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.
Dr. Rafaela Andrade and her team.
Building Canada's innovation pipeline
Lab2Market is modelled on international best practices, including the American National Science Foundation I-CorpsTM program, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT delt v program, and ICURe from the United Kingdom. The program consists of three streams, including:
- Discover - a part-time early-stage program cultivating interest in commercialization over 10 weeks, with participants learning foundational concepts and skills of innovation and entrepreneurship.
- Validate - a full-time four-month program that develops competencies focused on customer discovery and market-validation.
- Launch - a full-time four-month program that builds the skills needed to create a business model capable of bringing research-based innovations to market.
At Dalhousie, Lab2Market is woven into an ecosystem of entrepreneurship and innovation programs available through Dal Innovates that are open to all levels of students and researchers across Nova Scotia. From the undergrad-focused suite of Collide programs, to those that help researchers create product prototypes at the Emera ideaHUB, to programs at the Creative Destruction Lab-Atlantic that help established startups to grow, support is available to meet the needs of every entrepreneur.
In addition to serving as the national headquarters, Dalhousie will lead Lab2Market's Atlantic Hub, with support from delivery partners University of New Brunswick and Memorial University. Other regional hubs include the Pacific Hub, co-led by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University; the Alberta Hub, led by the University of Alberta; the Prairies Hub, led by the University of Manitoba; the Ontario Hub, led by Toronto Metropolitan University; and the Quebec Hub, led by Concordia University. The University of Toronto will lead a national Health Hub that brings together leading health-focused post-secondary institutions and hospitals across Canada.
Students and researchers across Canada can apply to Lab2Market programs without formal affiliation with its program leads or delivery partners.
At the Government of Canada's Lab to Market Grant funding announcement, Dalhousie was also named a co-recipient of a grant awarded to Simon Fraser University for the National Invention to Innovation Network and Guelph University's Sustainable Food Systems for Canada Innovation Platform.
Support for Dal Innovates
The Province of Nova Scotia, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and Mitacs support Dal Innovates programs, the Emera ideaHUB and CDL-Atlantic, making investments that are creating a pipeline of talent and new companies to drive innovation, productivity and economic growth in Nova Scotia and across the country.
