Thank you very much, Ms. Diab.
I can provide more details about our sector, which is discovering medicines. As I mentioned, the pandemic showed how important this sector is for Canada's economy.
I'd like to mention something that links to the previous comments. I'm going to use IRICoR as an example, but I believe it's a model that could be applied more broadly in Canada. High-value assets that can be developed in a university environment are needed before establishing companies. Doing this mitigates the potential risk for Canadian and American venture capital corporations. I can also see that my colleague, Professor Sallaudin-Karim, is working on this at the University of Waterloo. I believe that models like this would raise the value of Canadian innovation and intellectual property before establishing industry partnerships.
When I talk about partnerships, as you were pointing out, based on our experience at IRICoR, we mean partnerships with international pharmaceutical companies. Accordingly, what's involved is demonstrating that Canadian innovation can attract major funding. In our first 10 years, we funded drug discovery projects at various stages of development, ranging as high as $5 million or $6 million. These investments attracted $50 million to $60 million in research and development funding from international companies.
Unlike deep tech, pharmaceutical company headquarters are outside of Canada. We were nevertheless able to attract funds.
In addition to the research and development funding that would come to Canada, there are the contracts we sign with these companies. We're talking about intellectual property and expertise development. At IRICoR, working with Canadian research teams, we developed new intellectual property. However, we also afterwards established collaborative partnerships with major pharmaceutical firms, giving rise to knowledge transfers between university and pharmaceutical company research teams.
This jointly developed expertise generates benefits for research teams and universities in Canada, as well as for organizations like ours, and enables us to reinvest in research projects and make them sustainable with federal and provincial funding.