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Melissa Martin, chair of the St. Michael’s Foundation, right, with Dr. Darren Yuen, nephrologist and physician at St.
Michael’s Hospital, left, and his lab partner Eno Hysi, a scientist at St. Michael’s, on Dec. 11, 2024.
Yuen and Hysi are the winners of Angels Den 2024. Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail Darren Yuen won $250,000 at the country’s biggest medical research competition this fall by showing an audience of 1,000 what happens when you fill a clear balloon with thick red liquid and stab it with a needle. The nephrologist at Toronto ’s St.
Michael’s Hospital turned showman to demonstrate the dangers inherent when a kidney biopsy – a relatively common procedure – goes wrong. As the needle hit the balloon, which substituted for the organ, a geyser of fake blood spurted into the air, simulating the internal bleeding that can put a patient in intensive care . Dr.
Yuen delivered his show-stopping demonstration at the latest edition of a 10-year-old fundraiser called Angels Den. In 2014, the St. Michael’s Foundation launched the event as a way to urge donors to back the hospital’s research.
The evening is patterned after CBC’s Dragons’ Den , where entrepreneurs try to win startup money from judges. Stage presence and the potential to scale his lab project earned Dr. Yuen and his collaborator Eno Hysi seed money to build his invention, a non-invasive ultrasound kidney scanner the size of a cellphone.
His next challenge is to join a growing list of Angels Den winners who turned their ideas of how to better deliver health services into promising Canadian medical businesses. Since its first event, staged in a classroom with 50 donors, the downtown hospital fundraiser has cracked the elusive code for turning what works in a lab into commercially successful companies. So far St.
Michael’s Foundation has handed out $5.8-million to support 80 projects. The competition now takes place before sellout crowds in Toronto’s Koerner Hall, part of the Royal Conservatory of Music.
The event built its profile by landing judges known for stints on Dragons’ Den , including Joe Mimran, founder of Joe Fresh and Club Monaco, and Mike Wekerle, co-founder and head trader of investment bank GMP Capital. This year, it recruited former CTV anchor Lisa LaFlamme and science journalists Dan Riskin and Samantha Yammine (who has a PhD in neuroscience) as judges. Contestants have launched 33 devices, tests and treatments, 17 of which earned patent protection.
Scientists who competed at the event have gone on to raise an additional $23.8-million in funding from outside backers. “The hospital has become an incubator for health care innovations with global reach,” said Melissa Martin, chair of St.
Michael’s Foundation. “Despite facing this fragile moment in health care, I’ve actually never been more hopeful about the future.” Angels Den’s startup money has to led to nine companies so far.
Their products include a vest slipped on sick babies to help them breathe, an AI program used to treat multiple sclerosis and an app called MyEndo to assist patients dealing with often painful endometriosis. Other recent winners from St. Michael’s research that have the potential to become businesses include a robotic surgery project and a device to vacuum up kidney stones.
“Our primary goal is to find solutions to the toughest health challenges, not to simply commercialize research,” said Ori Rotstein, a surgeon and vice-president of research and innovation at Unity Health Toronto, which operates three hospitals including St. Michael’s. “However, one of the great successes of Angels Den is how it has evolved as a pathway to commercialization of great ideas.
” Angels Den’s most successful graduate is Mimosa Diagnostics, which makes hand-held imaging devices used to assess skin wounds, including bed sores and slow-healing foot ulcers on patients with diabetes. The MIMOSA platform allows health care professionals to track patient data over time, which improves decision making. One of Mimosa’s co-founders is Karen Cross, a plastic surgeon who watched her grandfather lose his leg, then his life, owing to a lack of accurate assessments of a diabetic foot ulcer.
In 2015, she was gathering data on skin wound diagnostics when a lawyer friend introduced her to General Leung, a physicist at St. Michael’s who specializes in medical imaging. Over three months, the pair came up with a concept for a device that imaged wounds and determined tissue health by measuring oxygen levels.
Support from friends and family brought in enough money to build a prototype. It was four metres tall and weighed 81 kilograms. In 2016, the two doctors, who had never pitched an investor for money, asked Angels Den judges for $100,000 to build the first version of a device meant to fit in a doctor’s or nurse’s pocket.
“All I can recall about that night is how nervous I was going on the stage, and how amazing it felt when we left with an endorsement of our work,” said Dr. Cross. Mimosa’s device subsequently won approval from U.
S. and Canadian health regulators and is in use across North America. The company employs 25 people in Toronto and Halifax and plans to launch additional diagnostic products within two years.
“Angels Den was the kick-start that helped Mimosa become reality,” Dr. Cross said, adding that beyond the money, winning the competition gave the startup credibility in financial and legal circles. “We need more events likes this to support innovative medtech companies in Canada.
” As Angels Den started drawing larger crowds in recent years, Ms. Martin and event co-chair Gwen Harvey increased the size of the winners’ prizes to $250,000 from $100,000. Every researcher who competes receives a minimum of $25,000 for their project.
The foundation also expanded the scope of the contest, with one $250,000 cheque for medical discovery and a second of equal size for health system innovation. The reality TV feel of the event has sparked impromptu donations from the crowd. At the last contest, in October, two members of the audience came forward after the show and donated an additional $250,000 to two of the competitors.
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