The Centre for Drug Research
and Development (CDRD) – Working with the World to
Transform Discovery into Opportunity…..
By:
Karimah Es Sabar, President and CEO, CDRD
The Centre for Drug Research and Development
(CDRD) and our commercialization vehicle, CDRD Ventures Inc. (CVI) were conceived
approximately eight years ago as a shared vision between government, industry
and academia to build a world-leading drug development and commercialization
centre to address one of the biggest challenges facing the global life sciences
sector today: how to translate and ultimately develop promising academic
discoveries into new therapies for patients. Together, the group of leading
entrepreneurial academic scientists leading the charge successfully established
the CDRD/CVI enterprise and developed a firm mandate to de-risk discoveries
stemming from publicly-funded health research and transforming them into viable
investment opportunities for the private sector – thus successfully bridging
the commercialization gap that existed between academia and industry.
Started as a provincially-focused endeavour, CDRD
was then recognized by the Government of Canada as a Centre of Excellence in
Commercialization and Research (CECR), and leveraged this and other public and
private sector funding to create a state-of-the-art drug development and
commercialization platform, and become national in scope with global reach. It
is now one of only a handful of fully‐integrated translational research
organizations in the world with the infrastructure and expertise to undertake
all aspects of pre-clinical drug development and commercialization.
The CDRD/CVI enterprise aims to be a leader
in its field, serve the needs of research institutions across the globe, and
thus bring a new level of health sciences commercialization to Canada. Recognizing the global nature of the life
sciences industry, CDRD/CVI is strongly committed to establishing and
collaborating with a network of international partners representing the world’s
top research institutions and global companies such as Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline,
Roche and Johnson & Johnson.
As the world changes and resources become
increasingly limited, a greater effort must be made on collaboration rather
than competition, sharing resources, leveraging
investment, and mitigating risk. To help realize this, CDRD led the
founding of the “Global Alliance of Leading Drug Discovery and Development
Centres”, an association of the top peer translational research organizations, to share
infrastructure and best practices, and work collaboratively to support the
conversion of early-stage technology into commercial investment opportunities. The
Alliance is a powerful vehicle in bringing such organizations together,
leveraging one another’s strengths, and ultimately making for a much more
effective global translational research environment.
CDRD has also entered into selected international
affiliations with Oxford University, UK; Griffith University (Eskitis Institute
for Cell and Molecular Therapies), Australia; Todai TLO (representing Tokyo
University), Japan; Karolinska Institutet, Sweden; and Lead Discovery Centre
(representing the Max Planck Institutes), Germany. As CDRD continues to expand its
network of world-leading affiliated institutions around the globe, organizations
recognize the many common benefits of international alliances – including the
sharing of knowledge and accelerating the development of much-needed medical
therapeutics. By leveraging the
international platform that it has established, and coupling it with the power
of partnerships, building and nurturing relationships amongst colleagues around
the world, CDRD/CVI has a very dynamic future to look forward to.
The
rapidly-growing knowledge economy requires a forward looking and evolving
institutional framework to support it. This is why CDRD’s vision is to change
the culture of scientific innovation and commercialization impacting human
health. It is only by doing things differently, being flexible, adaptable and
at the forefront of translational research efforts, that we will be able to collectively
and effectively capitalize on the opportunity in front of us. Canada’s federal
and provincial governments understand this paradigm, and have taken decisive
action to ensure that we play our rightful part on the global innovation stage.
Governments are thereby working alongside industry and academic and research
institutions to maximize innovation in Canada, and CDRD is critical to ensuring
Canada is successful in building a globally-competitive life sciences industry.
CDRD/CVI is therefore
proud to be joining the Canadian contingent at the upcoming BIO International
Convention in San Diego, alongside biotechnology organizations from around the
world. We hope to see you there, and look forward to working together to bring
new therapies to the world.
