Chemaphor Inc. (the Company) is a federally incorporated, publicly listed biotechnology company trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol CFR. The company, headquartered in Ottawa, was created on August 4, 2005, through the amalgamation of Occell Inc., a private National Research Council of Canada (NRC) biotech spin-off company founded in April, 1997, and Triumph Acquisition Corp. Inc., a TSX Venture Exchange capital pool company founded in August, 2003.
The two founders and principals of Chemaphor and the former Occell are Drs Graham Burton (President) and Janusz Daroszewski (Chief Scientific Officer). Dr. Paul Dick is Chief Executive Officer, David Hankinson is Director of Nutrisciences and Board Chairman, and Dave Croucher is the Chief Financial Officer.
Chemaphor has core expertise in organic chemistry that it combines with many years experience working on multidisciplinary, biomedical projects at NRC. The Chemaphor technology and the enterprise itself are the direct result of a project initiated in the early 1990’s by Burton and Daroszewski at the NRC’s Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences. The goal of the project was to explore a new, fundamentally different insight into the potential nutritional benefit of a class of compounds known as carotenoids, which are typified by such well-known substances as beta-carotene and lycopene. The latter compounds are responsible for the characteristic orange and red colours of carrots and tomatoes, respectively.
Although beta-carotene and some other related, but not all, carotenoid compounds are sources of vitamin A, resulting from a very specific oxidation process, Burton and Daroszewski believe all carotenoid compounds are potential nutritional sources of a diverse family of non-vitamin A carotenoid oxidation products that possess hitherto unrecognized biological activities. Many such carotenoid oxidation products are found pre-formed in plants and many of them inevitably become part of the human diet, as well as the natural diet of many animals.
The seven directors on the Chemaphor board are Graham Burton, Janusz Daroszewski, Paul Dick, David Hankinson, Dr. Chandra Panchal, Mark Goudie and Jacques Brault. David Hankinson is chairman of the board, continuing the role he held with Occell since its inception in 1997. Dr. Panchal is the former Executive Vice-President, Business Development, Licensing & Intellectual Property, at Ambrilia Biopharma Inc., Mark Goudie is Vice-President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer at Mxi Technologies (Ottawa), and Jacques Brault is a Montreal businessman.
The Company’s goal is to commercialize a range of product applications from its technology platform, targeting significant licensing revenues. In a secondary, chemical services activity, the company is generating annual revenues from the synthesis of selected specialty chemicals.
The Company’s business approach is to build strong, collaborative, institutional and industrial collaborations and alliances to optimize technology value and capture related new technology opportunities.
Chemaphor’s head office is in Ottawa and the company has two research and development operations located respectively in the Industrial Partnership Facilities in NRC’s Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences in Ottawa (Chemistry), and the Institute for Nutrisciences and Health in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (Nutrisciences).
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