Breviro Caviar and Soricimed win Innovation Challenge

By Christing Morris – Telegraph-Journal | link to orignal article (subscribers only)

FREDERICTON – A promising new cancer treatment and a proposal to get more caviar out of St. John River sturgeon are the winning projects in the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation R3 Gala’s first Innovation Challenge.

Breviro Caviar Inc., based in Pennfield, and Soricimed BioPharma Inc. of Moncton each walked away on Wednesday night with $50,000 worth of research and development services at a post-secondary institution or a research organization in New Brunswick.

They also will each get $5,000 in legal services and $5,000 in accounting services from Cox & Palmer and Deloitte.

“It will have a tremendous impact on the company and our ability to be globally competitive,” Jonathan Barry of Breviro said of the award, presented during the R3 Gala in Fredericton. “It is fundamental to our future.”

Paul Gunn, president and CEO of Soricimed, said the award will allow his company to proceed with development of a drug delivery system that could significantly aid in the treatment of cancer.

“If it wasn’t for this, we wouldn’t take the drug delivery system forward at this point,” he said of the innovation award.

The two companies were among five finalists for the inaugural award, which was designed by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation to help spur the development of “innovative and commercially viable ideas” in the province.

R3 stands for “recognizing research results” in New Brunswick.

“We needed to develop a way to encourage businesses to partner with researchers,” Calvin Milbury, president and CEO of the foundation, said in an interview.

“Typically, we are funding researchers who are looking to take their technology or research work out to the business community. But what we wanted to do was have the opposite happen. We wanted businesses with problems to be solved to take those ideas to the researchers and then partner with them to develop the idea.”

Earlier this year, the foundation issued a province-wide call for proposals from established businesses with revenues of less than $20 million that had a marketable idea but didn’t have the resources, expertise and facilities to take action on it.

The other three companies in the running for the award were:

• Lamda Guard Canada Inc. of Saint John and Fredericton, which is trying to develop a thin film that will make LEDs five to 10 times brighter.

• Gagnon Ornamentals Works Ltd. of Grand Falls, which is developing equipment to collect methane from cow manure on dairy farms.

• The Dizolve Group Corporation of Moncton, which is developing a new generation of dish detergent: a detergent sheet for use in automatic dishwashers.

Milbury said the selection process was extremely difficult because all five finalists had projects with a great deal of merit.

“Two are winning a prize, and we will connect them with researchers and they will get to carry ahead with their R & D proposals,” he said. “But we see a strong likelihood of being able to work with all of the finalists.”

Breviro has taken up the challenge of turning the sturgeon business into a profitable enterprise, despite the many difficulties involved in breeding and growing the fish.

The company’s proposal is to research and develop an aquaculture system and technique that would speed up the sexual maturation of sturgeon so they could get more caviar faster.

Breviro started selling in 2011 and considered it a trial year. Pleased with the results, the company is now marketing more aggressively.

Soricimed is already well along in developing a drug that attacks and kills cancerous cells by cutting off their supply of calcium.

The latest project, and the one involved in the R3 award, involves using their drug – which goes directly to cancer tumours – to better deliver chemotherapy drugs.

“We want to work with a medicinal chemist and take one of the current breast-cancer drugs, attach it to our drug and show that it can be effective on cancer cells,” Gunn says.

In addition to the innovation challenge winners, the gala also honoured three of New Brunswick’s top applied researchers with the R3 Innovation Award for Excellence in Applied Research.

Those awards were given to scientists John Spray of the Planetary and Space Science Centre at the University of New Brunswick; Jacques Gagnon of the Coastal Zones Research Institute in Shippagan; and Pandurang Ashrit, director of the Université de Moncton’s thin films research group.