Canada Does Not Lack Brains. We Just Export Them.

Dr. Gerry Wright has spent 33 years at McMaster University, and this year his lab had an extraordinary run: four new antibiotic candidates, including lariocidin, a discovery published in Nature that targets a vulnerability no antibiotic on the market currently exploits. He's also spent two decades on the other side of the table, reviewing grants for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and he's lived the commercialization gap firsthand, having founded and lost a company built on a single compound.In this conversation, Gerry walks through why discovery, the part Canada is genuinely excellent at, is the easy part, and why turning a Nature-published finding into an actual drug is close to impossible here. Getting a drug to market costs north of a billion dollars; Canada's entire federal health research budget doesn't come close. There's substantial funding for discovery, and essentially none for development, so promising science stalls at exactly the point where other countries start investing seriously.We get into how CIHR's own grant review process works from the inside: panels evaluating roughly 50 proposals at a time, funding success rates now hovering near 10%, down from 20-25% two decades ago, and why that scarcity quietly pushes reviewers toward safe, incremental proposals over genuinely novel ones, even when nobody intends it that way. Gerry explains why a well-intentioned new program meant to fund riskier science ended up building an entirely separate bureaucracy instead of reinforcing the systems that already work, and why the loss of five-year renewable funding matters more than it sounds, since it's what lets a lab actually retain skilled staff long-term.He makes the case for something Canada doesn't have: a version of the U.S. NIH's SBIR program, competitive, non-dilutive funding specifically for companies, not academics, that has underwritten a large share of American drug, vaccine, and diagnostics development for decades. We talk about why Canadian pension funds and banks stay parked in resource industries while U.S. capital treats biotech risk the way it treats a bet in Vegas, and why antibiotics specifically are one of the hardest sells in the entire pharmaceutical industry: curing a disease outright is, perversely, worse business than managing a chronic one.Gerry also talks candidly about what happened to his first company, built around a single compound discovered in his lab and published on the cover of Nature, that no Canadian investor would fund. It became a Delaware-incorporated company backed by NIH resources and Boston investors, and ultimately failed when an unexpected liability turned up late in development, the same risk every drug faces, just absorbed entirely by people outside Canada. He explains what he's doing differently this time: keeping the assets in Canada, diversifying beyond a single compound and beyond antibiotics into cancer targets, and raising non-dilutive funding from the UK and EU because that kind of support still doesn't exist domestically.Along the way: the insulin callback that keeps surfacing in this series (we don't manufacture it here anymore either), a former PhD student who had to launch his antibiotic-resistance-monitoring company out of New York because Canadian hospitals don't have the competitive incentive structure to pay for it, and Gerry's blunt read on the country's research culture: we don't lack brains, we don't lack ambition, we just export both.🎧 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

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