BioNova Companies Leading Innovative Health and Life Sciences in Nova Scotia

FOR 30 YEARS, BIONOVA HAS LED NOVA SCOTIA’S HEALTH AND LIFE SCIENCES SECTOR BY SUPPORTING ITS 200 MEMBER COMPANIES IN THEIR PURSUIT OF GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT.

BioNova provides partnership and collaboration within the health and life sciences ecosystem to enable the support and conditions required to foster development and sector growth for Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada.

BioNova values innovation in health and life sciences to advance the health and well-being of people here at home and around the world.

“With world-class research-driven universities, an innovative health system, risk capital and government infrastructure support, we strive to position Nova Scotia to attract foreign direct investment and high global export demand,” says Doris Grant, BioNova’s Vice-President of Business Development & Strategy.

BioNova is committed to being a member-driven organization by bringing value to its members throughout different stages of their commercial development. The organization empowers innovation and leverages partnerships that support expressed needs from entrepreneurs through improving access to mentorship, investments, talent, and markets locally, nationally, and globally.

“By fostering these strong networks through community building and enabling a supportive business environment, we are able to cultivate a vibrant life science sector. With this strong foundation, business development within our sector is able to accelerate and drive growth with the right support, for the right opportunity, at the right time,” says BioNova CEO Sean Awalt.

Here is a sampling of four of BioNova’s member companies.

“We bring together patented sample preparation tools and strategies, mass spectrometry services, and insightful data analytics output as a strategic, outsourced solutions partner for researchers,” says Kent MacLean, CEO of Allumiqs.

Allumiqs’ sample prep tools solve customer time and throughput challenges by standardizing and accelerating the omics sample preparation process, ensuring clean samples for analysis, while reducing the risk of variability in results.

As a collaborative partner, Allumiqs offers high-quality mass spectrometry solutions and services delivered by its team of world-class omics experts. “We work side-by-side with researchers to clearly define the right path to uncover the results needed to advance their discoveries,” says MacLean.

Allumiqs empowers researchers with new levels of insight to make data-driven decisions. Its data analytics platform enables customers to visualize results and strategize their next steps with simple, easy-to-understand reporting.

Allumiqs helps omics researchers move their ideas from the lab bench into a position to have scalable impact. https://allumiqs.com

Halifax based 3D BioFibR Inc. has developed a patented dry-spinning process for protein-fibre (biofibres) production of fibres such as collagen and spider silk.

“This process is fundamentally different from anything that has come before,” says chief executive officer Kevin Sullivan, who co-founded 3D BioFibR in 2020 along with Dr. John Frampton, the company’s chief scientific officer and a Canada Research Chair in Cellular, Biomaterial and Matrix Interactions at Dalhousie University.

Allumiqs Corporation is dedicated to elevating and enabling multiomics within development pathways to help biotech and biopharma researchers accelerate the pace of science.

“For over five decades, people have been trying to figure out how to spin protein fibres like collagen and spider silk such that they replicate the biophysical and biochemical properties of their natural counterparts. The main biofibre that we work with is collagen, which is the major structural protein that gives everything in your body form,” he explains. https://3dbiofibr.com

3D BioFibR’s process builds collagen fibres at very high quality and scale. “Our collagen fibres are two to three times stronger than natural collagen structures in the body,” says Sullivan.

The company is focused on market applications in 3D Bioprinting and 3D tissue culture, which fall within the broader $20 billion tissue engineering market.

That market offers the promise of being able to rebuild life-like tissues in a lab, and then use them to retransplant back into a human to fix tissues that are damaged by trauma or disease. For example, “the market is mostly still focused on research, but we’re staring to see first therapies coming to market in the skin space, building artificial skins for burn remediation. Over the next decade you’re going to start to see additional applications in muscle and other tissues and organs, that will begin to be available to patients,” Sullivan explains.

Having proven 3D BioFibR’s technology over the past two and a half years, “we’re beginning to close our first deals and making the transition to revenue, which is exciting for us,” he says.

The FDA 510(k) cleared software of Halifax-based Adaptiiv Medical Technologies Inc. is used to customize patient-specific radiotherapy accessories, preparing them to be fabricated via 3D printing.

Printing can be done in-house, using Adaptiiv at the Point of Care, or outsourced through Adaptiiv On Demand , where the company’s digital manufacturing partner, HP Inc., will print, perform QA, and ship accessories directly to a client’s clinic.

Using patient-specific 3D printed accessories can provide many benefits, including improved clinical precision, operational efficiency, and patient comfort. It can also reduce air gaps, spare healthy tissue, and provide superior dose distribution compared to traditional methods.

“3D printed accessories provide better fit, superior spatial fidelity, and consistency for each treatment fraction. Most importantly, patient comfort and their overall experience is improved,” says Dr. James Robar, co-founder of Adaptiiv.

The Adaptiiv at the Point of Care service works best for centers with an established 3D printing facility or are looking to expand their internal 3D printing capacity. https://www.adaptiiv.com

Adaptiiv On Demand , available only in North America, is a service specifically designed for centres seeking to leverage the advantages of Adaptiiv’s regulatory cleared software, but are unable to commission or establish 3D printing services internally. Adaptiiv On Demand offers all the same benefits as Adaptiiv at the Point of Care but is a pay-as-you-go offering with no upfront expenses, therefore eliminating the need to compete for funding from a capital budget.

Treventis Corporation, based in Halifax and Toronto, has developed a computational tool that can be used to aid in the therapeutic targeting of protein misfolding diseases (PMD). This patented approach, called Common Conformational Morphology (CCM), enables the design of compounds against special 3D models of misfolded proteins.

Treventis augments this ’in silico’ work with a variety of special in-house experiments that their team of biologists and medicinal chemists can use to develop drugs with unique potential to stop protein misfolding.

Over 160 diseases involve the misfolding and aggregation of a protein as part of their disease progression. The catalog of these PMDs include multiple dread diseases that cause human misery, including Alzheimer’s disease, Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, diabetes, cancer, and many rare diseases. Most PMDs have no disease-modifying therapy available.

One of the most daunting challenges in drug discovery is finding drugs for PMDs. The targets in PMD are unconventional: they do not have traditional active sites, and they are constantly changing conformation, defying conventional drug design techniques.

Using CCM, Treventis has built drug programs to combat Alzheimer’s, FTD, ALS, and cancer, with several pharmaceutical partnerships to its credit.

“At Treventis, we have one goal: making PMD history,” explains CEO and CCM chief architect Chris Barden. “We are always looking for new partnerships to build out our pipeline.” https://www.treventis.com