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The CQDM: A homegrown success story
québec
CQDM: Success story
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Since 2009, Biotechnology Focus has been profiling the Québec Consortium for Drug Discovery (CQDM), a non-profit consortium created in 2008 as a strategic initiative for drug discovery.
The CQDM is responsible for fostering partnerships between biotech companies, universities, and hospitals. As a publicprivate venture, the CQDM is supported by six A-list pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline and Lilly, along with Canada’s federal and provincial governments.
Over these past few years, the CQDM has seen the birth of many innovations and collaborations. Its principal mission is to identify, finance and support research projects aimed at developing tools and technologies that facilitate new drug discovery and development. These projects are carried out in partnerships between the academic and hospital networks in the public sector, and pharma and biotech companies in the private sector.
By promoting this synergy between academic and industry, and through creating an international exchange network, the CQDM intends to expand Québec’s leadership in biopharma research, and open up new doors for research that will benefit the entire industry.
The CQDM has also increased Québec’s collaboration with international industry partners, including a new bilateral agreement signed in June 2012 between the CQDM and Lyonbiopole. At the BIO International Convention 2012, Lyonbiopole joined the already existing consortium signed in November 2010 between Alsace BioValley and the CQDM. This new agreement aims to develop a joint program to enhance biomedical research in Québec, Alsace and Rhone-Alpes, by aligning international resources. This collaborative program aims to co-finance research projects between the three regions: Québec, Alsace and RhoneAlpes.
This year also saw the creation of a new initiative to fund collaborative life sciences research projects in the Ontario-Québec Life Sciences Corridor. The CQDM is partnering with MaRS Innovation (MI), Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) and Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), to launch the Québec/Ontario CQDM Funding Program, which will support collaborative research projects that seek to develop new tools for biopharmaceutical research.
Since 2008, the CQDM has launched seven competitions through four funding programs. Over 325 projects were submitted, totaling over $400 million in funding requests.
Currently, the Consortium is supporting 27 outstanding research projects, adding up to $29.7 million. These 27 projects involve a network of more than 350 researchers, working together to address the most important aspects of the pharmaceutical R&D productivity gap.
The first CQDM projects are now reaching maturity, and can be seen as a testament of the CQDM’s success. They are also an example of how the CQDM’s business model can help generate impact on biopharmaceutical research.
One such success story is Medicago Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel vaccines and therapeutic proteins to address a broad range of infectious diseases worldwide.
In 2009, Medicago was awarded $1.77 million in funding from the CQDM, to support the development of Medicago’s VLPExpress™, a high-throughput technology for accelerating the discovery and development of new vaccine antigens based on Virus-Like Particles (VLPs). The automated platform enables the rapid expression, purification and testing of VLPs, to identify the best antigen presentations for a disease-causing agent within 10 weeks.
As one of the recipients of the CQDM’s very first competition, the company has been with the CQDM since the Consortium’s inception. Their partnership has been successful: in February 2012, Medicago announced plans to invest approximately $4 million to enhance the capacity of its pilot production facility located in Québec City. The investment included capital expenditures, labour costs and preclinical studies for a rabies vaccine as well as other products.
Plants thrive in a sunny environment at Medicago facilities
Medicago’s VLPExpress™ platform, the project developed with the support of the CQDM, is now widely successful and benefited Medicago in multiple ways.
Biotechnology Focus talked with Medicago Inc.’s Dr. Louis-Philippe Vézina, co-founder of Medicago and its Chief Scientific Officer, about the company’s relationship with the CQDM, as well as the support it provided for Medicago’s VLPExpress™ platform.
Biotechnology Focus (BF): How did Medicago become involved the CQDM?
Dr. Louis-Philippe Vézina (LPV): “In 2008, when the CQDM launched the competition, we thought it would be very helpful for us. Medicago was working with recombinant vaccines, which have the advantage of only needing the sequence of a viral protein to start development, so this is a pretty quick process. We knew already that we could produce an H5N1 influenza vaccine candidate. Later in 2009 we succeeded during the H1N1 pandemic by generating a VLP vaccine starting from the gene from H1N1. So now instead of going from the pilot-scale to the commercial-scale or a larger scale, we can also scale it down and provide a high-throughput miniature version of this technology with the aim of speeding up the development of new vaccines. What we offered as a concept then was that, since we had been able to switch the technology from lab to small pilot to launch pilot, and we had a small commercial facility in place, if we were able to size it down to have it under a high-throughput approach, we could then offer to potential partners the use of this small or high-throughput platform for the development of a new VLP vaccine.”
BF: What was the significance of being funded by the CQDM?
LPV: “We probably would not have done this project to develop VLPExpress™ without them. Small biotech finds it difficult to invest $2 million in a conceptual development such as that, and as the scope of that project was the development and the building of an automated robot that could help us speed up the choice of vaccinal antigens and other proteins. We needed a fairly large piece of equipment that we had to custom develop. We had good support from the CQDM team as well, as most of them came from the pharma industry or the biotech venture capital space, so they understood our approach towards the project. I think they knew what impact it could have on a corporate level for us, because for us the bet there was that it would open our relationships with larger, more strategic partners.”
BF: So the VLPExpress™ project was developed with strong support from the CQDM?
LPV: “I think most of the people you would talk to who have had business to do with CQDM would agree with me, that they are a very competent group. They are rapid in decision-making and have had very clear and open communications with Medicago.
The CQDM team is very competent in terms of the technical perspective so we were able to explain in detail the challenges and issues we were facing and they has a solid understanding. They have sufficient experience on their own, in terms of science and R&D. They understand the things that will work and were very receptive and helpful. The CQDM team is very precise in its understanding in what are the deliverables for projects, and I think that before going into and making the investment, they are good at sizing out what is going to work and what is not going to work.
With Medicago, the CQDM was very close to the bull’s eye in terms of the issues they thought would be difficult and things that would be easier. At Medicago this project has exceeded our expectations. Even before finishing up this project, we had inquiries from groups that wanted to jump in and use the technology. So that’s an encouraging outcome for the CQDM as I believe their final goal for this is to take a technology and make it viable for use in the industry, to develop new medicines, new therapeutics and new vaccines.”
