BC Business
Call it a mid-life crisis or a courageous leap of faith. In September, at 51, Carl Roy, president and CEO of Providence Health Care since May 2001, ended his 25-year career in the public health sector (before Providence he was president of Edmonton’s Caritas Health Group, as well as president and CEO of Sudbury General Hospital and St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Sudbury) to take on the leadership of Perceptronix.
BCB_Crossroads_250.jpg
Call it a mid-life crisis or a courageous leap of faith. In September, at 51, Carl Roy, president and CEO of Providence Health Care since May 2001, ended his 25-year career in the public health sector (before Providence he was president of Edmonton’s Caritas Health Group, as well as president and CEO of Sudbury General Hospital and St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Sudbury) to take on the leadership of Perceptronix, a cancer-detection biotech start-up with a heavy-hitting board of directors. We caught up with a slightly shell-shocked but revved-up Roy 13 days into his new job where, he admitted, “It’s the first time in my life that I’ve not had an assistant.” What’s the biggest difference between running a publicly funded hospital and a private biotech company? In health care, we never have to worry about our customers. They keep coming 24 hours a day. They just never stop. The supply is constrained by government funding, and the demand continues to outstrip supply. But the money always comes in, in contrast to a private-sector company like Perceptronix. We’re now at the stage where we have licensed products that have to be commercialized. At Providence, my construct was always about how we best use the taxpayers’ money in a responsible fashion. Here, there will be a return to the investors. I think that that’s fine. I’ve never had a particular philosophical conflict in looking at the public and private sectors. After 25 years in the public sector, what major shifts have you seen in health care in Canada? There’s a growing awareness that the system as we have it now just isn’t sustainable. As painful as that is for people to realize, if we continue on our current track of expenditures, we’re going to be spending 70 per cent of the entire provincial budget on health care. We need a dispassionate discussion that gets us away from the “for or against” argument. I want the system here for my kids and for my grandkids, but we’ve got to start to look at some different models.The premier’s gone and looked at models in Europe and other countries. I would never, ever advocate for an American-style system. Hospitals like St. Paul’s and VGH will always have to be there; they will look after the most specialized and most complex. But there’s an awful lot that I think could go else- where. With Providence, we were sending a lot of surgical procedures to private clinics because they can do them much more efficiently. What’s your strategy for Perceptronix? I’m joining a company that, unlike a lot of other start-ups, has a fairly robust pipeline of services. They’re all focused on the early diagnosis of cancer, the localization of tumours or lesions, and then the appropriate treatment. What’s really important is to get established locally and in our own country before we start to move the products out. We have approvals for two products and other products are in development. We’re also simultaneously going to go to the European Union and then to the U.S. market. Are you looking for more investors? We’re looking in Canada as well as the E.U. That will be very important to sustain our sales and marketing initiative and our product development. Any plans to go public? That relates to some of those business strategies. That would include any and all options. A lot of B.C. biotechs get to a certain level then get acquired. Do you see that happening here? It certainly is a business option that I know the shareholders will be looking at and considering. It’s pretty standard. When will your products hit the market? The ClearSign Sputum Test and ClearCyte Test, which is our automated cytometer, will be in the market by the second quarter of ’07, if not sooner. Anyone who is at high risk for lung cancer is a primary focus. So your strategy is to market to patients rather than doctors? Both. We’re at the stage of defining the best marketing strategies. We know from our preliminary market research that respiratory specialists, lung specialists, are going to have a significant role to play in determining the use of the tests. There will also be some direct marketing where that is allowable. How long do you anticipate being here? In the system I came from there was very little risk in terms of my continued leadership. I came into this with my eyes wide open. I will be here until the company’s objectives are successfully achieved. Then, I’m hoping to continue working in what I consider to be a hugely dynamic sector. There’s so much great work that’s happening through the BC Cancer Agency, through Genome BC, through the research enterprises at our teaching hospitals. What we’re missing is the leadership and the expertise to actually have those discoveries adopted in the market and grow those markets on a global scale. You’re now free of the bureaucracy and politics of public health care you alluded to earlier. What does that feel like? I’ve gone from a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year corporation with 6,000 staff and many docs and multiple sites, to a start-up of 40. It’s such a luxury for me to be able to focus and move from task to task in a logical way, as opposed to the crisis orientation that I’m used to. While we have a number of meetings here, I’ve noticed in a very refreshing way that these meetings are shorter, to the point and action-oriented. There is a dimension of efficiency that I think is focused on the real urgency to move.