us inside university tech transfer, where he estimates 80 to 85% of IP sits in a folder because no one is there to champion it. UBC did something rare: it combed its own portfolio and recruited an outside founder to commercialize a promising technology. He explains why the license is the company, why his first term sheet was a deal-breaker, and why universities move at a very different speed from business.

The conversation turns to capital and the road to market. Chondros Bio faces a seven-to-eight-year path to FDA approval, which means finding patient investors. A competitor's approval, and its roughly $330 million acquisition by Smith & Nephew, cleared both a regulatory and a reimbursement path for him. He is candid about why medtech goes south first: approval costs about the same in Canada as in the US, for a market a tenth the size. He knows three Canadian-founded companies that moved to the US for funding, one of which reincorporated in Delaware for US investors.

His one ask of Ottawa is a Canadian SBIR: true grants companies can draw on like an ATM, rather than matching or reimbursement funding that forces founders to find the money first. Without it, he warns, the US researchers Canada is now recruiting may do their science here and build their companies back home. He closes on a personal note: married to a Canadian, he's here to stay, and so is Chondros Bio for as long as he can keep it here.

This is Breaking Innovation Paralysis: research for a book on why Canada keeps losing the cures, capital, and companies it builds. Not a promotional platform, an honest look at the structural gaps: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility.

If this shifted how you think about Canada's innovation gap, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

🎧 New episodes weekly. Subscribe for more honest conversations with the people building, gatekeeping, and navigating Canada's innovation journey.

🔗 Questions, feedback, or want to connect? https://augmentios.com/contact

📩 Subscribe to my LinkedIn Newsletter: https://bit.ly/BIPLinkedInNewsletter

#BreakingInnovationParalysis #CanadianInnovation #TechTransfer #MedTech #LifeSciences #SBIR #Commercialization #RegenerativeMedicine

Dr. Zayna Khayat is one of Canada's best-known health futurists. She is Chief Program Officer at AMS Healthcare, a nonprofit working toward AI-ready, compassionate health systems, and adjunct faculty and executive in residence at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, where she has taught healthcare innovation since 2011. Until recently she was health futurist in residence with Deloitte Canada's healthcare and life sciences practice. Before that, she led the Health System Innovation Platform at MaRS Discovery District, served as innovation sherpa-in-chief at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, and co-founded the Dutch Ministry of Health's Health Innovation School. She co-authored Future of Aging at SE Health, began her career with a PhD in biochemistry from U of T and SickKids, and was a principal in BCG's health practice. She has keynoted from South by Southwest to the Aspen Ideas Festival.

In this conversation, Khayat and Natalie start with why she traded "innovation" for foresight. Her test is simple: unless something unlocks five times more value than the status quo, it isn't innovation. Since ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, she argues, the foresight planning window has collapsed from ten-plus years to about three. She makes the case for a new way of funding research (when everyone has the same grant writer, scoring can no longer separate the best ideas) and describes an era of AI-accelerated science in which drug discovery that once took 15 years and $3 billion may take 18 months and $10 million. New entrants like Google and OpenAI are moving in fast; she notes that OpenAI's foundation alone has a $25 billion life sciences fund, "like 12 CIHRs" from one company.

The conversation turns to risk. Khayat argues that Canada's real barrier is mindset: we are wired to spot every risk but rarely calculate the opportunity cost of not acting, and until that changes, capital alone won't fix it. She urges founders to look beyond traditional venture capital to venture philanthropy, family offices, donor-advised funds, and the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in Canadian history, and to spend a third of their time telling their story.

On sovereignty, she sees a hidden Canadian advantage. Hospital records sit largely on American EMR systems, but most other Canadian health data lives on Canadian-built platforms in primary care, home care, and long-term care. She closes with a reason for optimism: Canada's brand is at an all-time high, and startups are fielding inbound calls from partners who no longer want to do business with the US. It's a window few could have seen coming three years ago.

This is Breaking Innovation Paralysis: research for a book on why Canada keeps losing the cures, capital, and companies it builds. Not a promotional platform, an honest look at the structural gaps: inertia, risk aversion, and diffusion of responsibility.

If this shifted how you think about Canada's innovation gap, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

🎧 New episodes weekly. Subscribe for more honest conversations with the people building, gatekeeping, and navigating Canada's innovation journey.

🔗 Questions, feedback, or want to connect? https://augmentios.com/contact

📩 Subscribe to my LinkedIn Newsletter: https://bit.ly/BIPLinkedInNewsletter

#BreakingInnovationParalysis #CanadianInnovation #HealthFutures #LifeSciences #AIinHealthcare #DrugDiscovery #HealthData #EconomicSovereignty