Pfizer and CDRD Ventures (CVI), the commercialization vehicle of the Center for Drug Research and Development (CDRD), have formed a strategic collaboration designed to provide new resources to advance Canada’s most innovative and therapeutically promising health technologies towards commercialization.

Through this collaboration, Pfizer will have the opportunity to support mutually-selected CVI R&D projects with the goal of commercializing the programs and resulting intellectual property. This new collaboration follows previous investments by Pfizer Canada into CDRD whereby a Pfizer-CDRD Innovation Fund was first established in 2007 to support innovative projects with therapeutic potential stemming from academic discovery. This new CVI partnership is an extension to the original CDRD relationship, and together, the two represent a continuum of support for health research projects, whether they are very early projects in CDRD or more mature projects that have been advanced into CVI.

“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,” said Natalie Dakers, president and CEO of CVI. “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.”

Uwe Schoenbeck, chief scientific officer, external R&D innovation, Pfizer, said, “At Pfizer we know that emerging science is happening at a rapid pace in innovation clusters throughout the world. This partnership with CDRD Ventures is an important example of our focus on partnering globally to identify and advance potential therapies that can significantly improve patient lives.”

The role of CDRD is to transform promising health research discoveries into viable commercial opportunities. CVI then in turn, transforms those opportunities into real and measurable value, thus providing a self-sustainability mechanism for CDRD, and 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.