Every summer, the Pre-Amp Fellowship brings outstanding PhD candidates, post docs, MDs, and inventors together to identify hypotheses for novel healthcare ventures. Launched in 2021, we created the Fellowship to promote the Canadian biotech ecosystem and train the next generation of leaders in precision medicine. The Fellowship also plays an important role in propelling Pre-Amp, our biotech creation studio and internal engine for discovering, incubating, and funding innovation.
More than 200 scientists applied for the Pre-Amp Fellowship in 2024, including many leaders at the forefront of cutting-edge science in their respective departments at universities across Canada and beyond. “Each year we try to build a really cohesive team while also ensuring that the Fellows represent a cross-section of scientific study,” says Pre-Amp Venture Associate Eric Desjardins, a former Fellow who now helps direct the program. “We look for creative people with broad scientific experiences and an entrepreneurial or self-starter mentality.”
This year we selected eight scientists to participate in the Fellowship, representing a diverse range of fields of study, including chemical engineering, pharmacology, cellular biology, biochemistry, molecular medicine, oncology, and experimental surgery. While the Fellows came from universities across Canada and the US — the University of Toronto, McGill University, the University of Montreal, and NYU Langone among others — candidates are welcome to apply from anywhere around the world provided that they are authorized to work in Canada.
A robust program of scientific exploration
The Pre-Amp Fellowship is divided into three one-month cycles. Every month, we divide the Fellows into groups and assign them a topic to focus on that we think would be interesting for them to pursue.
It could be a cool new science that may have commercial potential or something that came up from our conversations with academics and industry experts about the challenges they are facing in their respective fields. Every year, our Fellows focus on several emerging scientific fields, for example nuclear pore biology, somatic mutations, and blebs. Importantly, we try to balance the teams out by grouping people with different backgrounds together, and assign topics that they don’t have prior experience with to promote creative thinking and problem solving.
The first month, we give each group a different concept to explore. We want them to have the white space to be creative and to spend the first half of the month coming up with as many ideas as possible. By the middle of the month, the focus shifts to pruning and refining those ideas and, by the end of the month, they are presenting their ideas to the Pre-Amp and Amplitude teams, executives from our portfolio companies, and other scientists, all of whom critique their presentations, ask questions, and provide feedback.
An important part of the process is challenging the feasibility of the Fellows’ ideas from a business perspective. Whether it’s through our day-to-day interactions with them or our weekly meetings, we push on very practical considerations such as how widely applicable their ideas are, how quickly they can come to fruition, as well as whether or not they have the potential to result in a meaningful multi-billion-dollar business.
In the second month, the Fellows get assigned into new teams and repeat the process, but with the added challenge of being asked to explore two concepts rather than just one. In the third month, the teams get shuffled again and the work continues. This time, the Fellows focus on target or indication prioritization for a technology that’s already been built, forcing them to think differently yet again.
In addition to coming up with and refining ideas, Fellows have the opportunity to work alongside our early-stage portfolio companies. This exposure gives them the chance to drive strategic analyses and learn about the critical questions that arise and processes that need to be established in the earliest phases of company creation. It’s also a way for them to establish strong working relationships with the teams at these companies that can lead to interesting job opportunities down the line.
“Prior to joining the Pre-Amp Fellowship, I knew how to approach problems as a researcher — conducting literature reviews, communicating science, and diving deep into specific mechanisms,” recalls Iris Kong, a 2024 Fellow who is earning her PhD in experimental surgery from McGill University. “This program pushed me to apply those skills in entirely new ways, and at a pace I never imagined possible. It also shifted how I view science. It’s no longer just about the concept or discovery itself, it’s about the tangible outcomes and the value they can bring.”
Another highlight of the Fellowship is a week-long in-person session that brings the entire group together for meetings, workshops, and fireside chats with the Amplitude and Pre-Amp teams as well as some of our portfolio company CEOs and CSOs. This year, that in-person session was held in Montreal in late June and included discussions about developing intellectual property for platform-based companies, our strategy at Pre-Amp for creating companies, a look at some of our companies currently in stealth mode, and a healthcare VC event that gave the Fellows a chance to meet other investors in the broader healthcare community.
A strategy focused on cultivating future leaders
Since it was launched in 2021, 28 scientists have participated in the Pre-Amp Fellowship. Not only do they form long-lasting professional relationships, in many cases the Fellowship helps pave the way to their first jobs. Four past Fellows currently work at Pre-Amp, while others have taken roles at a number of Amplitude’s portfolio companies or gone on to consult for Amplitude or Pre-Amp. Still others have opted to work on the investor side, taking positions at other VCs and banks.
“The Pre-Amp Fellowship demands resilience and the ability to embrace failure as part of an iterative, almost evolutionary, process,” says 2024 Pre-Amp Fellow Yannick Cyr, who has since landed a position as a VC investment analyst at BSQUARED Capital, a biotech-focused fund in Montreal. “The way we were challenged to think critically and provided constant feedback as we worked to refine our ideas across multiple explorations was invaluable and great preparation for any aspiring life sciences entrepreneur.”
“Running the Fellowship is a big investment of time and energy, but it’s worth it because we know that we are building leadership within the ecosystem that will pay dividends down the line,” says Michael Mee, a Principal at Amplitude and Managing Director of Pre-Amp. “We are already hard at work preparing for the 2025 Fellowship and invite anyone who knows a talented scientist to encourage them to apply.”
Learn more about the Pre-Amp Fellowship here.
