IRICoR is proud to announce, as part of his joint project with the Oncopole, LeadAction Onco, an investment of $2.4 million dollars over two years, to support four flagship cancer drug discovery projects in Canada. This major announcement was made today by Mr. Pierre Fitzgibbon, Minister of Economy and Innovation, on the occasion of the opening of the Quebec Pavilion at the BIO International Convention, held in Philadelphia June 3-6, 2019.
From left to right : Steven Klein, VP Business Development – IRICoR; Nadine Beauger, CEO – IRICoR; Pierre Fitzgibbon, Minister of Economy and Innovation – Quebec Government; Renaldo Battista, CEO – Oncopole; Violetta Dimitriadou, VP Scientific Operations – IRICoR
IRICoR has obtained the support of the Ministry of Economy and Innovation and the federal government and the Oncopole, the participation of Merck and FRQS for the financing of this competition. IRICoR will closely support the winning teams in order to develop their projects in such a way as to establish co-development partnerships with industry or to create spinoff companies, as has successfully been done in the past. Applying the IRICoR model to these projects, with respect to funding as well as drug discovery and business expertise, will undoubtedly lead to innovative therapeutic solutions. The for selected winners will benefit from infrastructures, as well as from targeted and complementary expertise in the field of drug discovery.
- Post-transplant adoptive transfers of activated plasmacytoid dendritic cells to prevent acute leukemia relapse: toward the Phase I clinical trial [Team headed by Dr. Michel Duval, Investigator at the CHU Ste-Justine Research Centre]
- Development of first-in-class inhibitors of RAS GTPases [Team headed by Marc Therrien, Principal Investigator and Scientific Director at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer of the Université de Montréal]
- Development of Electron Transport Chain (ETC) complex I inhibitors as poor outcome AML treatment [Team headed by Anne Marinier, Principal Investigator and Director of the Medicinal Chemistry Core Facility at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer of the Université de Montréal]
- Chemical correction of mutated Keap1 generates highly selective chemosensitization by repairing a broken protein-protein interaction [Team headed by Dr. Gerald Batist, Director of the Segal Cancer Centre at the Jewish General Hospital]
To read the press release, here