SickKids Commercialization Advisory Board
The Commercialization Advisory Board (CAB) is a group of experienced industry and investment leaders who provide strategic guidance to help advance SickKids innovations toward impact.
Jessica Chutter
Morgan Stanley
Vice Chair, Chair of Biotechnology Investment Banking
Jessica Chutter
Jessica Chutter is the Vice Chair and Chair of Biotechnology Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley. During Chutter’s over 30-year career of building Morgan Stanley’s Biotechnology Franchise, she has been responsible for $75 billion of capital raising and $85 billion of strategic transactions. Chutter is focused on company-building, examples of which include raising $3 billion for Moderna, $2.4 billion for GW and $2.2 billion for BeiGene. During the pandemic Chutter led 15 IPOs totaling $3.1 billion, including those for Canadian-based Repare Therapeutics and Fusion Pharmaceuticals. Strategic transactions include advising Agios in its Oncology Business sale to Servier, Galapagos in its $5.1 billion transformative partnership with Gilead and Company sales of Clementia, Cubist, Pharmasset and Elan. She has also been involved in the creation of a new asset class involving royalty-backed debt (PhaRMA) where over $30 billion has been raised.
Chutter has a BA in Commerce/Honours Economics from McGill University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Chutter is a director of Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners and a member of the Board of Trustees of The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and McGill’s Toronto Advisory Board. She resides in Toronto with her husband, Derek Berghuis, and has three children – Andrew, Jennifer and Kevin.
Theodore Witek
Lumira Ventures
Special Advisor
Theodore Witek
Currently a Special Advisor for Lumira Ventures, Dr. Theodore Witek spent nearly 25 years at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals in pharmacology and clinical research roles, including Director of Respiratory and Immunology Clinical Research, before becoming President and CEO of the company’s Canadian and Portuguese operations. He also led the Global Operating Team for Spiriva and served as Co-Chair of the Global Alliance with Pfizer.
Dr. Witek was previously Chief Scientific Officer & Senior Vice President, Corporate Partnerships, at Innoviva (formerly Theravance, Inc.). He has served on the Board of Directors of Canada’s Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (Rx&D), including as Chair of the Health Technology Assessment and Public Relations Committee, and was appointed to the Ontario Health Innovation Council as well as advisor to OCAD University’s Design for Health Program.
He is Professor & Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto’s School of Public Health and Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, where he directs the DrPH Program. Author of over 100 scientific papers and several books and chapters, Dr. Witek holds a Doctor of Public Health from Columbia University, a Master of Public Health from Yale University, and an MBA from Henley Management College (UK).
Michelle Doig
Omega Funds
Partner, Head of Corporate Development
Michelle Doig
Michelle joined Omega Funds in 2016. She has over 20 years of experience advising life sciences companies on private placements, public equity financing and M&A transactions. Michelle currently serves on the Board of Directors of Artios Pharma and BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics and is a board observer at Arrakis Therapeutics.
Previously, Michelle was Director of Corporate Finance at Third Rock Ventures, where she supported numerous portfolio companies through their initial private and public financings. Prior to joining Third Rock, Michelle was a Principal at Abingworth in London and Boston. She was also a life sciences investment banker with Lehman Brothers International in London, JP Morgan/H&Q in New York and Morgan Stanley in Toronto and New York. Michelle has executed more than 50 equity and convertible transactions and numerous IPOs, private placements and M&A transactions for companies, including Gilead, MedImmune, Millennium, Illumina and Sepracor. Michelle graduated with an Honor’s degree in Business Administration from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London.
Parimal Nathwani
Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners (TIAP)
President & CEO
Parimal Nathwani
Parimal Nathwani has over 15 years of experience in various aspects of the biotechnology industry including corporate finance, business development, transactions, intellectual property management, technology development and operations. He has been actively involved in forming and managing start-ups, preparing and executing on business plans, raising early-stage capital and in- and out-licensing activities.
Before joining MaRS Innovation, now Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners (TIAP), Parimal was a healthcare analyst with a boutique investment bank, where he conducted equity research on publicly-traded biotechnology companies in Canada and the U.S. He has also led commercialization activities out of BC Women’s and Children’s Hospital as part of his role at the University of British Columbia’s Industry Liaison Office, and was a research scientist at a start-up biotechnology company involved in drug discovery targeting ABC Transporters.
