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Transforming Discovery into Opportunity
The Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD) is a national not-for-profit research centre that de-risks discoveries stemming from publicly-funded health research, and transforms them into viable investment opportunities for the private sector - thereby bridging the commercialization gap between academia and industry. We do this by collaborating with our network of over 1,200 principal investigators from 20+ affiliated research institutions across Canada and select international centres to identify commercially promising projects, and then providing the state-of-the-art drug development facilities, specialized scientific and business expertise, and professional project management needed to advance the technologies to a stage where they are sufficiently de-risked for private sector consideration.
Our commercial arm, CDRD Ventures Inc. (CVI) acts as the interface between CDRD and industry. CVI in-licenses selected intellectual property generated from CDRD projects directly from the affiliated institution or inventor, and forms strategic partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotech companies to further develop and commercialize technologies. Profits from CVI flow back to CDRD to support further ongoing drug-development projects.
Ultimately through the work of CDRD, health research discoveries have a much greater prospect of being developed into new medicines; the life sciences industry is fuelled with a robust pipeline of new pre-validated technologies; and the societal returns on public research investment are maximized.
Canada's Networks of Centres of Excellence Program has recognized CDRD as a Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR).