Dalhousie University
1459 Oxford Street
Halifax Nova Scotia
Canada B3H 4R2
 www.dal.ca/

 

Dalhousie University's national leadership in creating programs that empower students and researchers to turn ideas into enterprises has been rewarded with a $32 million grant from the Government of Canada through the Lab to Market grants program.

The funding was announced Wendnesday (Jan.15) by the Honourable Terry Duguid, minister of sport in an event at Red River College Polytechnic in Winnipeg. The investment will be administered by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) in collaboration with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

This new funding establishes Dalhousie as the national headquarters of Lab2Market, an innovation, commercialization and entrepreneurship skills training program founded by Dalhousie and Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) in 2020. Already thriving as a pilot at 15 partner institutions across the country, the new funding allows Lab2Market to expand to more than 50 Canadian universities, colleges, and research hospitals, helping to unlock the commercial potential of $7.8 billion in collective annual research funding.

"Together with institutional partners and the support of the governments of Canada and Nova Scotia, Dalhousie has established Lab2Market as a proven catalyst for research commercialization," says Dr. Jennifer Bain, Dalhousie's interim vice president research and innovation. "The thriving startups already supported by Lab2Market are a testament to its success and a promise of the program's future impact. This expanded program will equip even more of our brightest minds with the tools to create the innovation-driven organizations that Nova Scotia and Canada need to remain competitive."

Building on success

More than 1,000 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and researchers from over 40 Canadian academic institutions have already taken Lab2Market programs over the last four years. Of the teams that graduated, 42 per cent are working to commercialize their research, 133 companies were launched, and 190 jobs were created across a broad range of sectors, addressing needs in medical technology, clean energy, biomedical engineering and much more. This new funding will allow for thousands of new participants to be engaged.

The program comprises three core streams: Discover, Validate and Launch. It guides participants through every step of the entrepreneurial journey, setting them on a trajectory to commercialize their research-based innovations and build successful businesses around them.

"Lab2Market creates a vital pathway for graduate students and researchers to transform ideas into ventures that improve lives and drive economic growth," said Jeff Larsen (shown right), Dalhousie's assistant vice president, innovation and entrepreneurship, and CEO of Lab2Market. "By expanding our network of institutional partners, we can maximize the return on government investments in research, ensuring they deliver tangible benefits for the communities we serve."

From research to results

Dr. Rafaela Andrade leveraged Lab2Market after her PhD in biochemistry at Dalhousie to establish Myomar Molecular, a Halifax-based company producing direct-to-consumer and practitioner tests to monitor muscle degeneration. During the program, she interviewed more than 100 stakeholders - from physiotherapists to orthopedic surgeons - to finetune her product. The result is the first "pee-on-a-stick test" to assess muscle health, replacing costly, stressful and time-consuming blood tests.

"Lab2Market gave me the exposure to what our product would look like and what value it could bring to society. It was the spark that I needed to push forward with more research, to show that we could create a useful product for early detection that fills a gap and enhances patient outcomes," says Dr. Andrade, who gained Health Canada permission to sell the test in June last year and is currently working with the Canadian Speed Skating team to enhance training.