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.

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