Six teams to compete for $25k or $10k in funding at the Building a Biotech Venture Pitch Competition on May 2

2022 winners, DTPx Therapeutics, make their presentation at the Building a Biotech Venture Pitch Competition.

At the University of Toronto and its affiliated hospitals, research trainees including graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and research associates are on the forefront of regenerative and precision medicine research.

The Building a Biotech Venture Pitch Competition will feature six teams working on a range of innovations including discovering new drug compounds, engineering cell therapies, preventing neurodegeneration and revolutionizing eye treatments.

Both regenerative medicine, which aims to regenerate and repair the body with stem cells and other living therapies, and precision medicine, which focuses on the personalization of preventions and treatments for individual patients, are research areas that will be the future of medicine, says Allison Brown, Medicine by Design’s executive director.

“The trainees in our pitch competition will be showcasing tomorrow’s innovations,” says Brown. “Research they are doing today will be a part of the next generation strategies in these cutting-edge fields that expand our capabilities to treat disease.”

The teams will pitch their ideas in front of four expert judges for the chance to receive one of two research funding grants, valued at $25,000 and $10,000.

The Pitch Competition is the culmination of the Building a Biotech Venture program, an education program that gives participants a foundation in commercializing a real-world technology or product that has emerged from their lab research.

The program is a collaboration between Medicine by Design, an initiative that drives regenerative medicine research at U of T and its affiliated hospitals toward clinical impact; the Precision Medicine Initiative (PRiME), a U of T initiative that aligns research efforts in the area of precision medicine; the Health Innovation Hub (H2i), a campus-linked accelerator at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine; and Talk Boutique, a full-service speaker representation and coaching company.

“Past participants in our pitch competition have gone on to win other competitions and have joined accelerators such as Creative Destruction Lab. The Building a Biotech Venture program gives teams the foundation to successfully begin to translate their discoveries and technologies,” says Brown.

The Building a Biotech Venture program is designed to complement trainees’ scientific education.

“What we aim to do with this program is to teach trainees the skills they need outside of the lab — business concepts like regulatory affairs and intellectual property, and how to communicate their research, for example,” Sarah De La Rue, director of strategy and partnerships at PRiME, says. “All participants in the program come out with skills that will give them a strong foundation whether they end up founding a startup or staring a career elsewhere in the biotech ecosystem”