Pfizer teams up with Canada’s CVI to advance health technologies

Hannah Blake

pharmaphorum

The Centre for Drug Research and Development’s CDRD Ventures Inc (CVI) has announced a strategic collaboration with global pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, to provide new resources to advance Canada’s promising health technologies towards commercialization.

In 2007, a Pfizer-CDRD Innovation Fund was established to support innovative projects like this with therapeutic potential stemming from academic discovery.

Through this collaboration, Pfizer will have the opportunity to support mutually-selected CVI R&amp,D projects with the goal of commercializing the programs and resulting intellectual property.

“Pfizer was our pioneering industry partner making critical early investments in CDRD, thus enabling its evolution to become Canada’s national drug development and commercialization centre. By now extending Pfizer’s partnership into CVI (its third such industry partnership), we have further validated the CDRD/CVI model, and built a continuous and robust means to support the most exciting new health technologies through their full development cycle.”

Natalie Dakers, President and CEO of CVI .

“At Pfizer we know that emerging science is happening at a rapid pace in innovation clusters throughout the world. This partnership with CDRD Ventures Inc is an important example of our focus on partnering globally to identify and advance potential therapies that can significantly improve patient lives.”

Uwe Schoenbeck, Chief Scientific Officer, External R&amp,D Innovation at Pfizer.

The role of CDRD is to transform promising health research discoveries into viable commercial opportunities. CVI then takes these opportunities and turns them into real and measurable value, providing long-term support for the commercialization of Canadian health research.

This innovative partnership will support those efforts by providing the necessary funding to pursue the continued commercialization of innovative products for patients.