BCBUSINESS.CA
E N T R E P R E N E U R O F T H E Y E A R 2 0 2 2
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 BCBUSINESS 59
W
hen Euan Ram-
say met James
Taylor in 2009,
he knew that his life was about
to change: "Suddenly, me
doing a three-year apprentice-
ship could be replaced by an
instrument that's sort of like an
espresso machine." At the time,
Ramsay, who hails from Scot-
land, was working as a postdoc-
toral fellow with physicist and
biochemist Pieter Cullis at the
Centre for Drug Research and
Development (
CDRD), a local
technology transfer group.
Armed with a PhD in
nanoparticles, Ramsay origi-
nally came to Canada circa 2001
to work at the BC Cancer Agency
with Cullis's first postdoc, Mar-
cel Bally. It wasn't long before he
ended up at the
CDRD.
"Normally, drugs are just
one molecule," Ramsay ex-
plains. "Nanoparticles are
composed of hundreds of thou-
sands of molecules brought
together in a particular way to
form the particle."
Although he was working as
the business development man-
ager (looking for non-dilutive
funding, grants and founda-
tion awards to support the
programs moving through the
CDRD), he knew what it took to
make those particles himself.
Making them can be more
of an art than a science: "It was
W I N N E R S
Euan Ramsay + James Taylor
C O - F O U N D E R S , P R E C I S I O N N A N O S Y S T E M S