Is there any sector hotter than biotechnology today?

The number of biotech companies in Canada has soared more than 75% in the past 20 years, and they are spread out across the country. In fact, Canada has become a training ground for leaders, exporting talent to the rest of the world. What's more, it leads the world in the opportunities available to women.


Here are two women on top of their game:

Dr. Kathleen Pritchard, senior scientist in the Division of Medical Oncology and professor at the University of Toronto and clinical director of the Ontario Clinical Oncology group.

Ms. Pritchard credits her career in health sciences to her home town.

She grew up in Deep River, Ontario a stone's throw from Chalk River, home to Atomic Energy Research. Dr. Pritchard describes it fondly as being "in the middle of nowhere with between 2,000 and 5,000 people and had more PhDs per square inch than anywhere in the universe."

She's only half kidding. "There were lots of people who walked down the street thinking so hard they ran into telephone polls. We regarded them as eccentric scientists."

While neither of her parents were scientists, Dr. Pritchard says she and her friends were introduced to science by the time they could walk.

"Science was everywhere; particularly physics. We were all told science was the most interesting thing to do. I had a high school graduating class of 33 kids and seven of them enrolled in nuclear physics."

That was in 1964. Dr. Pritchard went on to honors science at Queens University before moving on to medicine. "I like working with patients and applying new treatments but I was also very interested in how you proved things."

It was in a third-year autopsy conference where she had to do an autopsy on a patient whose breast cancer had recurred after 15 years that she became interested in the disease.

Since then, Dr. Pritchard has gone on to play a key role in clinical breast cancer research and has advanced the standard of care for breast cancer patients worldwide.

"Breast cancer has turned into a disease with all kinds of targeted therapy and I'm interested in going into big clinical trials and picking out either retrospectively or by doing special studies in advance the groups of patients that will benefit most from therapy. That's a lot of what I do now," she says.

"I fell backwards into medicine but it was perfect for me because it's very practical and yet there is a lot of science. Even when you see patients, you can observe something that leads you to go back and ask a question and talk to scientists or pathologists and say 'how can we study this better?' "

Lyndal Walker, head of the Canadian commercialization organization for Abraxis Bioscience.

Ms. Walker's father steered her toward a career in nursing 20 years ago in Australia. A move to Canada, and the realization she was bored with her work led her to the University of Windsor where she took a degree in science, knowing she would pursue a career in the pharmaceutical industry.

"I was ready for a career change, and I wanted to set myself up for a career that would allow me to take a leadership role," says Ms. Walker.

"I was a prefect at my school. I was that personality that wanted to step up to the plate and so I targeted a career in the pharmaceutical industry. I started in a very junior level, but I was willing to take an opportunity and work hard."

Today, as head of the Canadian commercialization organization for Abraxis Bioscience Ms. Walker's role takes her around the globe to open up new markets for the company.

"We are providing a practice change drug in the treatment of breast cancer," Ms. Walker says.

"We launched the product 18 months ago. Within 12 months of having the drug approved in Canada we've had it reimbursed. We are getting the word out and explaining how it works, that's part of the biotech process. You are educating people about the new technology and what the impact is."

"I still wake up everyday loving what I do," Ms. Walker says. "The biotech industry is a very fast paced, evolving sometimes volatile business but you learn so much about yourself, about people and the process. It's a very exciting place to be. I don't think people should be fearful of it. It is a growing market."

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