Béatrice Séguin

Dr. Béatrice Séguin is a Pillar Leader at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health. She is also an Assistant Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto. She completed an M.Sc. degree in medical genetics at the University of Toronto in 1998. She then spent two years working for a biotechnology company in Vancouver, Canada within the drug discovery department. Dr. Séguin returned to the University of Toronto to pursue her doctoral (Ph.D) studies in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research focused on understanding the mechanism of drug-induced autoimmune reactions. After completion of her doctoral studies, Dr. Séguin joined the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health where she focused her work on global health research.  She has led a Canada-wide study on how scientific diasporas can contribute to capacity building in health biotechnology innovation in their home countries in the developing world. She has also led a large-scale project that examined the implications of human genomic variation studies (including pharmacogenomics) for global health. This work involved travelling to Mexico, India, Singapore, and Thailand where she visited and interviewed heads of large-scale genotyping institutions that are developing genomic medicine platforms that will address local health problems. Dr. Séguin’s work has lead to collaborations with the USFDA, DIA and the Mexican National Institute of Genomic Medicine. She is now leading the Commercialization Pillar at the MRC, which aims to 1) encourage and facilitate science-based health innovation in the South; and 2) accelerate commercialization of science-based innovations from the South.