Montreal-based nanoforestry and drug development networks get green light

Business-Led NCEs

Aerospace coatings from nano-sized wood compounds and improved drug efficacy are just some of the outcomes anticipated by two of the four Business-Led Networks of Centres of Excellence. (BL-NCEs) located in the Montreal region. The Canadian Forest Nanoproducts Network (ArboraNano) and the Quebec Consortium for Drug Discovery (CQDM) will receive $8.9 million and $8.0 million respectively over the next four years to come up with marketable technologies and innovations that will benefit their sectors.

They are the last two of the four winners in the inaugural BL-NCE program competition, following the federal government's current practice of splitting up the announcements of R&D program competitions ostensibly to generate maximum publicity. ArboraNano and CQDM — along with the Green Aviation R&D Network (R$, January 22/09) and the Sustainable Technologies for Energy Production Network (R$, February 9/09) — will receive a total of $39.2 million in one-time funding.

For ArboraNano, BL-NCE funding arrives at a particularly opportune time as the beleaguered forestry industry seeks to expand its product base through innovation and value-add. FP Innovations was formed through the amalgamation of three long-standing forestry research institutes (R$, March 8/07). FP Innovations has been working on a technology platform to extract nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) from wood pulp for use in a variety of products targeting industry sectors not typically associated with forestry.

"This funding allows us to really pull out the stops and reach out to other industries and get them on board," says Dr Reinhold Crotogino, ArboraNano's network leader and a 40-year veteran of forestry R&D at Paprican. "It gives us incredible credibility and makes it easier to bring industry to the table."

This made-in-Canada technology is now being produced in pilot plants at a rate of about 1 kg a week with ambitious plans to scale up to industrial production levels of several tons per day within two years. Some of the potential applications include cosmetics, coatings, chemicals, composites and medical devices.

"We've always wanted to look at new materials but the timing was never right. But recently there's been a huge push for renewable resources in several industry sectors and then our technological breakthrough. The BL-NCE program came at the right time to carry the momentum along," says Crotogino, emphasizing that the resulting R&D projects are focused at the pre-competitive stage. "We ask our industry members to identify the fundamental questions we need to answer and then pose them to our university partners. It's essentially a matrix management exercise driven by industry needs."

FP Innovations' success closely follows another major advancement with an agreement struck late last year with Natural Resources Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to launch a new research program. Funded with targeted NSERC funding announced in Budget 2008, the program will be led by FP Innovations and focus on developing transformative technologies that occur at the interface between various sciences and engineering disciplines.

CQDM

BL-NCE funding will also stimulate the development and market introduction of new pharmaceutical compounds through the Quebec Consortium for Drug Discovery (CQDM). Just eight months old, CQDM already enjoys financial support from the provincial and federal governments and three large drug firms: Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Merck Frosst.

Additional funding through BL-NCE will allow CQDM to fund four or five large-scale projects involving several institutions from the public and private sectors conducting multi-disciplinary, collaborative R&D.

Like ArboraNano and other public-private R&D consortia, CQDM will focus on pre-competitive R&D that addresses major drug discovery challenges. That means working on technologies that all partners can use, rather specific molecules or drugs. All partners will receive a non-exclusive licence for any technology that results from the projects.

"Each year we will have a strategic orientation committee which is dominated by industry members. They will describe a discovery subject of the year such as drug efficacy and issue a call for proposals," says Dr Max Fehlmann, CQDM president and CEO and network leader. "We want to create a productive environment among our private sector competitors who are not used to doing this kind of collaboration. Then we link their research agenda with research in small Quebec companies and universities to match capacity."

Fehlmann says CQDM took inspiration from another successful Quebec-based consortium — the Consortium for Research and Innovation in Aerospace in Quebec. CQDM is also similar to the Vancouver-based Centre for Drug Research and Development except that it focuses on an earlier stage of development.

"This gives us good visibility and credibility. It's excellent news," says Fehlmann. "We will naturally evolve to what they (CDRD) are doing

For this year's competition, CQDM pre-selected from 78 proposals and will announce funding for four or five in April, following international peer review. Up to $9 million over three years is available.

The BL-NCE competition had $46 million at its disposal and drew 38 applications from which 10 were selected to submit full proposals. While there was no restriction on which industrial sectors could apply, all were required to propose R&D in at least one of five priority areas:

* Environmental S&T;

* Natural resources and energy;

* Health and related life sciences and technologies;

* Information and communications technologies; and

* Management, business or finance.

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