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Oncopole, the cancer division of Fonds de recherche du Québec, unveils the results of its PROVEM competition: $2 million for the implementation of innovations in real healthcare settings

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MONTRÉAL and SAN DIEGO, June 3, 2024 /CNW/ – Oncopole, the cancer division of Fonds de recherche du Québec, has unveiled the results of its PROVEM (données PRObantes éValuées En Milieu réel) competition. The announcement was made at the BIO International Convention, held in San Diego from June 3 to 6, in the presence of Oncopole representatives, Minister for the Economy Christopher Skeete, founding partner Merck Canada, and partners GSK and Pfizer Canada.

Oncopole, the cancer division of FRQ, is announcing $2 million in funding for two teams under its PROVEM competition. 

The implementation of healthcare innovations, particularly in oncology, is essential at a time when the growing complexity of such advances can present a level of uncertainty as to their real value. It is therefore necessary to develop processes for evaluating and adopting innovations that eliminate these uncertainties to enable rapid and optimal use for patients and the healthcare system.

Against this backdrop, Oncopole, a major player in oncology research in Québec, is announcing $2 million in funding for two teams under its PROVEM competition. This initiative is supported by Québec’s Ministère de l’Économie, de l’Innovation et de l’Énergie, Oncopole’s founding partner Merck Canada, and partners GSK and Pfizer Canada.

The following two platforms have been awarded funding under the PROVEM competition:

“Leveraging real-world care data for responsible, efficient and equitable introduction of therapeutic innovations in oncology” led by Hermann Nabi and Isabelle Laverdière (CHU de Québec, Université Laval)”Creating timely real-world evidence and economic assessments to improve decisions for cancer patients” led by Elena Alice Dragomir (Université de Montréal) and Armen G. Aprikian (McGill University Health Centre).

These two teams will develop a set of services to obtain evidence in real-world contexts, reduce uncertainties, and accelerate the implementation of innovations in cancer treatment. Supporting innovations as close as possible to their use will have a direct impact on the quality of care and services offered to people affected by cancer in Québec.

“We are delighted to support these two platforms, which will help make high-impact research advances more accessible”, says Carole Jabet, Director of Oncopole and Scientific Director of Fonds de recherche du Québec – secteur Santé. “Oncopole will continue to play a leading role in funding and promoting oncology research, with a focus on scientific excellence and improving clinical outcomes for patients.”

“We applaud Oncopole and the brilliant research teams who are championing innovative work in support of cancer patients. We understand the profound impact that research in oncology has on patient outcomes and recognize the potential this program will have in advancing breakthrough discoveries and novel treatment approaches,” says Jennifer Chan, Executive Director of Policy at Merck Canada. “Our collaboration with Oncopole and other stakeholders in the PROVEM program underscores our commitment to improving patient outcomes with a better evaluation process to access innovative drugs and look forward to supporting the progress ahead.”

“Innovation is at the heart of GSK’s purpose, and strategic partnerships are essential to opening up new avenues of discovery. Through our partnership with Oncopole we are proud to help improve and accelerate access to the latest advances for patients” says Alison Pozzobon, Pharma Operations and Communications Director, GSK Canada Pharma.

“This announcement brings hope to people living with cancer. The level of excellence in cancer research in Québec is among the highest in the world. We are proud to continue to support cancer research in Québec through our support of Oncopole”, says Karine Grand‘Maison, Vice President, Access and Government Relations, Pfizer Canada. “Collaboration in Québec’s life sciences ecosystem is of great importance in ensuring that we can continue to develop our capacities in the province.”

About Oncopole

Oncopole, cancer division of Fonds de recherche du Québec – secteur Santé, is the result of a unique co-creative approach, supporting research, innovation and investment to accelerate the fight against cancer. Oncopole’s mission is to act as a catalyst for the actions deployed by Quebec’s oncology research and innovation ecosystem. It aims to position the province as a leader in the field. For more information, visit https://oncopole.ca/en/

About Merck

At Merck, known as MSD outside of the United States and Canada, we are unified around our purpose: We use the power of leading-edge science to save and improve lives around the world. For more than 130 years, we have brought hope to humanity through the development of important medicines and vaccines. We aspire to be the premier research-intensive biopharmaceutical company in the world – and today, we are at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions that advance the prevention and treatment of diseases in people and animals. We foster a diverse and inclusive global workforce and operate responsibly every day to enable a safe, sustainable and healthy future for all people and communities. For more information about our operations in Canada, visit www.merck.ca and connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter @MerckCanada.

About GSK

GSK is a global biopharma company with a purpose to unite science, technology, and talent to get ahead of disease together. Find out more www.ca.gsk.com.

