By:Tim Bryant
innOVAtOr
Using nature’s tools
for preVentIVe
heAlthcAre WiLL roWe, ceo And preSidenT nUTrASoUrce diAGnoSTicS
F
or some, their future is something that sneaks up on them when they least expect it, a sudden culmination of many small steps that did not immediately appear to lead anywhere. For others, the future and the success it brings, are the result of a childhood dream and years of hard work in making it happen. For William Rowe, his future is now his present, thanks to a desire to be more than one man. “I’ve always wanted to be in charge of something bigger than myself, to run something substantial, watch it grow and use my creativity to help it along,” he explains. As president and CEO of Nutrasource Diagnostics he’s built a company that allows him to do these things and at the same time enjoy the freedom that comes with being in control of his situation. “It’s refreshing, it’s liberating. I love the flexibility of being able to make decisions and not having to wait on some kind of bureaucracy for the decision-making process. And just watching your ideas grow and become reality is very rewarding.” Although he says his youth wasn’t one that would indicate he’d become a successful businessman, he did have a specific outlook on things. “I just always looked at situations from a creativity perspective,” he says. “I always found myself analyzing how to do things better or in a different way to optimize or maximize them.” After growing up and earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Waterloo, Rowe settled into a job in corporate develop24 BIOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS JULY/AUGUST 2010
“It’s refreshing, it’s liberating. I love the flexibility of being able to make decisions and not having to wait on some kind of bureaucracy for the decision-making process. And just watching your ideas grow and become reality is very rewarding.”
ment at Waterloo, focusing on fundraising and attracting corporate dollars. He stayed there for four years before leaving to take a similar job in the science and engineering department at the University of Guelph. Although he never touched the science
directly, Rowe gained valuable hands-on experience in the business of science and engineering, experience that made him comfortable with moving from corporate development to running a business. It was while he was at the University of Guelph in 2002 that a colleague, Dr. Bruce Holub, approached him with an idea about a unique blood test that the idea behind Nutrasource Diagnostics began to take shape. “A private lab group had developed this test and he and I had a rapport or relationship prior to that and he brought it to me to see if this was something we wanted to commercialize and make available,” Rowe says. After examining and running business scenarios on the test for a few weeks, Rowe decided it was fit to be commercialized. Given the name Omega Score, this test was the first offering Nutrasource would release to the market. The Omega Score test is designed to determine the Omega-3 levels in an individual’s blood. The results can help determine whether a person should take supplements to boost his or her Omega-3 levels. It also allows those who take it to correlate their readings with accepted values for heart disease risk and death from heart attack risk. This gives them a chance to screen themselves in advance, allowing them a chance to reduce those risks through dietary or lifestyle changes. From 2002 to 2004, Rowe ran Nutrasource as a “hobby shop” while he continued his job in corporate development with the University of Guelph, where he had been since 2000. By January 2004, the Omega Score test had become so successful that Nutrasource was simply too big to remain a side business. “It got to the point where its success, along
