How NorthMiRs made the jump from academia to entrepreneurship

Founded: 2022
Sector: Health
Program: Health
Services: Product Development, Marketing Intelligence, Intellectual Property, General Advisory

The biotech venture has refined its product development plan, crafted a business model and secured $250,000 in funding.

Sam McWhirter is out to catch a killer. The researcher turned entrepreneur has set her sights on sepsis, a severe medical condition that causes a person’s immune system to attack their tissues and organs. “It’s the number one reason people die in the ICU,” says McWhirter.

While antibiotics can tackle the symptoms, they don’t address the underlying immune dysregulation. That’s something McWhirter and her team at NorthMiRs are working to fix, leveraging promising research in lipid nanoparticles and microRNA to develop a therapeutic that targets the immune response. The company grew out of the work of Dr. Claudia dos Santos, a professor in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, as well as research from Dr. Gilbert Walker’s lab at the University of Toronto, where McWhirter is completing her PhD in chemistry. After seeing encouraging results of its first big study, the research team incorporated in 2022, and took a giant leap into entrepreneurship.
To take this idea out the lab and into patients, McWhirter turned to MaRS for guidance.

The challenge: “When you translate your academic research into a commercially viable product, there’s a large shift in mindset that needs to happen,” says McWhirter. “You need to work with people who have done this before and can direct you through the process.” In 2023, the company joined the Tx Biotech Accelerator, a joint program between MaRS and AdMare Bioinnovations, and tapped the advisory team at MaRS for added support.

“They came into the program at a very early stage,” says Richard Bozzato, a senior advisor at MaRS. “They were very strong technically, scientifically and clinically, but they had little experience in how to set up a company, how to run a company and how to get very innovative technology through regulatory processes.”

The first task? McWhirter needed a strong product development plan to show investors and other supporters that NorthMiRs’s product was worth the investment. “Biopharma startups typically need to raise tens of millions — if not more — before products are approved by regulatory bodies and are ready for market entry,” says McWhirter. “It’s a huge challenge.”

The strategy: The founders worked with Bozzato to understand what the FDA, Health Canada and other regulatory agencies look for in preclinical development, as well as the intellectual property licensing from academic institutions. Bozzato also provided market intelligence on sepsis and helped them narrow their focus on a therapeutic that would treat cardiac issues caused by sepsis. “In creating a product development plan, you want to be certain that you’ve got a relevant endpoint and that you can easily measure a successful outcome,” he says.
Having that expert advice on market intelligence proved particularly helpful, says McWhirter. “It really helps to foresee where we’re going, who our competitors are, other emerging technologies — it even identifies potential partners.”

The impact: NorthMiRs has made considerable strides. The startup snagged $250,000 in funding from the Entrepreneurship for Cardiovascular Health Opportunities program in October 2024, which McWhirter credits in part to her bi-weekly meetings with Bozzato. “Without that dedicated time to continually improve our business model and our plan, I don’t think we would have won that competition,” she says.

What’s next: The team at NorthMiRs is pushing forward with preclinical trials for its therapeutic sepsis-induced cardiomyopathy and is starting to test a drug to treat sepsis-induced lung injury. The company is also in exploratory talks for pre-seed funding.

“The progress the team has made over the last few months is remarkable,” says Bozzato. “They are not just a group of smart scientists. They have built a credible company and have the know-how to bring a product forward through development.”

MaRS programming is funded in part by the Government of Canada through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario and by the Province of Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade.