The Ontario government has chosen six life-science startups to invest in through a new fund that’s meant to help commercialize health and medtech innovation in the province and attract private-sector dollars to the industry. 

Here’s what you need to know: 

The recipients: Six Ontario-headquartered early-stage startups—Fero International, InventoRR MD, Juniper Genomics, Mimosa Diagnostics, Keep Labs and Gotcare—will each receive $500,000 from the government, for a total of $3 million. The companies will use the money to expand their products and services—which include a medical device to detect skin injuries before they are visible to the naked eye, modular health clinics and a smart storage device to help patients monitor their medicine dosage—and bring them to market.

The money: The funding is the first tranche of investments from the $15-million Life Science Innovation Fund, which the Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI)—a provincially funded organization—announced last fall. The fund’s goal is to help entice the private sector to bet on technologies that tend to be riskier due to the time and money it typically takes to commercialize them. 

In an interview with The Logic, Claudia Krywiak, president and CEO of OCI, said private investors need to chip in at least one dollar for every dollar the LSIF invests in any given company. In the case of the first six recipients announced Thursday, Krywiak said, private backers invested an average of $4 for every government dollar, with the startups raising a combined $12 million. 

The bigger picture: The life-science fund is part of a broader government play to establish the province as a global biomanufacturing and life-sciences hub. The government said in a press release that Ontario attracted over $3 billion in life-science investments in the last two and a half years. As part of the plan, the government is angling to create 85,000 “high-value” jobs in the sector by 2030, a 25 per cent increase from 2020, and attract at least five investments of $100 million or more for biomanufacturing in the province, like producing medicine and vaccines. 

What’s happened so far: This is the latest in a series of recent government announcements for programs designed to help Ontario realize its goal of becoming a global healthtech leader. The province established a life-sciences council in April. Earlier this month, it announced a commitment of up to $9.7 million for the forthcoming Life Sciences Critical Technologies & Commercialization Centre of Excellence. The centre is meant to support life-science companies using 5G, AI, blockchain, cybersecurity, quantum and robotics technologies. For its part, OCI opened applications in June for a new program that matches tech companies with health-care providers to help digitize aspects of health services in the province. Krywiak said the program will help health-care providers adopt new technologies, which is a long-standing barrier to healthtech commercialization in the province.