NORI is BioFund's human oncology research arm — funding early-stage programmes, training the next generation of researchers, and supporting the communities that carry a disproportionate burden of cancer risk.
NORI exists because early-stage oncology research is where the hardest and most important work happens — and where funding is most likely to run out. The gap between a promising discovery and a de-risked asset is where most science dies. NORI is built to close that gap, providing the research infrastructure, funding, and institutional support that early-stage programmes need to survive long enough to matter.
As the human oncology arm of BioFund, NORI sits at the origin of the translational pipeline. Early research validated here moves forward — into BioFund's cell engineering platform, into companion animal validation, and eventually toward the patients the science was always meant to reach.
NORI co-funds and supports early-stage human oncology programmes at the frontier of translational science — from novel therapeutic targets to combination approaches and emerging modalities. We work with researchers whose ideas are too early for conventional funding and too important to leave unfunded.
We train students and doctoral researchers in our own laboratories, and co-fund researchers embedded at partner universities. The researchers NORI trains carry the mission forward long after any single programme concludes.
NORI funds programmes at the intersection of oncology science and communities that face elevated cancer risk. Among them: a prevention programme developed with Dr. Jim Petrik — cancer researcher at the University of Guelph and volunteer fire chief — addressing the occupational combustion exposure burden carried by firefighters worldwide. The science is serious. The people it protects are real.
NORI works with academic researchers, university departments, and mission-aligned institutions across the full spectrum of early oncology science. We bring funding, laboratory access, and the BioFund translational infrastructure. Partners bring the science, the ambition, and the willingness to work in the space where certainty is still a long way off.
If your research is early, serious, and aimed at something that genuinely matters — we want to hear about it. There is no grant committee to navigate, no bureaucratic process to exhaust. Just a conversation about whether the work fits and whether we can help it go further.