27 September 2019
Oncopole is proud to announce, as part of his joint project with IRICoR, 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.
The funding of the competition is the result of a collaboration with leading financiers: Merck and the FRQS through Oncopole as well as, the Ministry of Economy and Innovation and the federal government through IRICoR. This project is fully in line with the innovative approach of Oncopole aiming to unite the players in oncology research, valorize innovations and optimize clinical practices for the benefit of patients.
Thanks to this substantial financial support, the 4 selected winners will benefit from infrastructures, as well as from targeted and complementary expertise in the field of drug discovery. A great opportunity for these Quebec investigators to accelerate the transformation of their projects in oncology significantly.
- 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]