Matthew Charles

Matthew Charles was like many other potential WestLink interns. He had earned a Master's in Immunology, but was at a crossroads in his career. He did not want to continue with his PhD and follow the academic career pathway as originally planned, so he started looking at other options.

As an undergraduate, Charles had a job at the Toronto Stock Exchange and it sparked an interest in combining finance and business with his science background. But when he finished graduate school and talked to biotechnology equity research analysts, he realized without any real biotechnology industry experience he would probably never land a similar job.

So he decided to move to Vancouver to gain some experience in technology commercialization before starting for the WestLink program. His first placement was with the University of British Columbia University-Industry Liaison Office (technology transfer). Working out of the Vancouver General Hospital on life sciences projects, Charles quickly learned how to make business plans attractive for company formation and to meet the interests of potential early-stage seed investors.

"I also really learned to develop a specific language when talking to scientists," says Charles. "You have to respect that they put their life into their work. But if we find in the patent database that it has already been invented you have to come up with a diplomatic way to say no this time, yet encourage them to keep dreaming up ideas."

In between his first and second placement, Charles and his cohort of interns went to England's Oxford University for a week-long conference on international partnerships and business development.

He then went to Centrestone Ventures, a life-sciences venture capital fund based in Winnipeg. The fund focused on medical device and biotechnology early-stage company investments, particularly those developing new uses for existing devices or drug therapies. This placement allowed Charles to use his background in science to help decipher which investment proposals might be the best fit for Centrestone. Even then, he quickly learned that if the science was strong, from a business perspective it still might not make sense.

"But if it did, that's when the valuation dance would begin," he says. "We would put out offer sheets and sometimes they would agree or sometimes we would have to walk away.

"That placement gave me a much stronger appreciation for the entrepreneur. It is a tough trek to go and find the next potential investor and to be shuttled around when all they really want to do is get their own company going. I was surprised to learn how much time and energy is focused on securing funding for a start-up."

Charles' final placement was with Sanomune, a biopharmaceutical company that focuses on the treatment of neurological and autoimmune disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. Now the manager of product development—he stayed on with the company after his internship finished in the fall of 2008—Charles' roles are varied. For instance, one of the company's products is a protein-based therapy that must be manufactured with a certain set of specifications. "It's a complicated process so I do such things as work with regulatory experts to make sure we know what we need to get the FDA on side with our product's development," he says. "We then have to look at how to move onto a much larger scale of manufacturing while taking advantage of various tax credits for doing the work in Canada. These are skills and gained knowledge being directly applied from my WestLink internship experience."

So far, he has also helped negotiate a license to bring in another technology from the University of Minnesota, put together marketing material to explain the company's technology and is currently exploring the development of a drug delivery device. Charles is still surprised to think it has only taken two years to get him to his current position. "WestLink gives you access to people you wouldn't have been able to talk to and now we have valuable network to show for it," he says. "It's like a working MBA—you can't trade this real life experience for textbook and classroom time.

"I also went through a lot of personal growth. When you are in a start-up environment, it's important to see if you can handle constant change. If you are thrown to the lions when given something completely new and unfamiliar to figure out on your own, you have to know how you can perform. I learned that if you can stick it out, you'll end up better for it and even become comfortable with constant change. That was a huge lesson and affirmed that working in a start-up environment was the best fit for me."