L’Oncopole is proud to announce, as part of its joint competition with IRICoR, LeadAction-Onco, an investment of $2.4 million over two years, supporting four flagship oncology drug discovery projects in Canada. This important announcement was made on June 4, 2019 by the Minister of the Economy and Innovation Mr. Pierre Fitzgibbon, on the occasion of the opening of the Quebec pavilion at the BIO International Convention, held in Philadelphia from June 3 to 6, 2019.

Funding for this competition has been made possible by leading backers: Merck and the FRQS via Oncopole, and the Ministère de l’Économie et de l’Innovation and the federal government via IRICoR. This competition is fully in line with Oncopole’s innovative approach to federating oncology research players, promoting innovations and optimizing clinical practices for the benefit of patients.

Thanks to this substantial financial support, the 4 selected winners will be able to benefit from infrastructures and targeted, complementary expertise in drug discovery. A great opportunity for these Quebec researchers to significantly accelerate the transformation of their oncology projects.

Take a look at the four winning projects:

• Post-transplant adoptive transfer of activated plasmacytoid dendritic cells to prevent leukemia relapse: towards a Phase I clinical trial [Team led by Dr. Michel Duval, researcher at CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center].

• Development of a novel series of RAS GTPase inhibitors [Team led by Marc Therrien, Principal Investigator and Scientific Director, Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer, Université de Montréal].

• Development of Electron Transport Chain (ETC) Complex 1 inhibitors for the treatment of poor-survival AMLs [Anne Marinier’s team, Principal Investigator and Director of the Medicinal Chemistry Platform at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer of the Université de Montréal].

• Chemical correction of Keap1 mutations induces highly selective chemosensitization by repairing a protein-protein interaction [The team of Dr. Gerald Batist, Director of the Segal Cancer Center at the Jewish General Hospital].