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D2R awards over $6 million to support Core Platforms

Published: 7 February 2025

The D2R (DNA to RNA) Initiative has awarded more than $6 million to support eight Core Platforms at Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ and one at the University of British Columbia through its Core Platform Sustainability funding program. This program supports state-of-the-art Core Platforms that are essential for advancing research and development and facilitating technology uptake and transfer in fields relevant to RNA therapeutics.

Core Platforms provide academic researchers and industry collaborators with the latest technologies and resources, enriching the quality of research and accelerating the pace of discovery. This funding program offers operational support to existing or newly formed Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ Core Platforms, covering costs for technical personnel, data managers, extended warranties, and equipment repair and services.

The funded platforms include those specializing in health data science, mRNA therapeutics, cytometry, clinical sequencing, RNA therapeutics quality control, nanomedicine, infectious disease research, and animal modeling. These platforms support a wide range of research areas, including precision medicine, cancer, rare diseases, and pandemic preparedness.

The following is a list of the scientific directors and their awarded core platforms at Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾:

  • Guillaume Bourque: D2R - Health Data Science (D2R-HeDS) platform
  • Thomas Duchaine: Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ messenger RNA therapeutic platform
  • Jorg Fritz: iCELL – Integrated Cytometry and Enhanced Learning Laboratories
  • Mark Lathrop: Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ Clinical Sequencing Service
  • Ioannis Ragoussis: End to end sequencing platform for RNA therapeutics quality control
  • Janusz Rak: Centre for Applied Nanomedicine (CAN)
  • Silvia Vidal: Integrated Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ Infectious Disease Platforms (iMIDPs)
  • Yojiro Yamanaka: MICAM (Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ Integrated Core for Animal Modeling) and MPCP (Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ Platform for Cellular Perturbation)

Janusz Rak, Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ Professor and Investigator at the Research Institute of the Âé¶¹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾ Health Centre (RIMUHC), noted :

“ I think this Core Platform Sustainability project is brilliant as it fills the gap in our present funding system, which does not provide accessible means to maintain essential, precious and expensive instrumentation. In our case the investment in the Centre for Applied Nanomedicine (CAN) could not have been more timely. CAN is among very few such facilities around the world, perhaps 2-3 in North America. At the present time, many groups within the D2R Initiative and elsewhere focus on different aspects of biomedical nanoscale, such as the use of natural nano particles (exosomes) and synthetic lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) as therapeutics, delivery systems, vaccines, or as molecular hubs with emerging new functions. CAN provides these studies with a considerable technological ‘edge’ and we believe that with this new D2R support we will be able to assist D2R researchers (and beyond) for many years to come, thereby contributing to our collective success.â€

In addition, D2R has also funded NanoCore, led by Pieter Cullis at the University of British Columbia. NanoCore is a research facility that develops high-quality, state-of-the-art lipid nanoparticles encapsulating nucleic acid, small molecule, or peptide drugs that enable proof-of-concept (POC) animal studies. NanoCore contributes to D2R by developing and producing lipid nanoparticles for POC and preclinical testing.

For more information on these projects, please visit D2R's funded projects page.

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