OTTAWA, Ontario - CRS Robotics Corp., of Burlington, Ontario, became the third biotech-related company in the past three months to benefit from Industry Canada's Technology Partnerships (TPC) program.

According to Ralph Steedman, President & CEO of CRS, the repayable TPC investment of C$1.1 million (US$670,000) will allow the company to further the research on its new Polymorph laboratory system.

With the advent of combinatorial chemistry and genomics, there has been a dramatic expansion of both available research compounds as well as the number of disease targets confronting the screening laboratory in the search for new drugs. Typically, this results in the need to test millions of compound combinations.

The Polymorph system is designed to offer a significant increase in assay throughput, allowing the high degrees of modularity and increased speed that is now demanded in the search for new drugs targeted to specific disease sites, the company said.

Industry Minister John Manley said that the goal of the TPC investment is to bring greater efficiency into the laboratory and accelerate the pace of research by getting important data into the hands of scientists as soon as possible. CRS also will upgrade its proprietary Polara lab-automation software as part of the project. Polymorph hardware and Polara software will be mutually complementary in increasing laboratory productivity.

TPC is a special operating agency of Industry Canada responsible for making strategic investments in technological development projects. Created in 1996, TPC makes investments in high-technology growth sectors of the Canadian economy, including enabling technologies, environmental technologies and aerospace and defense.