About Pfizer Canada

Pfizer Canada ULC is the Canadian operation of Pfizer Inc., one of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical companies. At Pfizer, we apply science and our global resources to bring therapies to people that help extend and improve their lives. We strive to set the standard for quality, safety, and value in the discovery, development, and manufacture of health care products. Every day, Pfizer colleagues work to advance wellness, prevention, treatments, and cures that challenge the most feared diseases of our time. To learn more about Pfizer Canada, visit pfizer.ca or you can follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Instagram or YouTube.

SOURCE Fonds de Recherche du Québec

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PRC-Saltillo Acquires Ner Chat, Bringing Minspeak® Symbols to Glint Visual Support Platform

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Acquisition brings together AAC expertise and school-focused innovation, with plans to add familiar Minspeak symbols to Glint and help educators and clinicians spend more time supporting communication.

WOOSTER, Ohio, Oct. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — PRC-Saltillo, a global leader in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), today announced the acquisition of Ner Chat, creator of Glint, a visual-support creation platform that helps educators and specialists turn hours of visual-support preparation into seconds.

The acquisition brings together two organizations with a shared mission: making communication support easier to create, easier to implement, and more accessible for the individuals who rely on it every day.

As an initial collaboration, the organizations are working to bring PRC-Saltillo’s Minspeak® symbols to Glint; the familiar symbols used in LAMP Words for Life® and Unity® AAC apps, as well as Minspeak-based systems on Genesis®, NovaChat®, Accent®, and Via® devices.

For teams supporting a child who uses a Minspeak-based AAC system, the planned addition will create a simpler path to building visual supports and lite-tech backup AAC with familiar symbols. Educators and clinicians will be able to create classroom activity boards, visual schedules, choice-making materials, and communication supports using the symbols many learners already know through LAMP Words for Life, Unity, and other Minspeak-based systems.

Founded in 2024 by Dylan Makani and Scott Soifer, Ner Chat created Glint to make assistive technology easier to bring into schools. Glint gives educators, therapists, and support teams a fast way to create personalized visual supports from simple text prompts, turning hours of manual creation into seconds so more time can be devoted to supporting learners and communication.

PRC-Saltillo brings six decades of AAC leadership to the partnership. As the company celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2026, the acquisition reflects its continued commitment to supporting communicators, families, clinicians, and educators through innovative communication solutions and implementation support.

“Our history is built on relationships with people who use AAC and the families, educators, and clinicians supporting them. Those teams tell us what they need. We want to make it easier to create useful materials with the symbols a child already knows and spend more time supporting communication,” said Sarah Wilds, CEO of PRC-Saltillo.

Glint already creates schedules, social narratives, communication boards, and other visual supports from text prompts, with options for QR-code sharing in more than 50 languages. Adding Minspeak symbols will help connect that creation process with the communication tools children and their teams already use.

“We built Glint to help educators and therapists turn their ideas into visuals without spending hours preparing materials,” said Dylan Makani, Co-Founder & CEO of Ner Chat. “Working with PRC-Saltillo brings deep AAC experience to that goal. We’re excited to help teams create supports with familiar symbols, personalize them for each learner and get back to supporting communication.”

The companies plan to demonstrate a beta featuring Minspeak symbols in Glint at the Closing The Gap Conference, with customer availability to follow. This marks the first collaboration between the two organizations, with additional innovations planned for the future.

While Ner Chat is now part of the PRC-Saltillo community, Glint will continue to operate under its existing brand identity. Together, the companies are working toward a straightforward goal: familiar tools, easier preparation, and more opportunities for children to communicate and participate throughout their day.

About PRC-Saltillo

Founded in 1966, PRC-Saltillo is a pioneer and global leader in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology for individuals with complex communication needs. The company offers a full range of speech-generating devices, industry-leading AAC apps, and research-based vocabulary systems. PRC-Saltillo is 100% employee-owned and headquartered in Wooster, Ohio, with subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, Singapore, and India.

About Glint

Glint helps educators and specialists create the visual supports their learners need, communication boards, visual schedules, social narratives, and more, in seconds instead of hours. No design skills, no starting from scratch, no late nights. Just the right visual, ready when you need it. Founded in 2024 by Dylan Makani and Scott Soifer and headquartered in New York, Glint supports tens of thousands of educators across hundreds of school districts. Learn more at nerchat.com.

