At the 2012 BIO International Convention in Boston this week, MaRS Innovation, The Québec Consortium for Drug Discovery (CQDM), the Ontario Brain Institute and the Ontario Centres of Excellence announced we are launching a new life sciences funding program within the Ontario-Québec Corridor.
The Ontario-Québec Life Sciences Corridor was itself announced at the 2011 BIO International Convention. Shortly thereafter, Max Felhmann, president and CEO of CQDM, and Raphael Hofstein, president and CEO of MaRS Innovation, decided to collaborate on a joint pilot project, which has produced Encycle Therapeutics.
The corridor has helped foster MarRS Innovation’s business development plans for Encycle’s ground-breaking chemistry platform for cyclizing peptides. We’ve done that through relationships made between research institutions like the University of Toronto and the Université de Sherbrooke, and through future partnership interest from four major pharmaceutical players located in Ontario and Québec.
But why is the Ontario-Québec Corridor a good thing for business in general?
Raphael Hofstein, our president and CEO, has made five suggestions in a guest blog post he wrote for the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation’s blog.
Here are his five reasons why the Ontario-Québec Corridor is good for business:
- It’s creating a robust arsenal of disruptive, financeable technologies
- It’s maximizing investment capital across sectors
- It’s providing wider access to our HQP
- It’s created a model for pan-Canadian commercialization
- It’s made Canada more attractive as a place to do business
You can read Raphael’s full post on the MEDI blog website.
Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, marketing and communications manager.