TFRI and MEDTEQ+ join forces to mobilize the Canadian Digital Health Ecosystem, help launch an Innovation Fund
The Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI) sought the guidance and experience of MEDTEQ+, a pan-Canadian industrial research and innovation consortium in health technologies. This collaboration supported aspects involved in its augural call last spring for project applications to be funded by the TFRI-led Digital Health & Discovery Platform’s (DHDP) new Digital Health Innovation Fund (DHIF).
DHDP's goal is to enable industry and researchers to access clinical and administrative data through Canada's first cloud-based federated learning platform in health, with the aim of accelerating the development of marketable products in precision medicine. This collaboration between TFRI, DHDP and MEDTEQ+ has helped to make the DHIF successful in its infancy and purpose: 89 partners submitted applications before the mid-November 2025 deadline, leading to the preselection of 20 projects.
As part of the Innovation Fund's call for applications process, TFRI has mandated MEDTEQ+ to support networking and provide assistance to applicant companies and researchers. This collaboration helped to improve the quality of the projects submitted, both technically and commercially.
“TFRI has a superb reputation for conducting diligent, fair and thorough adjudication of cancer research but our experience is tuned to the academic and health sectors. Our partnership with MEDTEQ+ leveraged their expertise in company due diligence, start-up support and understanding the needs of the health technology sector,” remarked Dr. Jim Woodgett, TFRI’s president and scientific director. “Their expertise was critical and complementary to ours in identifying the best applicants, projects and partnerships to apply to the Innovation Fund.” This sector, its players and projects, is new territory for TFRI to navigate as it heads towards the completion of the development of the Digital Health & Discovery Platform.
“Leveraging its expertise in rolling out Canada-wide calls for projects, MEDTEQ+ supported TFRI by maximizing connections, structuring networking, and assisting companies at every stage of their collaborative project submissions,” added Annie-Kim Gilbert, PhD, chief executive officer of MEDTEQ+. “With our health innovation ecosystem rapidly evolving and digital transformation accelerating, we continue to expand our mission through collaboration and bringing together companies, researchers, healthcare institutions, community, organizations, and public partners more quickly and efficiently around promising projects that are ready to be deployed.”
In order to be eligible for the Innovation Fund, project teams must be composed of at least two Canadian SMEs. In this context, MEDTEQ+'s support for TFRI was decisive in terms of networking efforts, structuring evaluation criteria, and rigorously supporting the process, from the submission of letters of intent to the final submission of projects. The DHIF is designed to bring together Canadian SMEs to collaborate on and explore data discovery, preparation and analysis on the Platform. Built by users, for users, the work and feedback of those groups that are awarded project funding, will help to refine Platform functionality in addition to their individual project goals in healthcare data analysis.
Building Long-Term Collaboration
The ongoing collaboration between TFRI and MEDTEQ+ will reinforce links between industry and academia in the field of health sciences related to artificial intelligence and precision medicine. The complementary nature of their expertise — MEDTEQ+ in collaborative innovation, funding, networking, and support, and TFRI’s DHDP in digital infrastructure, data, and advanced analytical capabilities — will contribute, in the longer term, to accelerating the development of projects related to digital health, medical devices, artificial intelligence applied to health, home support technologies, and solutions aimed at improving care pathways, and thereby boosting Canada’s knowledge economy.
Both organizations look forward to the results of this matchmaking and the impact of DHIF projects on better outcomes for patients with cancer and neurodegenerative disease from coast to coast in Canada. The projects that will receive funding from the DHIF will be announced in March and awardees will have a year to move them forward. Once funding has been confirmed, the TFRI team will oversee the rollout of the projects.
About TFRI: Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI), established in 2007, invests in world-class, collaborative cancer research teams and partnerships. Together with its research and funding partners, TFRI is working to inspire the transformation of cancer research in Canada by bringing together leading cancer research and treatment organizations from coast to coast and empowering them under the framework of the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network.
About DHDP: The Digital Health & Discovery Platform (DHDP) is a pan-Canadian initiative led by the Terry Fox Research Institute, with a funding allocation of $49 million through the Government of Canada's Innovation, Science, Economic, and Development fund. Please visit the following link for more details on the DHDP and our new funding opportunity: Digital Health Innovation Fund. Focused on improving health outcomes for Canadians by bringing together health researchers, AI and data scientists and industry partners to advance precision medicine—the Digital Health Innovation Fund supports collaboration in secure health data sharing to accelerate research in precision medicine.
About MEDTEQ+ : MEDTEQ+, a pan-Canadian consortium for industrial research and innovation in healthcare technologies, aims to accelerate the development of innovative technological solutions to improve people’s health and quality of life. MEDTEQ+ supports the validation of these technologies, their integration into the healthcare network, their commercialization, as well as their local and international outreach, by bringing together the complementary skills of industrial and institutional partners and healthcare providers. MEDTEQ+ offers support, subsidies, and investment services to innovative companies. Since December 2022, MEDTEQ+ has also been the lead partner in the envisAGE initiative, which aims to catalyze the AgeTech ecosystem and help companies grow and scale in the AgeTech market. MEDTEQ+ relies, among other things, on financial support from the Government of Quebec, the Government of Canada, the private sector, and complementary partners to foster research-industry relationships. www.medteq.ca/
For more information:
Josée Laflamme
Director of Communications and Events, MEDTEQ+
514 909-0575
Amanda Maxwell
Communications Specialist, DHDP
778 652-2590