The Saskatoon Bio Life Science and  Agriculture sector.

Saskatoon is home to the University of Saskatchewan and Innovation Place which are the hub of the Bio life sciences research cluster.

With 20,000 students and over a thousand faculty, the Saskatoon Campus is the largest university in the province. The University is home to seven accredited colleges in life sciences:

The university is primarily a teaching school but is also rich in world class research.  One such example is the Invention of  the first calibrated cobalt-60 unit for cancer radiotherapy treatment.

Research on campus is promoted through research institutes which are mostly joint ventures between the University, Government and the private sector.

Over a dozen such institutes provide world class research on everything from feeds to human vaccines. The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) alone holds 90 patents and has 7 vaccines in commercial use. Academic and private sector scientists have access to world class facilities like the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s s. Over 250 varieties of grains and oilseeds have been developed at the College of Agriculture, the Crop Development Center or the Agriculture Canada Research Station.

In addition to research institutes a group of support companies dealing primarily with analytic services have evolved around the cluster. These analytic laboratories can provide everything from the most basic proximate analysis to testing on BSE.

Finally as a result of these strengths a series of private sector companies have evolved based on these capabilities. Companies such as Bioriginal and Phenomenome originated with local entrepreneurs. Other companies like BioExx and Linneaus came to Saskatoon as start-ups, recognizing the development infrastructure available here.