The Rainbow District School Board, Conseil scolaire catholique des Aurores boréales, and Rainy River District School Board are now live with Edsby this academic year, joining the growing list of Ontario districts using the Edsby K-12 digital platform.

RICHMOND HILL, ON, Sept. 17, 2026 /CNW/ — Edsby®, a multi-award-winning, next-generation K-12 digital learning platform, is being introduced this school year in three additional Ontario school districts, bringing the total number of Ontario districts using Edsby to 18 of Ontario’s 72 school districts.

Among the new adoptions is the Rainbow District School Board (RDSB), the largest public school board in Northern Ontario. Covering a vast geographic area of 14,757 square kilometers across the regions of Sudbury, Espanola, and Manitoulin Island, RDSB supports more than 14,000 students across 29 elementary and 9 secondary schools.

“We welcome the opportunity to integrate modern technology to further support parental involvement and student achievement,” said Bruce Bourget, Chief Executive Officer of the Rainbow District School Board. “Edsby will enhance communications between the school and the home by streamlining attendance, improving safe arrival practices, providing another venue for sharing information, and celebrating student learning.”

Joining RDSB in introducing Edsby to modernize its family engagement are two more school boards in the province:

Conseil scolaire catholique des Aurores boréales (CSDCAB): Serving French-language Catholic students in Northwestern Ontario, CSDCAB will leverage Edsby to seamlessly connect its nine elementary schools, one secondary school, and remote communities in a secure, bilingual environment.Rainy River District School Board (RRDSB): A previous Edsby district, Rainy River returned to the Edsby family this year, recognizing the value of this powerful tool.

Edsby continues momentum in Ontario

The addition of RDSB, CSDCAB, and RRDSB adds to Edsby’s significant usage across the province of Ontario. Edsby is specifically designed to meet the unique and challenging needs of K-12, unlike other corporate or higher-education platforms, and has become central to the digital transformations of school districts throughout the region.

Hundreds of thousands of Ontario families already rely on Edsby as their primary way to follow class schedules, access class materials, review homework, monitor assessment results, participate in discussions and more. In any given academic year, Ontario teachers use the platform to capture millions of points of learning evidence. This evidence is tagged directly to Ontario curriculum expectations, shared instantly with families and streamlines provincial reporting.

These newest districts join a long and growing list of Ontario boards that have adopted Edsby, including York Region DSB, Greater Essex DSB, Kawartha Pine Ridge DSB, Superior-Greenstone DSB, Nipissing-Parry Sound Catholic DSB, Algoma DSB, St. Clair Catholic DSB, Durham Catholic DSB, Lakehead DSB, Near North DSB and others.

Districts using Edsby repeatedly say the platform has the best capabilities to streamline communications and assessment in the Ontario K-12 environment.

In a profile on Edsby’s website, Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board calls Edsby the right tool for stakeholder engagement. In a similar profile, Greater Essex County District School Board says the district doesn’t even allow other parent options because “parents know that everything they need–from attendance reporting to grades–is right there in Edsby.”

To learn more about how Edsby is driving K-12 digital transformation in Ontario and beyond, visit www.edsby.com.

About Edsby 

The unique needs of K-12 education are hard to meet with conventional technologies. Edsby’s innovative software systems have been fostering student success and leveraging data responsibly in K-12 worldwide since 2010. Districts, regional governments and independent schools use Edsby for modern K-12 assessment & reporting, family engagement, personalized learning and analytics. Edsby and its products have received more than 90 industry awards and distinctions. Learn more at https://www.edsby.com/.

SOURCE Edsby

BOSTON, Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Ara Partners, a global private markets firm focused on decarbonising the industrial economy, today announced that it has acquired a majority interest in Bryden Wood, a strategy and integrated design consultancy. Ara will support Bryden Wood’s continued growth and expand the firm’s work across the industrial economy and within Ara’s portfolio.

Bryden Wood brings inventive thinkers, designers, engineers and technical specialists into one team – solving the most complex design problems for some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world. The firm, headquartered in London, UK, employs 300 people in four offices across Europe.

Bryden Wood is changing the way industrial process facilities are designed and delivered. Combining front-end strategic thinking with deep delivery expertise, the company has carved out a distinctive offer turning complex requirements into repeatable, configurable solutions – using reference designs, standardised systems and off-site manufacture.

Across pharmaceuticals, low-carbon industries and data centres, this approach moves projects from strategy to delivery with greater speed and certainty – reducing capital cost, compressing programmes and making facilities easier to replicate at scale.

The transaction, which sees Ara take a majority stake in Bryden Wood, solidifies a multi-year relationship between the companies. Bryden Wood has supported the design evolution and capital strategy for several Ara portfolio decarbonization projects, including Sedron, Divert, Utility Global, BioVeritas, and GIDARA Energy.

“Investment in decarbonisation, data centres and advanced manufacturing is accelerating. The challenge is designing the pathway from promising technologies to physical assets that are investable, buildable and repeatable,” says Bryden Wood co-founder, Martin Wood.

“This partnership with Ara gives us the opportunity to apply our approach at greater scale and make a bigger impact.”

“Bryden Wood has been central to our ability to scale low-carbon process technology and deliver projects on time and on budget,” said Charles Cherington, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ara Partners. “We have seen first-hand how their approach takes real capital cost out of major industrial projects, and that advantage compounds across every asset we build. This partnership allows us to deepen that capability within our portfolio and deliver that value to the broader industrial economy.”

