Biotechnology Focus, a compendium of the Canadian life sciences industry, has published the following guest column by Dr. Raphael Hofstein, MaRS Innovation’s president & CEO, and Elizabeth Monier-Williams, director of…
To coincide with our presence at the 2016 BIO International Convention (BIO) from June 6-9, 2016, MaRS Innovation launched a video explaining our role in Canada's innovation ecosystem: backing big…
Montreal-based venture capital fund and entrepreneurship program brings over $20 million in funding and deep expertise in consumer electronics to MI members; first deal in speech recognition TORONTO and MONTREAL,…
It’s been a busy quarter for UTEST company TrendMD. Fresh off their participation in Ycombinator’s Winter 2016 cohort, which was covered in TechCrunch, the company has announced partnerships with HighWire…
TORONTO, January 29, 2015 — CoursePeer Inc. and National Franchise Group have partnered to launch Franchise University, a service offering global franchise groups a powerful cloud-based training and collaboration solution for their franchisees. Signarma Canada, the global sign industry leader ranked 28th on Franchise Direct’s Top 100 Global Franchises list, is among the first brands to join.
CoursePeer, a University of Toronto and MaRS Innovation company that provides learning and collaboration solutions for enterprise and government, will begin a full rollout of Franchise University solution for Signarama in the first quarter of 2015.
“Training a new hire and retraining existing employees can be very difficult and a time-consuming task for a franchise operator. Cloud-based approved training allows staff to be trained and retrained without losing focus on the franchise’s daily operations,” said Ghassan Barazi, CEO of National Franchise Group.
CoursePeer’s platform allows organizations to design and upload advanced training curriculum for the various departments while leveraging its authoring tools. Additionally, off-the-shelf training courses are available in marketing, sales, customer service, project management, and other topics. CoursePeer was launched and incorporated through the University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology program (UTEST)’s first cohort; the company announced a partnership focused on increasing civic-engagement with municipal issues involving several Greater Toronto Area municipalities in 2014.
TORONTO, Jan. 12, 2015 — MaRS Innovation, the commercialization agent for Ontario’s 15 leading academic institutions, today announced that it has formed a research collaboration with Johnson & Johnson Innovation, LLC and its Canadian affiliate, Janssen Inc., to advance three technologies focused on cardiac, diabetes and depression, respectively.
This announcement was covered in Lab Product News.
“These three projects reflect the quality of innovation present in Toronto’s research community for our industry partners, and Toronto’s progress in addressing healthcare issues of international concern,” said Dr. Raphael Hofstein, president and CEO of MaRS Innovation. “Johnson & Johnson Innovation is a long-term strategic partner of MaRS Innovation and of our members; our collaboration reflects the benefits to accessing our members’ deal flow through MaRS Innovation. Through these deals and other scientific exchanges, we see increased interest in Toronto’s innovation and entrepreneurship community.”
The projects’ principal investigators are researchers from the University Health Network (UHN), the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the University of Toronto. This announcement follows Johnson & Johnson Innovation’s December 2013 commitment to collaborate on early-stage drug development projects.
In a January 24, 2014 Biotechnology Focus cover article, author Shawn Lawrence discusses MaRS Innovation President and CEO Dr. Raphael (Rafi) Hofstein‘s recent visit to learn more of the emerging science and technology markets in Singapore and Japan.
The trip allowed Hofstein to discuss current MI projects, specifically start-ups XLV Diagnostics Inc. and DVLR Therapeutics Inc., whose products could benefit from Singapore’s proximity to medical technology markets in India and China.
Hofstein joined other delegates from Canada, including Dr. Mark Poznansky, president and CEO of the Ontario Genome Institute (OGI).
MaRS Innovation (MI) has launched a unique funding program to match researchers with industry partners while advancing early stage technologies: the MaRS Innovation Industry Access Program (MI-IAP).
This program provides a simple mechanism to connect researchers with MI’s industry partners. The process and application form are intentionally brief to save researchers time and allow MI’s partners to review a wide range of remarkable technologies within the Toronto academic community in a short period of time.
“Many granting programs require an industry partner, but leave finding that partner to the researcher,” says Parimal Nathwani, vice-president of life sciences at MI. “Our Industrial Partnership Program completes that step for them. We also know researchers within our member institutions are incredibly busy, which is why we’ve adopted a streamlined process to save them time.”
The program is open to any researcher affiliated with our 16 member institutions working on technologies in:
VitalHub is building on its success in redefining how doctors access patient data by partnering with Box, which announced 13 new partnerships with companies, including VitalHub.
Together, their technology will work across web and mobile devices to help healthcare organizations work with, share and collaborate using information.
Invented at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital in the IT Department, VitalHub was created to effectively manage patient data through a platform allowing clinicians to rapidly access comprehensive, relevant patient information gathered from multiple disparate clinical information systems.
The VitalHub Server platform sits on top of whatever clinical enterprise systems the hospital, community physician practice or healthcare organization already has in place.
Every six weeks, MaRS Innovation’s marketing and communications manager writes a guest post for the MaRS Discovery District blog profiling MI’s activities or one of our start-up companies. You can read the original post on the MaRS blog.
Nearly 14,000 delegates—representing over 1,100 biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centres and related organizations across the United States and more than 60 countries—attended the 2013 BIO International Convention from April 22 to 26, 2013.
The event drew biotechnologists, pharmaceutical industry executives and life sciences researchers, along with sector-based organizations and associations, to Chicago.
According to a press release issued by the conference organizers, BIO 2013 offered “a record number of partnering meetings and panel sessions on the latest science, policy issues and business opportunities and challenges facing the biotechnology industry.”
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