GPCR-focused French firm Domain Therapeutics is opening a North American subsidiary, dubbed Domain Therapeutics NA, at the NEOMED Institute in Montreal, Canada, as part of a plan to bring BioSens-All™, a new GPCR-specific biosensor technology, to market. Domain is hoping the geographical closeness of the new subsidiary to Canadian and U.S. pharmaceutical and biotech firms will help it secure new partnerships with them and also speed up the development of its own projects using the new technology.

The firm says BioSens-All technology allows users to predict the pharmacological profiles of drug candidates by bringing to light the signaling pathways that each candidate molecule activates. The technology was developed by the molecular pharmacology research unit run by Michel Bouvier, Ph.D., at the Universite de Montreal’s (UdeM) Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC).

Domain Therapeutics plans to work closely with the technology’s inventors at UdeM and McGill University, with whom Domain inked a December 2013 agreement under which it agreed to pay an annual access fee for the technology as well as royalties on income earned from any sales of screening services and sales of drugs that result from its own research and partnership activities.

“This initiative will expedite the process of bringing to market an important element of the IRIC technology portfolio,” said Steven Klein, vp, business development at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer–Commercialization of Research. “Our continuing collaboration with Domain Therapeutics and with our research partners, particularly Professor Bouvier, along with researchers at McGill, Universite de Sherbrooke, and the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center, will also help to produce additional novel biosensors, which will further strengthen the company’s BioSens-All platform.”

Previous articleEpigenetic Event-Impacting Protein Linked to Alzheimer’s Memory Loss
Next articleAriad’s Iclusig Returns to U.S. Commercial Market