Mar-2021
Hamilton life sciences accelerator awarded $6 million in federal funding
Hamilton’s biotech and health sciences accelerators will be getting a funding boost to support local innovation through a $6 million investment by FedDev Ontario.
The funding will be provided to two non-profits: Innovation Factory, a business accelerator founded in 2011; and the Synapse Life Science Consortium, founded in 2016, and made up of local university and hospital research partners, businesses, and startups. The organizations are working together to launch the Southern Ontario Pharmaceutical and Health Innovation Ecosystem, or SOPHIE.
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Funding support for the project will create 50 new jobs and maintain 100 others, and is expected to attract another $7.5 million in capital or in-kind services.
“I’m happy to say that it’s my first investment since the beginning of the year in the life science sector, and I decided to choose Hamilton because it’s a very promising [project],” said Mélanie Joly, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages, in an interview on Monday.
The Minister, who is also responsible for FedDev Ontario — or the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario — said the funding reinforces the government’s goal of developing and retaining biotech talent in Canada.
“When I was last in Hamilton in October, I was searching for the best ideas, the best projects, and what could really have an impact in terms of legacy of what we’ve learned during the pandemic,” Joly said.
The investment aligns with the government’s goal to prioritize life sciences among projects to help Canada’s economic recovery. She cited the local success story of Fusion Pharmaceuticals — a biotech company born out of McMaster University chemistry professor John Valliant’s lab — which went public on the Nasdaq in June 2020.
David Carter, executive director of Innovation Factory, said his team is “thrilled” to use the funding to help researchers and entrepreneurs commercialize their health science solutions. He said the pandemic has played a role in educating the public about the cost and process of bringing a health-care item through the so-called discovery pipeline, from research to a commercialized product.
On the business side, the pandemic has made it impossible to hold valuable networking sessions to connect researchers with the “who’s who of business,” said Carter, who has led the Innovation Factory for the last eight years.
“I think what this money is … is an endorsement of what was already going right in Hamilton,” he said. “This isn’t about building something that isn’t already there. This is about supporting something that’s been built.”
It’s also about fortifying it.
“We have companies from Boston that are now sniffing around Hamilton, whereas five years ago, they wouldn’t have come looking,” said Alex Muggah, director of the Synapse Consortium.
Boston serves as the U.S. headquarters for many big biotech and pharmaceutical companies, with over 1,400 member companies in the life sciences cluster, according to Massachusetts Biotechnology Council.
Muggah refers to himself as a “broker” for the industry to “make connections horizontally in an industry where everyone usually has vertical expertise,” he said. In other words, he helps leverage Synapse contacts in both the research and commercial space to stoke collaborations and advance the development of projects.
Read the full Hamilton Spectator piece here