Canada and Israel exploring opportunities for collaboration in nanotechnology

Israel and Canada are moving to deepen their S&T ties at the company and research levels with recent meetings in Ottawa and Toronto to respectively discuss innovation and nanotechnology. While information is scant on the August 9th Ottawa meeting (chaired by National Research Council president John McDougall on behalf of Industry minister Tony Clement), the August 10th Toronto meeting brought together research officials and nanotech experts from across Canada to meet with their Israeli counterparts including chief scientist Dr Eli Opper.

The event — which followed visits to Israel by prime minister Steven Harper and Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty earlier this year — was broadened to include representatives from other provinces including Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia. Hosted by the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) program, the meeting provided an opportunity for Israel to promote its upcoming international nanotechnology conference (www2.kenes.com/nano/pages/home. aspx). It also provided a platform for the recently created NanoOntario, which was launched in January/10 to exploit the deep base of nanotech research and industrial activity in the province.

"Nanotechnology may be a key area of collaboration. There's a lot of momentum and exchanges of senior delegations," says Jonathan Levy, a Canada-based consul for economic affairs and trade commissioner with the Government of Israel. "The prime ministers met in May and the starting point of collaboration on innovation is the nanotech seminar."

The Toronto meeting evolved through discussions with senior OCE VP Mario Thomas and Nova Swersky Sofer, organizer of the The 2nd International Nanotechnology Conference in Tel Avis and former president and CEO of Yissum, the technology transfer arm of Hebrew Univ, Jerusalem. Swersky Sofer also sits on the board of the Centre for Commercialization of Research, a Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research operated by the OCE.

"We hope to see Canadian companies represented at the November conference. We will have a tailor made program to meet with institutions and companies to lay the basis for real collaboration," says Swersky Sofer, adding that no Canadian companies attended the inaugural conference last year. "There's a good potential fit in terms of active companies and their level activity … In Canada I see many areas of potential. Canada has some excellent research in nanotech and a pretty good concentration of strong industrial companies that use or will shortly be using technologies based on nano-tech."

The seminar featured a presentation on Ontario's nanotech capacity by Dr Marc Nantel, the OCE's director of collaborative research and talent programs and its resident expert on nanotech.

"Most of the discussion (at the Toronto seminar) was about S&T and nanotechnology and nanotechnology commercialization in Israel," says Nantel, who is completing a white paper on nanotech capacity in Ontario. "There are a lot of technologies in Ontario that could be useful in Israel, especially in the areas of water purification and crop protection."

For Dr Robert Crawhall, president and CEO of NanoQuebec, the Toronto seminar provided a first-hand opportunity to learn more about Israeli nanotech capacity, commercialization models and the potential for collaboration.

"A lot of Israeli technology has military roots. The culture in the military structure translates well in the start-up world," says Crawhall. "In the military, you fund it until it works and then transfer it to the civilian sector like the US and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) ... The Israelis work quite fast and Canada also wants to get on with it."

The meetings were also timed to coincide with a board meeting of the Canada-Israel Research and Development Foundation (CIIRDF), a longstanding industrial R&D collaborative agency that served as the template for other bi-national collaboration through International Science and Technology Canada.

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