Spotlight on Québec
québec
Personalized Medicine Partnership for Cancer At the beginning of this year, Québec’s life sciences sector made headlines with its commitment to create a cross-sector partnership devoted to personalizing cancer treatment. The Personalized Medicine Partnership for Cancer (PMPC) was established to develop and implement clinical biomarkers and other personalized healthcare solutions in Québec’s healthcare system. The not-for-profit partnership is also aiming to position Québec as a global leader in the field of personalized medicine. Officially announced in February, the PMPC emerged from a call for proposals under a Government of Québec initiative called the Stratégiequébécoise de la rechercheet de l’innovation (SQRI). The initiative’s aim was to advance knowledge and speed up the process of getting personalized medicine solutions deployed in the province’s healthcare system. Led by Caprion Proteomics, a Montrealbased company developing proteomic biomarkers, discussions started about the possibility of creating a major partnership for cancer research. “One of the main objectives of the PMPC is to establish a network and an infrastructure that will bring together the forces at play in the personalized medicine field in Québec,” says Martin LeBlanc, president and CEO of
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Biotechnology Focus / October 2013
Caprion. “Achieving this will allow us to position this network and Québec as a credible integrated solution for discovering, validating and deploying biomarkers in the healthcare setting.” The PMPC, in collaboration with the Ministère de la santé et des services sociaux (MSSS), was also created to strengthen the relationship between the private and public research sectors. Caprion and a number of other major industry partners joined forces with the Québec–Clinical Research Organization in Cancer (Q-CROC), whic as a hospital and university network would provide the private partners with access to public research. Under the leadership of Caprion, the PMPC forged partnerships with industry partners OncozymePharma Inc., Pfizer Canada Inc., Sanofi Canada Inc., Amgen and TELUS Health. At its inception, the PMPC received $21.1 million in total funding, with $10 million from the Québec government and $11.1 million from private partners, to carry out a four-year project devoted to bringing personalized medicine solutions from concept to concrete.
A new healthcare model With personalized medicine, it’s possible to map out a patient’s disease path and select the most effective treatment option. By using the information obtained from a patient’s blood, tumour or other specimens, one can tailor medical decisions and treatments specifically to each patient. This holds great promise for developing more effective drugs and biomarkers, especially in the realm of cancer. The underlying molecular mechanisms in cancer are influenced by genetic, epigenomic and environmental factors. A better understandingof these factors will help researchers develop more effective biomarkers and drugs that are, as the organization describes, ‘the right drug, for the right patient, at the right time.’ This type of treatment will also save the healthcare industry millions of dollars in diagnostic tests. The projects supported by the PMPC will use genomic, proteomic, bioinformatics and information technology platforms to develop and install these biomarkers and targeted therapies in Québec. The main targets are biomarkers and therapies for lung, colon and breast cancers.
