2007 Health Researcher of the Year (Health Services and Systems and Population Health Research)

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Dr. Peter Singer isn't your average bioethicist. His impassioned talk is peppered with the buzz words of a biotech entrepreneur - leveraging capital, knowledge and access to emerging markets. Has the bioethicist gone Bay Street? Certainly. In fact, he's won Canada's top health award for it.

"Human health and economic health go hand in hand, and for developing countries this means that solving massive health challenges means building countries' domestic science, technology and entrepreneurial infrastructure," says Dr. Singer, Co-Director of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health's Program on Life Sciences, Ethics and Policy at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Singer is the recipient of the 2007 Health Researcher of the Year Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Dr. Singer has made the long journey from training as a physician, to research in more traditional bioethics (his work focused on end-of-life care), to what he now sees as the "the mother of all bioethics challenges" - the massive health-care disparity between the developed and developing world.

For example, notes Dr. Singer, life expectancy in Canada is about 80 years. But in sub-Saharan Africa it's only 40 years. However, 90 percent of health research money is currently spent on treatments for the richest 10 percent of the world's population.

Dr. Singer says that a key part of the long-term solution to this deadly disparity is to put an emphasis on building internal business and biotech capacity in developing countries.

"Products like mosquito nets are crucial in the near term, but the long-term goal is a malaria vaccine and that will only come with biotech advances."

Working in close collaboration with McLaughlin-Rotman Centre Co-Director Dr. Abdallah Daar, Dr. Singer is actively paving the path for these advances. Their research identifying biotechnology advances that hold the most promise for tackling developing world health issues has informed the goals of the U.N. and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges for Global Health Initiative.

Last spring, Dr. Singer put all his skills, knowledge and passion together to act as health technology matchmaker: he organized the Mobilizing the Private Sector for Global Health Development conference at the MaRS Centre in Toronto. The event was biotech development in action. It brought together executives of 70 biotechnology firms from India, China, Brazil, South Africa, Canada, and the United States.

As Dr. Singer's team brokered dozens of business meetings, Dr. Singer found himself perfectly at home at the interface of entrepreneurship, ethics and health care where yearly dividends are measured in millions of healthier and richer lives.

Dr. Peter A. Singer receives Canada's Researcher of the Year Award from CIHR's Governing Council member, Dr. Nancy Edwards.