This week, MaRS Innovation (MI) announced a new partnership agreement with The Québec Consortium for Drug Discovery (CQDM), the Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) and Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) to launch the Québec/Ontario CQDM Funding Program.
The funding program will support collaborative life science research projects between the two provinces that seek to develop new tools for biopharmaceutical research.
The announcement, made at the 2012 BIO International Convention in Boston, received coverage in the Montreal-based newspaper, La Presse (note that the article is written in French).
Raphael Hofstein, MaRS Innovation president and CEO, was quoted:
«C’est vraiment un cas où 1 ” 1 égale davantage que 2, continue Raphaël Hofstein, président et chef de la direction de MaRS Innovation, un agent de commercialisation mis sur pied par 16 institutions scolaires ontariennes. On veut combiner les capacités financières et les expertises des deux provinces pour aller plus loin.»
. . .
Raphaël Hofstein, de MaRS Innovation, affirme qu’il n’a senti aucune réticence envers un tel rapprochement et assure qu’il s’agit «de la première de plusieurs initiatives».
The launch of Encycle Therapeutics, a MaRS Innovation spin-off company, was announced at the same BIO event. It was covered by:
- Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Canada Finance
- Digital Journal
- Kidela.com
Encycle’s ground-breaking chemistry platform for cyclizing peptides promises to increase the efficiency of the early-stage drug discovery process.
Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, marketing and communications officer.