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SOURCE PRC-Saltillo

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RemoteThreat Expands Executive Leadership Team with Appointment of Joe Castellanos as Vice President of Product and Taylor Pettis as Vice President of Marketing

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Veteran product and marketing leaders from Bugcrowd and SOCRadar join after RemoteThreat emerged from stealth with the O/C/O Platform and $7 million in pre-seed funding

FULTON, Md., Oct. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — RemoteThreat, the AI-enabled offensive cyber operations company, today announced the expansion of its executive leadership team with the appointments of Joe Castellanos as Vice President of Product and Taylor Pettis as Vice President of Marketing. The two executives join founders Chris Thompson, Chief Executive Officer, and Shawn Jones, Chief Technology Officer, along with Rob McCall, Chief Operating Officer, as the company accelerates deployment of the O/C/O Platform, the first commercial, fully integrated, end-to-end platform for offensive cyber operations.

The appointments come just weeks after RemoteThreat emerged from stealth with $7 million in pre-seed funding led by Osage University Partners and DataTribe, a strategic advisory partnership with The Nakasone Group, and membership in USSOCOM’s Special Operations Forces Rapid Acquisition Consortium for Emerging Requirements (SOF RACER). Castellanos will lead product vision and roadmap for the O/C/O Platform. Pettis will lead global marketing strategy and growth initiatives to establish RemoteThreat as a globally recognized leader in offensive cybersecurity.

“We are building the most sophisticated offensive cyber operations platform in the market today, and that requires an experienced leadership team that can execute. Joe and Taylor bring the background and skillsets we need to operate in this space,” said Chris Thompson, Co-Founder and CEO of RemoteThreat. “While we launched just a few weeks ago, our team and the market are already moving at a pace that requires relentless execution. Joe has taken products from concept to significant revenue at some of the most demanding companies in security and identity. Taylor has built the brands behind multiple high-growth technology companies. Together they give us the product and go-to-market leadership to turn that momentum into category leadership.”

Joe Castellanos, Vice President of Product

Castellanos is an enterprise product executive with more than 15 years of experience building and scaling cybersecurity products. He spent the first half of his career on the defensive side of security, launching Entra ID Governance at Microsoft, leading Salesforce’s internal identity governance platform, and launching Okta DynamicScale. Along the way, he watched organizations pour huge budgets into security controls with no way of knowing whether they would hold up against a real adversary. That led him to offensive security, first at AppOmni, where he launched AppOmni Discovery, and then at Bugcrowd, where he led the entire product portfolio, including its expansion into AI penetration testing with Pathseeker. He has brought multiple products from concept to significant revenue scale and led high-performing product teams at startups and global technology organizations. He has presented at Microsoft Ignite and Oktane.

At RemoteThreat, Castellanos leads the company’s product strategy and development, shaping solutions that advance offensive cyber operations and deliver measurable value to enterprise red teams, government mission teams, and defense partners.

“Red teams are being asked to emulate adversaries whose capabilities evolve faster than the tools built to model them. RemoteThreat is the first company I have seen answer that with an integrated platform instead of another point tool,” said Castellanos. “The founders have spent their careers running the kinds of operations this platform is built for. My job is to make sure the O/C/O Platform keeps pace with what those operators need next, and that we ship it faster than anyone expects.”

Taylor Pettis, Vice President of Marketing

Pettis is a global marketing executive with more than 20 years of experience helping early-stage and private equity-backed technology companies accelerate growth, build market leadership, and scale for long-term success. Throughout his career, he has guided multiple organizations through critical growth phases, including cybersecurity companies Code42, Intel 471, and SOCRadar. His expertise spans demand generation, product marketing, brand strategy, go-to-market execution, and building high-performing marketing organizations.

As Vice President of Marketing, Pettis leads RemoteThreat’s global marketing strategy and growth initiatives, focused on establishing RemoteThreat as a world-renowned cybersecurity brand while scaling the business for meaningful and sustainable growth.

“RemoteThreat has the three things every marketer wants and almost never gets at once: a category that is being defined in real time, a product that is years ahead of the market, and founders who are the most credible voices in it,” said Pettis. “The company’s launch out of stealth showed how quickly this team moves. My focus is on making sure every red team leader, mission owner, and defense partner knows RemoteThreat is the name in offensive cyber operations.”

A Team Built to Outpace the Adversary

Castellanos and Pettis join a leadership team of offensive security veterans. Thompson and Jones founded RemoteThreat after decades of building and leading adversary simulation teams, developing malware and offensive tooling, and executing red team operations against defense targets, nuclear power plants, critical infrastructure providers, and some of the world’s largest financial institutions. McCall joined after years of venture investing in early-stage cybersecurity and AI startups, he most recently led customer success and support at Randori (acquired by IBM), one of the first Continuous Automated Red Team (CART) vendors.

“The gap between what AI-enabled adversaries can do and what red teams can emulate is widening every month. Closing it is an engineering problem and a product problem,” said Shawn Jones, Co-Founder and CTO of RemoteThreat. “Joe has shipped products operators actually adopt, in environments where the bar is unforgiving. Having that discipline alongside our research and engineering teams means the platform gets better at the speed our customers need.”

