OBI receives $100 million from Ontario to expand research, ramp up commercialization

The Ontario government has awarded $100 million over five years to the Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) with the proviso that it generates $80 million annually from other sources by FY17-18. The funding follows an initial seed grant of $15-million over three years that capped an effective advocacy campaign by several prominent philanthropists and industrialists to make the province one of the world's top centers for neuroscience research and commercialization (R$, November 29/10).

The new funding will allow the OBI to expand its research into the areas of depression and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's while continuing its work on cerebral palsy, autism and epilepsy. The province also requires the OBI to ramp up its leverage of external investments from 1:4 to 4:1 over the five years of funding.

"It's a relatively large burden for us but the government has been understanding. The money can go to one of our affiliated institutions and doesn't have to flow directly through out coffers to count. We feel confident we can achieve it," says Dr Donald Stuss, Obi president and scientific director. "The system we are setting up is sufficiently powerful to attract clinical trials to the province."

The OBI system is based on a collaborative, patient-focused approach to addressing brain diseases and related disorders and has a strong commercialization component, acting as a catalyst to bring together Ontario's research strength in neuroscience with its clinical and patient advocacy resources and strong business and manufacturing base.

The institute was launched following interventions from the likes Joseph Rotman, a Toronto philanthropist and chairman of Roy-L Capital and Dr Joseph Martin, co chair of the Harvard Neurosecretory Centre. Further impetus was provided during a trip to Israel by then premier Dalton McGinty, who met with Israeli president Shinto Peres who proposed collaboration between the two nations. The result was a $15-million seed grant through the Ministry of Research and Innovation (MORI) and secured from re-prioritized funding. At the time, then MORI minister Glen Murray told RE$EARCH MONEY that if OBI's backers were able to match the provincial contribution, further funding was likely.

Stuss says the agreement under the initial seed grant was for OBI to leverage an additional $6 million — an amount that was greatly surpassed with $26 million secured from other sources. To date the majority of leveraged funding has come from industry but Stuss anticipates greater philanthropic support once OBI becomes better established and its research programs begin to bear fruit.

The bid for new funding was backed by a review by an international panel which concluded that OBI and the province would benefit from an expansion of its research into new areas.

"We have excellent scientists and clinicians in Ontario but we're not punching above our weight in terms of impact. Our backer and scientific councils advise me on where Ontario can be leading edge and do research others are not doing," says Stuss. "And we're now changing the model by creating advisory panels for every program to determine the cutting-edge research to be done and the skills that are needed at the table."

OBI pulls together research expertise from 12 brain research centres situated throughout the province and has accumulated more than 40 industrial partners and input from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the National Research Council, the Government of Israel and the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev). The latter provided a $10-million grant last year which gave the institute even more leverage heft. It is also in discussions with Israel to see how OBI can benefit from that country's strong entrepreneurial and commercialization expertise. Acting as an intermediary is the Canada-Israel Industrial R&D Foundation, which specializes in company-to-company collaboration.

Stuss stresses that collaborators are sought out not only for their financial contributions but for their strategic commitment to enhancing and translating Ontario's neuroscience expertise writ large.

"We wanted a commitment to the vision, not just the money ... The value of the OBI is the interaction of people skills and talent," he says. "We want to expand our corporate partnerships but we also want to expand the types of involvement partners can bring."

In the area of training critical managerial talent, OBI has established an Experiential Education initiative which Stuss describes as a Dragon's Den for brain research. Winners are provided with $50,000 a year through the Ontario Centres of Excellence to create companies from promising research findings.

OBI has also spent $1 million establishing a Brain Centre for Ontario Data Exploration (Brain CODE) which leverages more than $100 million in existing infrastructure and contains information covering multiple brain disorders and data from a wide range of disciplines

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