In a city less than 30 minutes away from Toronto’s downtown core is an 82-acre parcel of land that is not earmarked for new condos, but instead, a full ecosystem driving healthtech innovation.
The City of Vaughan has partnered with Mackenzie Health, York University, and ventureLAB to develop a destination for healthcare innovation called the Vaughan Healthcare Centre Precinct (VHCP).
“The VHCP presents a truly unique opportunity for medtech innovators to gain access to a broad range of collaborators all within a single campus.”
Raphael Costa, Director of Economic Development at the City of Vaughan
Already home to Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital—Canada’s first smart hospital—the VHCP will convene partners across the healthcare sector to produce the next generation of healthcare practices, research, talent, and technology.
The site will also be home to York University’s forthcoming medical school, which will focus on training the next generation of primary care physicians and is expected to become operational in 2028.
Able Innovations, a robotic medical device startup, found its first champion in the City of Vaughan.
Before officially launching in 2018, CEO Jayiesh Singh was accepted into one of the Vaughan Business and Entrepreneurship Centre’s startup programs, securing early support and funding to help turn his vision into reality.
“It was symbolic for us,” Singh said about the investment. “Symbolic enough for us to begin operations. We’ve been working closely with Vaughan ever since.”
In addition to helping the company develop its first business model, working with the City of Vaughan meant Singh could take advantage of the city’s strong health tech ecosystem, connecting him to key contacts in manufacturing and at hospitals.
Today, Singh says partnerships are still crucial to the company’s ability to implement innovations. “It’s starting with finding those key individuals,” he explained. “And then there’s finding key healthcare partners. They could be partners that can manufacture technology. They could be partners that are connected with strategic players. It really helps to be in an ecosystem.”
Emphasizing the importance of building relationships, Singh said, “Everybody recognizes how hard it is to drive change, so it is absolutely critical and crucial for us to engage with healthcare professionals, and how we do that is we develop relationships through individuals across the decision-making suite.”
For example, the development of Able Innovation’s ALTA platform was completed in deep consultation with PSWs from Schlegel Villages long-term care centers. Jayeish held feedback sessions with clinicians who would be using his device to tackle the pressing problem of patient transfers.
Nurturing relationships with clinicians to inform, validate, and refine healthcare solutions is vitally important. Going forward, the VHCP will continue to make it easier for companies like Able to make these connections to clinicians in the Cortellucci Vaughan hospital and future long-term care home, and to future clinicians studying at York’s new School of Medicine. The specialties of these anchoring institutions are expected to create significant collaboration opportunities for innovators working in the areas of digital health, primary care, and aging care.
Similarly, relationship building is one of the core business skills that York University professor Ozzy Mermut hopes more educators will teach future researchers and healthcare professionals, in addition to creating structured agreements and protecting intellectual property.
As the Research Chair in Vision Biophotonics at York University, Mermut is currently working on a technology that allows very sensitive light emissions related to phototherapy to treat cancer.
“Our goal is to transfer this knowledge and discovery into a technological solution,” she explains. “That would involve partnering with someone from the medtech community to bring it to life.”
Proximity and access to leading research institutions are critical to generating and validating new health innovations. As a globally-recognized research institution, York University has 11 health-related faculties. Researchers from these faculties play an important role in leading new discoveries and generating intellectual property that can later be brought to market by entrepreneurs.
Emerging start-ups can accelerate their path to commercialization by collaborating with world-class healthcare partners in Vaughan’s ecosystem. One key partner is Sterling Industries, a contract manufacturer specializing in medical devices. As a host for ventureLAB’s Hardware Catalyst Initiative lab, Sterling supports start-ups in refining product design, meeting regulatory requirements, and scaling their go-to-market strategies.
With the Canadian healthcare system under stress, a core problem driving innovation right now is the capacity of healthcare professionals. “What they’re trying to do is free up the high-value resources, like surgical suites, surgeons, and surgical nurses,” said David Van Slingerland, CEO of Sterling Industries. “To do that, what we’re seeing is a lot more single-use products.”
The pressure to find efficiencies in healthcare is leading to breakthroughs in medical devices. Through ventureLAB’s Hardware Catalyst Initiative MedTech lab, a first-of-its-kind initiative in Canada, innovators gain access to critical equipment needed to test and validate their medical devices. Co-location of the lab with Sterling Industries also ensures that ventureLAB clients have access to industry-leading expertise and advisory support from Sterling’s team of engineers and manufacturing experts. When companies are ready to ramp up production, Sterling is well-positioned to support that next phase of their growth.
Developing innovations like this requires a collective effort, and that’s exactly what VHCP hopes to create. As Van Slingerland puts it, “It gives innovators one-stop shopping.”
“To get a medical device to market you need to do clinical studies, you need practitioners, doctors, technicians, nurses, that would be the end user of the device,” he said. “Vaughan and all the partners are putting together all the ingredients to churn out successful medical devices and solve clinical problems or healthcare resource problems. Those are the two biggest solutions.”
Raphael Costa, Director of Economic Development at the City of Vaughan, believes the VHCP is set to become a hub where innovators, startups, and leading companies can develop solutions that solve real-world healthcare challenges and build thriving businesses.
“The VHCP presents a truly unique opportunity for medtech innovators to gain access to a broad range of collaborators all within a single campus,” Costa said.
“Researchers, healthcare providers, clinical practitioners, patients, and innovation accelerators each play a critical role in supporting the development of technologies that solve real-world healthcare challenges effectively and at scale,” he added. “There is no other place in Canada that supports healthcare entrepreneurs in this way.”
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Join Vaughan at the frontier of health innovation. Connect with Vaughan’s Economic Development team to learn more about business opportunities for MedTech innovators.
Feature image provided by Office of Communications and Economic Development (OCED) at City of Vaughan.