February 18, 2025

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The Westons have donated to health and environmental causes for years. Now they’re backing startups in both areas

The Westons have donated to health and environmental causes for years. Now they’re backing startups in both areas
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The Weston family, which controls publicly traded grocery giant Loblaw Cos. Ltd., owns billions of dollars worth of private assets through Wittington. Galen Weston, president of Loblaw, speaks to reporters in Ottawa, on March 8, 2023.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press

After donating hundreds of millions of dollars to environmental causes and health research, Canada’s billionaire Weston family is now backing innovative startups in both areas.

The family’s Wittington Investments Ltd. is set to announce this week the first deal by its new innovation fund, which seeks to bankroll fledgling companies looking to turn cutting-edge health and climate technology research into marketable products. Wittington Innovation Fund is leading a $14-million venture capital financing by Grey Matter Neurosciences Inc., a startup aiming to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related brain disorders with an emerging mode of treatment known as focused ultrasound, using technology developed by the Sunnybrook Research Institute.

Publicly funded Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners (TIAP), Ontario Centre of Innovation and Ontario Brain Institute are also backing the deal.

“The family for decades has funded research in the area of neurodegenerative disease, so we have a wealth of knowledge around that area” at Wittington, said Jim Orlando, managing partner, Wittington Ventures, who is overseeing the fund. “Canada doesn’t have a strong track record of commercializing fantastic research. So we just decided it was time.”

Several wealthy individuals and families in British Columbia and Quebec have made big investments in early-stage life-sciences companies and venture funds, but there are relatively few such investors in Ontario. That has contributed to a funding gap for domestic medical-device developers. TIAP chief executive officer Parimal Nathwani said in an interview that the Wittington fund is “quite meaningful for the community,” calling the Grey Matter deal “a significant opportunity for us to actually build a company rather than have it be drip-fed a million or two million dollars at a time and stumble along” – which is often the case.

The Weston family, which controls publicly traded grocery giant Loblaw Cos. Ltd. L-T, owns billions of dollars worth of private assets through Wittington. It has shifted its private investing strategy in recent years, selling British luxury retail company Selfridges & Co. in 2021 and redeploying some of the estimated $6.9-billion in proceeds into private equity and growth equity investments in disruptive retail and consumer-products companies. Wittington has backed technology startups since starting an in-house venture capital unit in 2019, led by Mr. Orlando, a veteran private capital investor.

Wittington Ventures has made 14 investments, but just two in Canada. Mr. Orlando said the new fund would take a more focused approach to Canada, either backing Canadian startups or foreign companies that license intellectual property from domestic research institutions. “Obviously it’s our hope that it’s Canadian companies that are commercializing the research,” he said.

The Wittington-led deal builds on long-standing relationships. Grey Matter’s CEO, third-time founder Jeffrey Coull, is a neuroscientist who has advised the Weston Family Foundation since 2019. The foundation granted $16.7-million to Sunnybrook in 2020 – to fund research into the very technology Grey Matter is now licensing from the institution. “When I came across this technology, I was really impressed with its potential,” Mr. Coull said in an interview.

The product, invented by focused ultrasound pioneer Dr. Kullervo Hynynen, Sunnybrook’s vice-president of research and innovation, is a helmet-like device kitted up with thousands of sound-wave emitters that deliver targeted ultrasound therapy deep into the brain. Initial research has shown that this non-invasive approach can stimulate the brain and enhance cognition.

Other researchers have shown that focused ultrasound can treat an array of conditions from plantar fasciitis to Parkinson’s. It works in one of three ways: by opening the blood-brain barrier to help deliver drugs that otherwise can’t get to the brain; through ablation – using sound energy to demolish diseased tissue – or by stimulating and soothing regions of the brain with lower-intensity ultrasound comparable to diagnostic procedures now done in hospitals. Grey Matter is pursuing the latter approach.

The field is in its early days and many companies are looking to commercialize focused ultrasound technologies. What sets Grey Matter apart, Mr. Coull said, is that its helmets will be usable in doctors’ offices and eventually by patients at home while rival technologies must be connected to CT or MRI scan machines in hospitals to work. Grey Matter will collect data when patients go in for those scans and use those to 3-D print customized helmets that fit snugly on each patient’s head with transmitters positioned to deliver targeted sound waves.

Mr. Coull said Grey Matter will use its seed funding to build a “minimum viable product” and conduct a safety and feasibility clinical trial on 40 Alzheimer’s patients. If that succeeds, it will try to raise at least US$50-million to conduct expanded efficacy trials with 100 patients over 20 weeks, which, if successful, could lead to regulatory approval, he said.

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