Next Phase Newsletter

By Michael Quigley, VP of Market Research, LSN

Your idea may be brilliant but is your marketing collateral doing it justice? LSN is launching a contest to find out.  This week, we’d like to see your logo and tagline. Send in your logo and tell us the 5-7 word tagline for your startup, and we’ll feature the best submissions in a future edition of this newsletter, which will go out to 40,000 readers around the world.  It’s a fantastic platform to reach investors and strategic partners interested in your space.

Marketing is LSN’s DNA.  Our guide to building a consistent marketing message covers the vital elements of marketing your company.  Here are the key elements that investors will want to see:

In our years of working with early stage life science companies we’ve observed that companies that lack consistent, concise messaging often lose what would otherwise be interested investors simply because they couldn’t understand your core value prop or they misunderstood what you are working on.  And it all starts from the logo and tagline.

Your marketing package needs to convey, concisely and consistently, who you are and what your company does.  A logo therefore visually represents your company’s brand.  The tagline then distills your company’s vision down into its most concise form – generally 5-7 words.

Additionally, a fully developed marketing package should include an elevator pitch, an executive summary, and a pitch deck, with a website that builds on all these elements to showcase your company.  We’ll explore these elements in future editions.

Check out our guide on how a great set of marketing collateral is structured.  In the meantime, send LSN your logo and tagline – we’ll offer our professional opinion, and will share our favorites in a future issue of Next Phase.

By Shaoyu Chang, MD, MPH, Director of Research & Asia Business Development Liaison, LSN

The Asia Pacific region represents a diverse healthcare marketplace, where each country comes with a unique set of challenges including regulatory approval, reimbursement, distribution channels, and healthcare practice. North American startups can benefit from working with strategic partners who could help them navigate the complex landscape. Corporations from Asia Pacific are also strongly motivated to seek collaborators from overseas.

In the biopharma field, Japanese big pharmaceutical companies have entered the global biopharma arena through M&A since 1980s. Now armed with strong R&D capability, they are looking to collaborate with biotech startups and commercialize their products globally. Chinese pharmaceutical firms are jumping into the fray in recent years, with an aim to modernize China’s pharma industry and obtain an entry portal to advanced economy markets.

Opportunities are abundant within HealthTech. Many investment groups from Asia are focusing on medical devices, diagnostics, and genomics that are faced with lower risks and shorter development time. In addition, traditional IT, manufacturing, and food industries in Asia are looking to break into healthcare. By working with them, entrepreneurs could also gain support in software development, engineering, prototyping, and manufacturing.

RESI Toronto provides an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs to meet potential Asian partners face-to-face. Two exciting panels are organized on pharma and HealthTech, respectively:

Asia Pharma Partners

• Richard Soll, Senior Vice President, International Discovery Service Unit, WuXi AppTec (Moderator)
• Weiyong Sun, Senior Director External Scientific Affairs, Daiichi Sankyo
• Tianle Redanz, BD Director, Simcere Pharmaceutical
• Hiroshi Kawai, Vice President, Mitsubishi Tanabe Holdings America

Asia HealthTech Partners

• Jean Yao, Managing Partner, Med Qiao Group (Moderator)
• Akihiro Maeda, Manager, Business Development, Teijin Pharma
• Angela Mah, Vice President, Global Business Development, InTeahouse
• Zishan Haroon, Chairman and General Partner, Julz
• Zoe Zhang, Regional Manager, BGI Americas Corporation

By Sarah Mortimer, MaRS Discovery District

A growing revolution in healthcare is fueling innovation and increased government spending in the sector, while opening up new opportunities for investors.

Today, thanks largely to mobile devices, people are collecting more personal health information than ever before, including family medical histories, symptoms, biometric data, and food and drug intake. Experts have taken to calling this wealth of information “big data” or the “quantified self.”

This democratization of the healthcare sector—where both doctors and patients are involved in the healing process—is driving increased spending in the system, which, in turn, is fuelling new health innovations and greater interest in the sector from venture capitalists.

According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, health spending in Canada was expected to reach $228 billion—or $6,299 per Canadian—in 2016, signifying the government’s strong commitment to advancing this sector. And this is just the tip of the global iceberg. Between 2015 and 2020, the world’s major regions are expected to see healthcare spending increase from 2.4% to 7.5%, according to a recent healthcare report by Deloitte.

“Canada has always had a very strong ecosystem for driving innovation in health sciences, particularly in medical imaging, equipment and devices,” says Dan Mathers, investment director at the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund. “The vision here is big.”

Toronto in particular is perfectly poised to leverage the investment trend. The city’s infrastructure includes all the necessary pillars for a healthcare pipeline — from leading hospitals and medical centres to innovation hubs and research facilities. In fact, some of the world’s leading medical institutes call Toronto home, such as Mount Sinai Hospital and the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, among many others. According to the Government of Canada, “over 50% of Canada’s life sciences companies are located in the Toronto region, and the Toronto biotech cluster is the largest in Canada.”

Much of Toronto’s healthcare epicentre is located in the city’s Discovery District, a 2.5-square-kilometre region in the heart of its downtown core. Not only does the Discovery District represent the greatest concentration of research centres, startup incubators and other business development services in all of Canada, but it’s also the world’s densest geographical area for research.

With such an active life sciences scene, it’s not surprising that Toronto continues to attract and retain a growing number of high-growth startups working in some of the hottest healthcare segments.

“Investors are beginning to take note of Toronto as an under-tapped market for cutting-edge biotech and life sciences startups,” says Ying Tam, acting managing director of health venture services at MaRS. “Events like next week’s RESI on MaRS conference and MaRS HealthKick will give international investors an opportunity to meet with founders and scout the region’s most promising emerging health technologies.”

“The recent increase in the size of investments in the Toronto market reflects the quality of science and innovation in fields such as regenerative medicine and neurosciences,” says Mary Haak-Frendscho, a venture partner at Versant Ventures and the CEO of Blueline Bioscience.

Venture capital and private equity firms from around the globe are also being drawn to Canada’s medical device and equipment sector, which ranks ninth in a global context, according to Global Affairs Canada. The same government report estimates the sector’s worth to be $6.8 billion, with additional exports totalling $1.9 billion.

“There’s a lot of activity here,” says Mathers, referring to successful medical device companies such as Perimeter Medical Imaging, Synaptive Medical, eSight and Intellijoint Surgical.

All in all, the boundaries between the possible and impossible are constantly being redefined in ground-breaking ways—especially in Ontario. In the words of Dan Mathers, Toronto’s healthcare scene presents the “ability to turn what was previously science fiction into real-life solutions.”