The University of Toronto has announced a new open-innovation research collaboration, dubbed the Neuroscience Catalyst, with Janssen Inc. and Johnson & Johnson Innovation.
The three-year agreement, which will support research through the Collaborative Center for Drug Research (CCDR), will solely focus on identifying new ways to treat and manage brain disorders, such as mood disorders and Alzheimer’s disease.
Through the collaboration, the CCDR will issue three calls for proposals over the three-year agreement. Calls for collaborative and open-source research projects will be open to researchers from the Faculty of Medicine, the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), and other U of T-affiliated hospitals through the Toronto Academic Health Science Network. As part of the collaboration, Janssen scientists will work with U of T researchers providing technical support and use of their discovery sciences facilities.
This unique marriage between academia and industry presents an opportunity to accelerate the discovery and exploration in the field of neuroscience and mental health.
“Brain disorders are highly complex and therefore identifying new drug treatments requires a concerted effort and the combined skills and expertise from academia and industry,” said professor Ruth Ross, director of the CCDR, chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and senior scientist at CAMH.
In the spirit of open collaboration, funded researchers are free to commercialize and publicly disclose, through peer-reviewed journals, any of their findings. “This partnership is unusual in that the funding from Janssen is ‘no strings attached.’ That is, the company does not have any intellectual property rights to the research funded by the Neuroscience Catalyst fund and the research is conducted within a model of ‘open collaboration,’” said Ross.
Historically, investment in funding brain research to identify and develop new treatments has proven to be high-risk commercially. However, the Neuroscience Catalyst will allow researchers to identify potential drug targets and new therapeutic compounds.
