Toronto businessmen Tom Ehrlich, right, and Michael Wilson, left, who launched Invest in Research which funds innovative research at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
The organizers: Tom Ehrlich and Michael Wilson
The pitch: Creating Invest in Research Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation
The cause: To fund research at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
Tom Ehrlich had just undergone successful treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital when he struck up a conversation with his oncologist about research.
The doctor lamented that donors were reluctant to fund novel ideas because they worried that the experiment might fail. “She said everybody wants to find the magic bullet but nobody wants to fund the gunpowder,” recalled Mr. Ehrlich, a real estate developer, investor and former chair of the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation. “Nobody is willing to give money to scientists to fail.”
That conversation was more than 20 years ago but it left an impression on Mr. Ehrlich. He knew from the venture capital world that for every successful start up there were many companies that don’t succeed.
“We’ve known through history many scientific discoveries are serendipitous,” he added. For example, he cited the discovery of insulin by Dr. Frederick Banting and Charles Best in 1921. They went through a number of failures before finally extracting insulin from a dog’s pancreas.
Mr. Ehrlich decided to devise a funding model that would encourage scientists, and donors, to take chances. He called it Invest in Research Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation and teamed up with Mike Wilson, a Toronto-based wealth adviser.
Under the program, researchers pitch their ideas to a group of donors who vote on which projects to fund for one year. Around three are selected annually and each researcher receives $100,000. If the venture shows promise, the scientists can use the seed money to find more sources of funding to continue their work.
Invest in Research has contributed $3-million in total toward dozens of projects. Several recipients have leveraged the initial investment and raised an additional $50-million in total. Some of the successful projects include non-invasive blood tests that can detect cancer and indicate the best treatment, an accelerated lung cancer diagnoses through liquid biopsies; and new treatments for acute myeloid leukemia.
“There’s been a lot of success and there have been some failures,” Mr. Ehrlich said. “But that’s okay, they learn from that.”