“In the weeks since launch, demand from enterprise red teams and mission teams has outpaced even our own projections,” said Rob McCall, Chief Operating Officer of RemoteThreat. “Scaling to meet that demand without losing the precision our customers expect is the job in front of us. Joe and Taylor bring the operating rigor and the growth playbooks to do it. This is the team that takes RemoteThreat from a launch to a category leader.”

Building on Launch Momentum

RemoteThreat emerged from stealth earlier this month with the launch of the O/C/O Platform, which brings eight connected systems into one operational picture to plan, execute, and adapt offensive cyber operations: mission planning, native command-and-control (C2), implants, initial-access frameworks, advanced capabilities, obfuscation pipelines, analysis engines, and AI-assisted operation. AI-enabled and built for expert operators, the platform equips enterprise and critical infrastructure red teams to emulate sophisticated adversaries and outpace frontier model advancements in cyber capabilities, while enabling U.S. government mission teams and vetted defense partners to conduct offensive cyber operations at mission speed.

Since launch, the company has announced $7 million in pre-seed funding led by Osage University Partners and DataTribe, a strategic advisory partnership with The Nakasone Group, founded by retired four-star U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone, former director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, membership in USSOCOM’s SOF RACER consortium, and a capability integration partnership with Talon Defense. The company is actively hiring senior operators, researchers, and engineers across its offensive capability, platform, and go-to-market teams.

The O/C/O Platform is available now to qualified enterprise, U.S. government, and vetted defense industry customers. To request access or schedule a briefing, visit remotethreat.com.

About RemoteThreat

RemoteThreat is the offensive cyber operations platform. Built by experienced offensive operators for internal red teams and defense industry partners, it combines deep capability, precise control, and human-machine operation at mission speed. RemoteThreat. The O/C/O Platform. Learn more at remotethreat.com.

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SOURCE RemoteThreat

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Mission North Joins Forces with cred to Lead New Era of Thought Leadership and Live Events

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Acquisition expands Mission North’s capabilities in executive positioning, thought leadership and live eventscred will retain its brand and operate independently under founder and CEO Caitlin Bartley

SAN FRANCISCO and NEW YORK, Oct. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Mission North, a communications agency for consequential companies, today announced it has acquired cred, a communications agency specializing in thought leadership and events for innovation brands.

Mission North acquires cred, expanding its executive positioning, thought leadership and live events capabilities.

cred builds thought leaders by securing earned speaking opportunities on the world’s most important stages and producing experiences from intimate VIP dinners to large-scale conferences. cred’s clients include high-growth startups, Fortune 500 companies and investors across the same segments Mission North serves, including B2B and consumer technology, AI, healthcare and financial services. The partnership deepens and expands Mission North’s capabilities in executive positioning, thought leadership and live events at a moment when earned, in-person visibility matters more than ever.

“In a world of endless content, real relationships matter more than ever, and those are built in rooms and on stages, not just in feeds,” said Mission North’s Co-CEOs Bill Bourdon and Tyler Perry. “Caitlin and the cred team are the best in the business at making that happen. As AI reshapes how we communicate, the companies that win will be the ones that show up in person.”

AI has made it easy to generate infinite content, but much harder to build trust. Whether it’s an executive on stage, a customer dinner, a flagship conference or a strategic industry convening, events build the relationships and trust other channels can’t match. Together, Mission North and cred will give clients integrated thought leadership and event capabilities to elevate their executives and brands across earned media, speaking, podcasts, owned events and social content.

“cred has grown on the strength of our work and the relationships we’ve built over the last decade,” said Caitlin Bartley, CEO, cred. “Mission North is the clear partner to help us go further. This partnership lets us bring our approach to more companies who see the value of live experiences, and do it while doubling down on what’s always set us apart: our people and our clients.”

cred will retain its brand and operate under its existing leadership, with strategic backing from Mission North. Bartley will continue to serve as CEO of cred, partnering closely with Mission North’s leadership team to build, market and deliver new client solutions.

About cred
cred is a communications agency specializing in thought leadership and events for innovation brands. The agency positions executives and secures speaking engagements on stages like SXSW, HumanX and Milken, and produces experiences from VIP dinners to large-scale conferences. cred’s current and former clients include high-growth startups and Fortune 500 companies, such as Notion, Together AI, Pinterest, Cisco and Salesforce.org. For more information visit credpr.com.

About Mission North
Mission North is a strategic communications agency for consequential companies to accelerate their market impact at every growth stage. The agency is headquartered in New York and San Francisco, with hubs in Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon. For more information visit missionnorth.com.  

Media Contact:

Shara Seigel, vice president, Media Strategy at Mission North – sseigel@missionnorth.com 

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SOURCE Mission North

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