About Ara Partners

Founded in 2017, Ara Partners is a global private markets firm focused on decarbonizing the industrial economy. The firm invests in the middle market across three strategies: Private Equity, Infrastructure, and Energy. Ara scales commercially demonstrated decarbonization solutions, supports the businesses and infrastructure that enable their adoption, and reduces emissions at the source across the conventional energy value chain. Ara operates from Houston, Boston, Dublin and Washington D.C., and as of March 31, 2026, had approximately $8.2 billion in assets under management.

For more information about Ara Partners, please visit www.arapartners.com.

About Bryden Wood

Bryden Wood is a strategy and design consultancy that brings together inventive thinkers, designers, engineers, and technical specialists to solve complex challenges in mission-critical infrastructure.

Our 300-person team integrates strategy, design, engineering, and digital expertise to deliver greater quality, speed, and value. Our work is focused on three priorities: accelerating decarbonisation, deploying new technologies, and transforming how infrastructure is designed and delivered.

For 30 years, we have challenged conventional approaches and developed innovative solutions that move industries forward.

Bryden Wood is headquartered in London, with offices in Barcelona, Milan, and Athens.

www.brydenwood.com

Media Contact
Jane Merkler, Ara Partners
jane@arapartners.com 

Media Contact:
Felicity McKane
fmckane@brydenwood.com
+447768828518

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SOURCE Ara Partners

Dualitas will use its DualScreen™ Bispecific Discovery Engine to functionally screen more than 300,000 novel bispecific combinations for Immunology & Inflammation (I&I) diseases – representing one of the largest-scale bispecific discovery endeavors Collaboration leverages Dualitas’ proximity biology expertise to discover bispecific antibody therapeutics Dualitas to receive $36.5 million in upfront payments and is eligible to receive research, development and commercial milestone payments and tiered royalties for a potential total deal value of up to $1 billion

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Dualitas Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company developing next-generation bispecific antibody therapies for immunology and inflammation (“I&I”) indications, today announced a research collaboration and license agreement with Roche to advance novel bispecific antibodies for immunology & inflammation (I&I) diseases, using Dualitas’ DualScreen™ Bispecific Discovery Engine. In what is believed to be one of the largest-scale bispecific discovery endeavors, Dualitas will functionally screen over 300,000 novel bispecific combinations to discover and develop bispecific antibody (“BsAb”) therapeutics. Roche will be responsible for all subsequent preclinical development, regulatory, manufacturing and commercial activities.

The collaboration will leverage Dualitas’ expertise in proximity biology to develop BsAb candidates with synergistic activities that are unattainable with conventional therapeutics. Under the terms of the agreement, Dualitas will receive $36.5 million upfront payment and may receive additional research, development and commercial milestone payments for a potential total deal value of up to $1 billion, in addition to tiered royalties.

“We are thrilled to partner with Roche on this first-of-its-kind collaboration to functionally screen and develop novel proximity BsAbs at a scale that was previously unachievable,” said Forbes Huang, co-founder, chief operating officer and chief business officer of Dualitas. “Since founding Dualitas in 2023, we have established our DualScreen™ discovery engine as the premier technology for discovering next-generation proximity BsAbs, as exemplified by our robust therapeutic pipeline entering clinic next year for I&I diseases.”

“Bispecific antibodies remain central to Roche’s portfolio strategy across many disease areas,” said Boris L. Zaïtra, Head of Corporate Business Development at Roche. “We are committed to continue pushing the boundaries of scientific innovation in immunology and inflammation diseases that will ultimately benefit patients through external partnerships.” 

“This collaboration with Roche underscores the enormous potential of Dualitas’ technologies to identify BsAbs that harness novel proximity mechanisms that may deliver truly differentiated results to patients,” said Karim Dabbagh, Ph.D., CEO and board member of Dualitas. “Our internal pipeline of proximity engager BsAbs has already demonstrated the ability to drive amplified therapeutic effects that push the boundary of what conventional antibody therapies can achieve. This collaboration extends our therapeutic innovations while we continue to develop our internal pipeline.”

DualScreen™ Bispecific Discovery Engine

Dualitas’ first-of-its-kind DualScreen discovery engine uniquely enables high-throughput discovery of proximity biology and novel BsAbs that are rapidly optimized into differentiated drug candidates. Whereas traditional BsAb approaches narrowly focus on pre-determined target pairs to realize incremental gains, the DualScreen™ engine functionally screens entire cell surfaces – interrogating the proximity biology of hundreds of thousands of unique bispecific combinations – across a vast range of targets and epitopes to identify BsAb candidates. DualScreen™ technology has discovered powerful cell surface proximity mechanisms and rapidly delivers drug candidates that achieve synergistic activities unattainable by conventional therapeutics.

About Dualitas Therapeutics

Dualitas Therapeutics, Inc. is a biotechnology company pioneering next-generation bispecific antibody therapies for immunology and inflammation (I&I). Dualitas’ portfolio, built from its DualScreen™ discovery engine, includes development candidate DTX-102 in rheumatoid arthritis, DTX-103 in allergic disease and DTX-101 in dermatologic and gastrointestinal autoimmune disease, alongside additional discoveries based on cell-surface proximity biology and novel co-target pairing. While advancing its own pipeline, Dualitas offers a variety of strategic collaboration opportunities to extend the impact of its discovery capabilities, ranging from existing pipeline programs to identifying de novo BsAbs to establishing programs in disease areas beyond I&I. For more information, please visit https://www.dualitastx.com/ and follow us on LinkedIn.

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SOURCE Dualitas Therapeutics