Parimal received his MBA from Simon Fraser University and his M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia. He currently sits on the boards of TRIUMF Innovations, Zucara Therapeutics, and Vasomune Therapeutics, and is an observer on the board of Encycle Therapeutics.
Rami Hannoush
Versant Ventures
Venture Partner
Rami Hannoush
Currently a Venture Partner operating across San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area, Rami Hannoush brings a unique combination of investment experience and deep drug discovery expertise to company creation efforts. Most recently, he served as General Partner at Mubadala Capital, where he built the firm’s U.S. healthcare platform and invested in early-stage life science companies. He was also Co-Founder and CEO of EpiBiologics.
Earlier in his career, Rami spent over 16 years at Genentech in R&D, where he held leadership roles including Area Head for New Therapeutic Modalities and Group Leader for multiple successful oncology and immunology programs.
Rami holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from McGill University and completed postdoctoral training in chemical biology and cell biology at Harvard University. He maintains strong networks in the Bay Area and San Diego as well as in Canada and the northeast.
Paul McCracken
CPP Investments
Managing Director, Growth Equity
Paul McCracken
Paul leads investments in growth stage private companies in healthcare. Prior to that, he was responsible for building the health care team and leading the launch and scale-up of multiple health care strategies for CPPIB Active Equities.
Prior to joining CPP Investments in 2009, Paul was a Senior Vice President at Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers in New York, leading the Health Care Desk-Based Analytics team for trading in public equities and equity derivatives. Previously, Paul held a series of positions in financial services, private start-up ventures, and strategy consulting.
Paul holds a BA (Hons) in Chemistry and English, a BSc (Hons) in Chemistry, and a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Queen’s University.
Ronald Cohn
The Hospital For Sick Children
President & CEO
Ronald Cohn
Dr. Ronald Cohn has served as President and CEO of the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, Canada since May 1, 2019. Cohn joined SickKids in September 2012 as the Chief of the Division of Clinical and Metabolic Genetics, Co-Director of the Centre for Genetic Medicine, and Senior Scientist at the SickKids Research Institute. He became the Inaugural Women’s Auxiliary Chair in Clinical and Metabolic Genetics in April of 2013, and joined the department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. In 2016 he was appointed to the position of Chief of Paediatrics at SickKids, and Chair of Paediatrics at the University of Toronto.
Cohn received his medical degree from the University of Essen, Germany. After his postdoctoral fellowship at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the laboratory of Dr. Kevin Campbell, he moved to Baltimore where he was the first combined resident in paediatrics and genetics at the Johns Hopkins University. He subsequently joined the faculty of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins where he became the director of the worlds’ first multidisciplinary centre for Hypotonia, which has earned national and international recognition. Dr. Cohn was also the director of the medical genetics residency program at Johns Hopkins.
He has received numerous awards including the David M. Kamsler Award for outstanding compassionate and expert care of pediatric patients in 2004; First Annual Harvard-Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics Award in Medical in 2006; and the NIH Young Innovator Award in 2008.
Over the last few years, Dr. Cohn has developed an interest in applying a concept of Precision Child Health to the care of children. His own research focuses on implementing genome editing technologies for the treatment of neurogenetic disorders.
Stephen Scherer
The Hospital For Sick Children
Chief of Research
Stephen Scherer
Dr. Stephen Scherer is recognized internationally for his pioneering research on the human genome and its role in genetic disease. His work focuses on gene copy number and structural variation, defining the genetic architecture of autism spectrum and related disorders, and building Canada’s capacity for translational genomics.
He has co-published more than 690 papers in leading journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Science. His discoveries have been widely covered in global media such as The New York Times, Globe and Mail, Time, and Scientific American, and he is a frequent contributor to national outlets including CBC. Dr. Scherer was named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher and, in 2014, a Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate for his discovery of large-scale copy number variation and its link to disease, earning him a place in the lifetime Hall of Laureates.
He directs The Centre for Applied Genomics, which has managed over $100M in revenues in the past five years, and the University of Toronto McLaughlin Centre, a $50M endowment supporting research and education in genomic medicine. To date, he has secured more than $350M in research funding, supervised nearly 120 graduate, postdoctoral, and visiting fellows, and delivered over 440 invited presentations in 29 countries.
Dr. Scherer has also founded or co-founded several major initiatives, including the Autism Genome Project, The Canadian Personal Genome Project, The Database of Genomic Variants, the Autism Speaks MSSNG 10,000 Project, the CANSEQ150, and most recently the Canadian COVID-19 Host Genome Sequencing Project.
