Canadian commercialization and entrepreneurial programs helping scientists and researchers bring their products to market are the focus of a recent article in Nature Journal and on nature.com.

Posted online on October 2, 2013, the article explains how the Centres of Excellence in Commercialization and Research (CECR) programme, and specifically MaRS Innovation, develop research and put it into practice:

“MARS Innovation and its sister organization MARS Discovery District are not-for-profit organizations that are tightly integrated in Canadian research commercialization. They are based in a heritage building that once belonged to the Toronto University Hospital, in the heart of the city’s ‘discovery district’ — the inner-city conglomeration of universities, institutes and hospitals which has a reputation as a research hotbed. “Here, all the different actors in the commercialization sphere come together in one space,” says Ilse Treurnicht, CEO of MARS Discovery District.

MARS Innovation has seen around 1000 intellectual-property disclosures from its member organizations in the past five years. In a pipeline that Treurnicht describes as “a unique model in Canada,” those that are accepted can then be scaled-up in the MARS Discovery District. Many of those inventions come from the University of Toronto, which ranked third in North America the number of new start-up companies it generated between 2009 and 2011, after MIT and the University of Utah. “Company creation here has taken on a whole new dimension,” says Derek Newton, executive director of the university’s Innovations and Partnerships Office. His office manages around 150 invention disclosures each year, of which approximately two thirds have at least one student or post-doc as a co-inventor.”

ChipCare is also mentioned in the article, reflecting the success of commercialization programs in Canada.

Visit Nature for the full story.

Posted by Kailee Travis, writer and communications assistant.