Rory Carrillo moved to Thunder Bay from California to take a job with Tornado Medical Systems, a medical-imaging startup.Brent Linton for The Globe and Mail
Rory Carrillo grew up loving his native California for its heady brew of ideas and people, and the moderate weather that allowed him to train year-round as a triathlete. Yet three months ago, this son of Los Angeles washed up on the shores of Lake Superior – in the blue-collar Northern Ontario city of Thunder Bay.
"I wanted to go some place different," said Mr. Carrillo, 28, and few places could be more different than Thunder Bay, a city with a ravaged forestry industry, a proud but underused port, and long cold winters.
Mr. Carrillo is the new face of Thunder Bay, as it strives to pull off a near-impossible task for a once resource-dominated economy – to reinvent itself as a place where brains rather than commodities are the building blocks.
He has what The Lakehead desperately wants – knowledge, specifically medical-technology knowledge. He has a masters in biomedical engineering, and five years experience with a big medical devices firm in San Francisco.
Thunder Bay, with 114,000 people, is still identified with rocks and trees – mining in particular is strong again – and it is still a key gateway to the Middle and West of Canada. But Mr. Carrillo's employer – a medical-imaging startup called Tornado Medical Systems Inc. – is founded on a completely different kind of resource. It's one that could help the old port city, long identified with its cluster of grain elevators, come to be known for a new kind of cluster – in research talent.
"We've got to survive as a community," says Keith Jobbitt, a local lawyer who long ago observed the precarious nature of the city's resource-based economy and concluded that minds, rather than mines, are the only sustainable advantage.
"The old combination of the paper mill, the mines and the port are not the economic drivers any more. It's intellectual capital," Mr. Jobbitt says.
Mr. Jobbitt's tenacity drove the construction of an architecturally vibrant regional teaching hospital that opened in 2004 at a central location. At 70, Mr. Jobbitt is chairman of the region's medical research institute, a public-private body, aligned to the hospital and Lakehead University, whose core mandates include developing cutting-edge imaging technology for detecting and diagnosing disease.
There is a remarkable consensus among residents in support of these initiatives, but Thunder Bay still needs to shake off outsiders' stereotypes of an isolated mill town. It must be able to tap venture capital beyond local angels that have sustained the dream so far. It needs a continued flow of research grants to Lakehead and the research institute.
Thunder Bay has a 10- to 20-year window to make it happen, says Tornado's president, Stefan Larson, a former McKinsey consultant who spends a lot of his time on planes commuting between his home in Toronto and Thunder Bay. "It needs one strong bellwether company."
That core company is critical if the city is to become the medical version of Waterloo, Ont., which built a high-tech hub around a major university and spinoff companies, such as Research In Motion Ltd. and Open Text Corp. The breakthrough company could be Tornado, or it could be Mitomics Inc., which is developing molecular tests for prostate and other cancers based on mitochondrial genomes.
Or it might develop from the two DNA labs in the city – one university-owned, the other privately held – that garner headlines for uncovering serial killers or analyzing evidence from ancient and Biblical times.
But above all, it needs more talent. Mr. Carrillo admits he came to the city for the experience, and he will go back to California at some point. Thunder Bay is okay with that, confident that some globe-trotting adventurers will settle down in the city. Tornado, for one, is also benefiting from returning local talent, including exiles from RIM and Microsoft.
But the lure has to be more than family ties – there must be a lifestyle attraction. The city has a spectacular natural location, a symphony orchestra and a rich diversity of restaurants, but, as with most old industrial cities, there are areas of empty shops and deserted streets.
The city is tackling that problem with efforts to put public buildings, including a new courthouse, into some of the most run-down areas of the old Fort William. On the other side of town, there is the research cluster and new life on the old waterfront, with development under way for condos and a luxury hotel, along with a refurbished marina and space for artists.
But Thunder Bay competes in a talent marketplace where coveted workers can live and work anywhere. For example, Tornado, although founded by a Thunder Bay medical scientist and employing a growing engineering team in the city, has a major office in Toronto – close to the health sciences hub on University Avenue – and a research and development arm in Ithaca, N.Y., home of Cornell University.
Location is important, Thunder Bay officials agree, but it can be trumped by the opportunity to work on an exciting project. Steve Demmings, chief executive officer of the local economic development corporation, insists the concept of isolation is no longer as relevant. You can live anywhere and plug into a wired global knowledge network, he says.
Perhaps the biggest imperative in Thunder Bay is developing entrepreneurial drive – to find people who will follow the model of Dr. Bob Thayer, 74, a former Olympic wrestling coach who retired almost a decade ago from teaching bio-molecular science at the university.
He and a colleague started tossing around the idea of a new company to harness the properties of mitochondrial DNA. After long evenings – often at the fabled Bar Italia restaurant in meetings with local investors – they built Mitomics, whose first product is a more accurate test for prostate cancer.
Dr. Thayer still sits on the board while the company is now run by a professional manager. This fall, Mitomics is reviewing options which may include an initial public offering.
Today, the indefatigable Dr. Thayer can be found at another of his creations, the Lake Superior Centre for Regenerative Medicine, a non-profit tissue bank.
"There is nothing more exciting – and that gets your heartbeat going – than business," he says. "It's the most exciting thing I've done."