ProteinQure

Overview

ProteinQure (Toronto) is looking to lead the charge in making Ontario a thriving hub of drug development and research, while focusing on breast cancer therapies.

What they’re doing: ProteinQure is testing the safety of their peptide-based tumour targeting drug ahead of a North American clinical trial.

How will this be used in the real world? We’re getting closer to personalized medicine and ProteinQure is working to raise the bar by designing anti-cancer therapies that are highly effective with less side effects for patients.

Noa Therapeutics

Overview

Noa Therapeutics (Toronto) is a biotech company working to create better treatments for the millions of people struggling with inflammatory illnesses like eczema, ulcerative colitis and inflammatory bowel disease.

What they’re doing: Noa is in the advanced development phase of a non-steroidal medication that targets inflammatory barrier diseases and are preparing to conduct a clinical trial on humans.

How will this be used in the real world? Over 200 million people around the world suffer from eczema, making it the leading cause of skin disease. Current treatments temporarily address the symptoms but Noa is developing medications that can provide lasting relief.

Mediphage

Overview

Mediphage (Toronto) is a genomics company that has created trademark DNA technology to improve the quality of key ingredients in genetic medicines.

What they’re doing: Their research-grade msDNAᵀᴹ platform is being used to develop genetic medicines that can help people with hard-to-treat conditions like hemophilia and other chronic and genetic diseases.

How will this be used in the real world? Science is getting us closer to personalized medicine and Mediphage’s DNA technology is aiming to make genetic therapies that are much more effective to meet the growing commercial demand for quality ingredients to create new DNA-based treatments.

Material Futures

Overview

Material Futures (Toronto) is taking all-natural dyes to a new level by using the power of microbes to engineer colourants for a variety of industries.

What they’re doing: Through upcycling dairy waste, Material Futures is expanding their line of vibrant, fade-resistant colours and scaling up their production process to get these sustainable and natural colorants to market faster.  

How will this be used in the real world? We have an emotional response to colour but we’ve also come to realize artificial dyes can be unhealthy to humans and our planet. Material Futures is using precision fermentation to create all-natural, eco-friendly colourants for a variety of industries including food, fabrics and cosmetics.

Materia Bioworks

Overview

Materia Bioworks (Toronto) is revolutionizing the way eco-friendly materials are being made by simplifying the process for companies to produce biomaterials like sustainable plastics and packaging.

What they’re doing: Materia is scaling up their interactive AI technology that gives their customers the best formulas and ingredients to make their plastics, textiles and packaging to meet their sustainability goals with less risk.

How will this be used in the real world? It can take years to create reliable and sustainable plastics and textiles, but Materia’s AI platform helps producers find the perfect recipe for their product and has a marketplace to buy the ingredients, cutting down production time and making it easier for manufacturers to make eco-friendly products. 

Inteligex

Overview

Inteligex  (Toronto) is a genomics company hoping to change the way traumatic spinal cord injuries are treated by developing drug and stem cell therapies for patients.

What they’re doing: Regenerative treatment is the focus for Inteligex as they use stem cell innovation to create effective treatments for spinal cord injuries, as well as other central nervous system disorders.

How will this be used in the real world? Spinal cord injuries have a deeply destructive impact on patients that go far beyond the physical damage. Treatment options are few but Inteligex is working to generate effective and reliable stem cells that can be used in ground-breaking therapies for the millions of people with this condition.

Epiloid

Overview

Epiloid (Toronto) is a biotech company focused on finding effective treatments for neurological conditions through data analysis and personalized medicine.

What they’re doing: Epiloid is working on perfecting their machine learning algorithm to accurately predict whether a neurological drug will be an effective medicine before it goes to the clinic trial stage.

How will this be used in the real world? Clinical trials can be long, expensive and end with disappointing results. Epiloid is de-risking the development of neurological drugs to treat conditions like epilepsy, by using data to predict a drug’s effectiveness to speed up development and get medicines to patients faster.  

Ardra Bio

Overview

Ardra Bio (Toronto) is a business-to-business biotech company focused on creating sustainable and ethical ingredients that are used in food and cosmetics products.

What they’re doing: Expanding on their animal-free heme (a compound found in blood) that is used in plant-based meats to give it authentic flavour, Ardra is using their heme ingredient to create an iron supplement.   

How will this be used in the real world? Nearly a quarter of the world’s population has anemia, most of them children and women. Since heme is the best source of iron, Ardra is scaling up its heme iron supplement to provide an animal-free and sustainable source of nutrients for people with iron deficiency.

Investment in CGEn

Overview

CGEn is Canada’s national platform for genome sequencing and analysis, with nodes at The Centre for Applied Genomics at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, the McGill Genome Centre in Montreal and Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre at BC Cancer in Vancouver. CGEn is a Major Science Initiative of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI-MSI) providing world-class infrastructure, services, and expertise since being founded in 2015, and enabling novel research and technology development that would otherwise be impossible within Canada. To date CGEn has generated over 12.6 petabases of sequence data for more than 2,900 research labs, companies, and not-for-profits. To remain internationally competitive, CGEn makes considerable efforts in technology development activities to drive forward innovation and formulate new approaches to genomic science. In turn, this ensures that CGEn continues its optimal support of Canada’s research and innovation ecosystem, while remaining in a ready-state to respond to large-scale genomic opportunities and challenges.

This project focuses on technology development driven by demand from the scientific community and aligned with CGEn’s key existing and emerging service growth areas including (i) Long-read sequencing and associated analysis and interpretation of data, (ii) Single cell genomics to produce data on individual cells from a cell population (iii) Spatial transcriptomics to understand intracellular biology with integrated information, ultimately leading to highly accurate tissue specific cell maps, and (iv) Short-read sequencing focusing on the assessment and validation of new technologies. As a result of these technology developments, CGEn will be able to provide important new genomic services to Canadian and international researchers.

Investment in Centre for Biodiversity Genomics

Overview

The Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG) at the University of Guelph holds global leadership in the development and application of species identification systems based on sequence diversity in short, standardized gene regions (DNA barcodes). Termed DNA barcoding, this approach is hugely advancing both our knowledge of the species that share our planet and our capacity to track shifts in their abundance and distribution.

The CBG delivers two key analytical services (informatics, sequencing) to the biodiversity science community; it analyzes millions of specimens and tens of thousands of samples each year by coupling large sequencers with mainframe computers. The award from Genome Canada’s Technology Program will allow the CBG’s Innovation Unit to expand its efforts to develop the laboratory protocols and informatics systems required to capitalize on the capabilities enabled by the thumb-sized DNA sequencers developed by Oxford Nanopore Technologies.

Aside from their speed in delivering data, the low cost of these sequencers and their associated flow cells make them ideal for two purposes – accelerating the development of methods for subsequent implementation in the CBG core facility and making it possible to establish a distributed network of sequencing facilities so nations around the world can track their biodiversity. Because the CBG coordinates the research programs undertaken by the International Barcode of Life Consortium, the advances made by the Innovation Unit in the application of nanopore technology are sure to see rapid uptake on a global scale.