Show Notes
Dr. Kostas Trakas is a pharma builder and former Johnson & Johnson executive, and co-founder of Exsilios Pharma — a Canadian specialty pharmaceutical company that sources FDA, EMA, and MHRA-approved late-stage assets and secures Canadian commercialization rights across rare disease, oncology, immunology, CNS, and cardiometabolic indications. He holds a PhD and a Master's in pharmacology from the University of Toronto, and spent over a decade at J&J in global marketing and market access leadership, including building companion diagnostic policy platforms and public-private partnership models across EMEA and LatAm. Before Exsilios, he led Exactis Innovation, taking Canada's largest oncology real-world evidence network from a grant-funded model toward commercial self-sufficiency. He writes and speaks publicly on where Canada's Life Sciences Task Force has fallen short, and is currently pivoting Exsilios toward developing early-stage Canadian IP into a genuine anchor company. In this conversation, Dr. Trakas and Natalie trace the entire pipeline from the ground up. It starts with the argument that Canada's most underused strategic asset isn't a new discovery at all — it's the tokenized, longitudinally-linked health data sitting inside a single-payer system, an asset the fragmented, privately-insured US system structurally can't replicate, and one Canada still won't let researchers actually access. From there it moves into funding: Dr. Trakas's own experience inheriting ten years of grant-funded operations and being told to make them commercially self-sufficient, his blunt dismissal of Canada's incubator and accelerator model as "checkbox" theatre, and the pension fund paradox where the Maple Eight are structurally barred by their own fiduciary rules from investing in the small domestic companies that need them most — a policy Canada wrote into its own regulations roughly twenty years ago and has never revisited. The conversation turns next to why Canadian founders default to selling rather than building — Dr. Trakas's own theory that Canadians settle for being what he calls the "second banana," happy to sell at the first good offer rather than aspiring to build the next Shopify — and what it would actually take to produce Canada's first true anchor companies and the biotech clusters that follow them. From there they dismantle the reimbursement gauntlet directly: Dr. Trakas's case for collapsing the PMPRB, CDA-AMC, and pCPA into a single agency instead of three sequential closed-door negotiations that can take a product two years to reach a single provincial formulary, set against the reality that Canadians access only about 18% of globally available medicines versus an OECD average of 28%. The episode closes on the geopolitical stakes: China's decade-long playbook of steel, then EVs, now life sciences, and why Dr. Trakas believes Canada can run the same playbook rather than keep funding runway for other countries to take off. 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 #InnovationEcosystem #LifeSciences #Biotech #Pharma #InnovationPolicy #EconomicSovereignty
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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.
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.
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.
Daniel Perry is Director of Federal Affairs at the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI), where he leads national advocacy on behalf of Canada's high-growth scale-up companies. Named to The Hill Times' Top 100 Lobbyists for 2026, he has testified this year before three House of Commons standing committees — Industry and Technology, Finance, and Citizenship and Immigration — each time making the same case: capital, customers, talent, and sectoral strategy aren't separate policy files, they're one connected problem. He holds a Master of Political Management from Carleton University and has written a bi-weekly political column for the Niagara-Hamilton Independent since 2021. The conversation turns to risk. Perry shares the story of a CCI member who couldn't crack Canadian capital, flew to San Francisco, and closed a deal with an investor over drinks at the airport bar — a deal they said would have taken six to eight months at home. He is candid about the branch-plant economy, where Canadians become the worker bees while the real value flows elsewhere, and why every foreign investment should face one question: where does the IP live? When CCI loses members, he says, it's usually because a US acquirer or investor pulls the leadership team south. On healthcare, Perry calls it a national security asset. He points to CCI's Care at Scale report, which estimates that better, more portable health data could save up to $2.4 billion a year, and warns that Canadian health data stored on foreign servers can be reached by foreign governments — making Canadian-built "maple stack" infrastructure a sovereignty issue. He closes with CCI's budget priorities: a Canadian QSBS, a startup visa, a Buy Canada policy that supports genuinely Canadian companies rather than those Canadian in name only, and a reminder, borrowed from Red Green, that we're all in this together — but duct tape won't fix it this time. 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 #InnovationEcosystem #LifeSciences #InnovationPolicy #Procurement #HealthData #EconomicSovereignty
Dr. Kean Birch holds the Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy at York University, where he has spent more than a decade studying the political economy of science, technology, and innovation. He is co-editor, with Fabian Muniesa, of Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (MIT Press), currently holds the Otto Mønsted Visiting Professorship at Copenhagen Business School, and co-edits the journal Science as Culture. His core concept, assetization, describes how things are turned into assets that someone can own, control, and extract future revenue from — a lens that reframes Canada's innovation problem as a question of ownership, not invention. In this conversation, Dr. Birch and Natalie start at the bench, where researchers and innovators run on opposite logics: researchers pursue what isn't yet known, while innovators know where they want to go but not how to get there. People who can do both are rare, which is why ecosystems have to deliberately bring them together. He argues that early founders need accessible money to take risks, not venture capital, which only a tiny fraction of companies ever touch. He traces Canada's sell-the-resource instinct into its financial system, where public markets reward banks and miners, and explains why acquisition beats IPO for investors: acquirers pay a knowledge premium that general public-market investors won't. The conversation turns to his sharpest diagnosis: finance has replaced innovation as the endpoint. Instead of using finance to fund innovation, the system now uses innovation to generate financial returns, and founders absorb that logic from day one, building toward an exit rather than a product, market, or company. He describes the "moments of valuation" every founder faces, from the first angel conversation to borrowing, acquisition, or IPO, each demanding a different story. On tokenization, he sees real potential to open startup investment beyond accredited investors, but only with a solid legal and regulatory foundation underneath. On health data, Birch is blunt: an individual's data is worth pennies, but pooled, curated, and de-identified, it becomes enormously valuable. His proposal is a data wealth fund, held collectively like a natural resource fund in a public entity at arm's length from the government, with the power to improve data quality and set terms for access. He closes on what governments must do to govern assetization rather than react to it: avoid investment commitments that lock future citizens into today's decisions, and stop concentrated capital from dictating the direction of innovation itself. 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 #InnovationEcosystem #LifeSciences #Biotech #InnovationPolicy #HealthData #EconomicSovereignty