Thermo Electron has entered into a collaborative research and development agreement with the Research in Immune Tolerance in Transplantation (RITT) programme
The research will be conducted in the RITT Industrial BioDevelopment Laboratory at the Toronto General Hospital.
As part of this collaboration, the state-of-the-art RITT Industrial BioDevelopment Laboratory (IBDL) has been equipped with over C$1,000,000 of Thermo laboratory equipment, making this one of the IBDL's biggest investments in a single supplier.
The RITT programme is a new $10 million initiative that aims to fully understand the biology of transplant rejection in order to develop treatments to prevent it.
The program is part of the research arm of the Multi Organ Transplant programme - one of North America's largest transplant programmes.
As well as equipping the IBDL with biological safety cabinets, incubators, freezers, microplate instrumentation, a KingFisher magnetic particle processor, and a liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry system (LC/MS), Thermo will also support the RITT programme's objectives by funding a post-doctoral research scientist for two years.
The Thermo Electron Bioanalytical Post-doctoral Fellow will work on projects of joint interest to the RITT programme and Thermo in the areas of assay development and biomolecule purification using the latest Thermo instrumentation.
Additionally, Thermo will provide training workshops in its many areas of expertise.
Gary Levy, director of the Multi Organ Transplant programme and the RITT programme, and an internationally-renowned expert in organ transplantation stated: "This partnership with a world leader in scientific instrumentation such as Thermo is an exciting step forward.
"This new collaborative environment between industry and academia is key to successfully translating medical research from the bench to the bedside.
"Our collaboration with the RITT programme demonstrates our ability to provide customers with total laboratory solutions," said Marc Casper, senior vice president of Thermo Electron.
"In turn, customers can spend less time managing their lab and instead focus on their promise of their research.
"We look forward to great things to come from RITT".
The RITT programme's new Industrial BioDevelopment Laboratory is a brand new facility with a mandate to bridge the gap between academia and industry and accelerate the commercialisation of new technology.
It has been funded jointly by the Canadian federal government (Canada Foundation for Innovation), the province of Ontario (Ontario Research Foundation), and the Toronto General Hospital.
