McMaster centre to get $10.5M from Ottawa

Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization only one of its kind to get three straight rounds of federal funding

A McMaster University centre for research commercialization is getting $10.5 million from the federal government toward developing and manufacturing radiopharmaceuticals.

“This investment, it will lead to better diagnostics for cancer and heart disease and it will also lead to jobs here in Hamilton,” said Minister of Science and Sport Kirsty Duncan, who announced the funding at McMaster’s Innovation Park on Monday morning.

The Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization (CPDC), which takes medical isotopes research and creates diagnostic tests and cancer treatments, is one of five centres getting a total of $79.8 million in funding from Canada’s Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research program.

The four other hubs getting funding are in Toronto, Montreal, and St. John’s, N.L. Four of the projects selected are focused on health, and one on the North.

“It’s an extremely competitive process, so to be chosen is a real accomplishment and the people of Hamilton should be so enormously proud,” Duncan said.

McMaster’s CPDC is the only National Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research to get three consecutive rounds of federal funding.

The centre was founded in 2008 by John Valliant, a chemistry and chemical biology professor, with a model to take new technologies developed in labs and develop them into products and get those products to market.

The new federal funding, along with other funding, will propel them through the next four years, where Valliant estimates they’ll grow from about 100 people being employed to perhaps 300. “Our model was to spin out companies, put the new discoveries in the companies and get international investment,” he said.

The first spinoffis Fusion Pharmaceuticals, which raised $55 million in international investment last year, he said. They’re making new cancer therapy using medical isotopes to target and kill cancer cells.

“It works really well for the hardest to treat cancers,” Valliant said, adding that the drug will be tested next year.

The next spinoff company is NuGeneris Inc.; it will manufacture the drugs, which Valliant said have a very short shelf life.

“It will produce the product suitable for human use and it will ship it around the world from Hamilton,” he said.

Both will be set up in the Fraunhofer Project Centre for Biomedical Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing (BEAM) at McMaster’s Innovation Park, where construction is underway.

The space is also expected to include “flex labs” where new spin-out companies could find space.

It’s an extremely competitive process, so to be chosen is a real accomplishment. KIRSTY DUNCAN Minister of Science and Sport