BUILT BY HER
Built on Fearlessness: Dr. Denise Belsham on Science, Startups, and Saying Yes
october 12th, by imane baghouri
When Dr. Denise Belsham opened her lab at the University of Toronto in 1996, she had no plans to become an entrepreneur. “I didn’t go into science saying I want to also become a businesswoman,” she says. “Certainly not. I’m a basic scientist by trade.” Thirty years later, she is a professor and neuroendocrinologist, the founder of two companies, a recipient of the President’s Teaching Award - U of T’s highest teaching honour - and a mentor to more than 160 scientists.
Her field, neuroendocrinology, looks at how the brain controls the endocrine system: the network of organs that governs reproduction, feeding behaviour, circadian rhythms, and stress. At the centre of her research is the hypothalamus, a small region of the brain made up of many different types of neurons, which makes it notoriously difficult to study. Yet its importance is hard to overstate. Without the hypothalamus, there is no reproduction, no regulation of appetite, no circadian rhythm, and no stress response. Her lab studies how this tiny structure is integrated into the physiology of the entire body.
“What those neurons control is everything you are,” she explains.
Her path into entrepreneurship began with a discovery. Her team found a way to immortalize neurons - to keep brain cells growing in a dish - across the many different cell types found in the brain. Colleagues quickly recognized the value of the work and encouraged her to patent it and protect the intellectual property. Then they pushed further: researchers around the world, they told her, could benefit from this.
The timing could hardly have been more demanding. She was a new professor at a highly competitive institution, still finding her footing and competing for grants. Her twin boys were about a year and a half old when she launched the company in 2001 - and much of the research behind it had been done while she was pregnant with them.
“Some people jump at opportunities, and some people say, ‘No, I have too many other things on my plate,’” she says. “I’m the type of person that jumps at opportunities.”
That company, Cellutions Biosystems, grew steadily until 2007, when she sold it to a larger biotech company, where it continues as a standalone company under their umbrella. Today, its cell lines are used in roughly 800 labs around the world and by major biotech companies as a testing platform for neurological function and disease - research that travelled far beyond the lab where it began.
She is candid about how hard it was to build a company as a woman in science, especially with no formal business training. She learned as she went, and along the way discovered something unexpected: she loved it. “If you don’t like it, you don’t do it,” she says. “But if you have a knack for these kinds of things, then you continue.”
The hard work, she notes, was nothing new. “Being a woman in science, you’re going to work hard no matter what,” she says. “You’re going to work ten times as hard as maybe your male counterparts to prove yourself and to get to the same level.”
That understanding shapes how she mentors. As the first person in her family to earn a university degree, Dr. Belsham had to figure much of academia out on her own. It left her with what she describes as a heartfelt need to help people who face a harder time getting into science, staying in it, or finding opportunities.
She is clear, however, that this is not about tokenism. “I take the best people into my lab,” she says. “But if the best people are women or underrepresented minorities, I’m going to take them, and I’m not going to shy away from that.” In her experience, the best of the best often are - “because they work really hard and they do really well.”
Many of the undergraduates she meets through the Faculty of Medicine are set on becoming doctors, and her advice to them is simple: don’t do something just because someone else expects it of you.
“Try to find something that you love to do,” she says. “Something that gives you energy instead of taking away energy.” A career can last another forty years, she reminds students, and it takes a real toll if you don’t love what you’re doing. Her suggestion is a very Toronto one: go down to Lake Ontario, watch the waves, and think about what truly brings you joy. Parents may have a lot of influence now, she says, but ultimately they just want you to be happy.
When asked whether there is anything she wishes she had been less afraid to try, her answer comes without hesitation: no. She has been fearless since childhood - so much so that her mother, whose own parents barely left home for seventy years, often wondered where it came from.
For anyone hoping to follow a path like hers, her advice is the same philosophy that carried her from a new lab and two babies at home to a company used by researchers worldwide: go for it.
“Fear is what’s holding everyone back,” she says. “If you fail, no big deal. You’ll pick yourself up and keep going, and it’ll be a learning experience.”