MARTIN DEE/ UBC COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING APRIL 2017 BCBUSINESS 17
T H E M O N T H LY I N F O R M E R
tmı
"We've got a couple of jokes in
the chamber network. One is
that the network is maybe
stale, male and pale" –p.23
A P R I L 2 0 17
INSIDE
Burning rubber in Oliver ... Ferries' future ... Politicians' promises ... Chamber remade ... + more
LAB WORK
Andre Marziali holds
a prototype of the
cartridge his firm's
OnTarget device uses
to process blood
samples
O
ne day in September
2014, Andre Marziali
gathered his team of
23 scientists in the lunch room
of Boreal Genomics Inc. The
director of engineering phys-
ics at
UBC had co-founded the
campus-based company, which
was working on a technolo‚y for
early cancer detection. Marziali
had bad news: he needed to
shrink the team, and about half
of them would lose their jobs.
"It was pain and shock for
a lot of people, but the †rst
thing that happened is one of
the people got up and gave me
a hug," he recalls. Somebody
wrote "Boreal Class of 2014" on
a whiteboard, and one by one
everyone signed their name. The
message is still there.
For three years, Boreal had
tried a more aggressive approach
to growth. In June 2011, Boreal's
board hired a new
CEO, Nitin
Sood, who had extensive experi-
ence in bringing new products
to market. Sood was based in
Silicon Valley, so Boreal opened
an o"ce and soon a lab there.
The company had recently
commercialized a machine
called Aurora that Marziali,
David Broemeling and Joel Pel
had invented in the two former
UBC students' basement suite.
About the size of a counter-
top bread-maker, the device
uses rotating electric †elds to
separate a
DNA sequence from
contaminants like soil.
But as the new o"ce opened,
Go Big and Come Home
Biotech company Boreal Genomics took a chance on
Silicon Valley–but staying in Vancouver turned out to
be a better plan
by Marcie Good
STARTUPS
"I get that
culture down
there—you
spend a lot of
money, grow
the company,
make it super
visible and
hope that
someone
comes and
invests large
amounts of
money. "
– Andre
Marziali
