The Quebec government is allocating a $ 13 million grant to the University of Montreal to support the creation of Médicament Québec, the objective of which is to revive the drug industry.
The health crisis in which we are plunged has demonstrated the need to increase Quebec’s autonomy in the discovery, development and production of drugs. To begin to respond to this need, the ministers of the Economy and Innovation and of Health and Social Services announced a $ 13 million grant over two years to fund Médicament Québec.
This multicenter project led by the University of Montreal, in collaboration with several other institutes (Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC), Sherbrooke Institute of Pharmacology (IPS)) and universities (Laval, McGill, Sherbrooke) will have for main objective of developing innovative platforms to improve the chain of discovery and distribution of essential drugs and treatments in Quebec in order to avoid supply shortages. Médicament Québec will promote partnerships with innovative pharmaceutical, generic, biotechnological and manufacturing companies and will consolidate the use of artificial intelligence approaches in the drug discovery and development process. Three pillars were put in place during the creation of this initiative: (1) Discovery and synthesis of innovative drugs; (2) Technologies for the production of active ingredients; (3) Innovation in biopharmacy.
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IPS will be directly involved in the initiative for the discovery and synthesis of innovative drugs (pillar 1). This involvement will result in an improvement of the available chemical libraries, the establishment of an integrated management system for collections of compounds and screening campaigns; and finally by the integration of new technologies for the design and production of drug candidates, including the use of chemogenomics approaches and artificial intelligence.
