Having established enduring relationships within Canada's orthopaedic community over decades, in 2022, the Foundation embarked on a new strategic initiative to advance orthopaedic research on a national scale as never before.

 

The Challenge

 

While Canada's research community is world-renowned for it capabilities and excellence, it is dispersed and fragmented.  As such, only a fraction of the community can be marshalled to conduct larger, multi-centre research projects with national scale and representation.  At the same time, industry is limited by compliance restrictions, time and resources as it seeks to conduct its own research at scale.

 

A New Approach

 

Discussions with industry confirmed the following strengths of the Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation:

 

• The Foundation has a decades long reputation for independence, integrity and its support of MSK research, education and care.

• The Foundation has well established and respected relationships with Canada's sub-specialty organizations.

• The Foundation, through its annual research awards, has built a rigorous call, evaluation, selection and management process led by the brightest minds in Orthopaedics both in Canada and world-wide.

• As a charity, the Foundation's motivations are purely to advance care.

 

The Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation, therefore, presents itself as an ideal partner for industry to collaborate with in order to advance research in their individual areas of priority.  As an independent, credible third party, the Foundation is a bridge directly to Canada's entire research community.  Working with the sub-specialities, the Foundation is ideally suited to meet with industry partners in order to select projects for research, to put out a national call, to manage the grading and selection process and to oversee the project through completion.

 

Through partnering with the Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation, Industry derives the benefit of the Foundation's reach, reputation and rigour to conduct its strategic research on a national scale with Canadian researchers whose work is respected and accepted world-wide.

 

In short, the Foundation can bring all of Canada's research assets to bear on a project as compared to limited centres and resources currently available to industry.  In addition, particularly in the competition for USD research funds, the exchange rate makes every research dollar go further.

 

Additionally, as the Foundation already has the personnel and processes well established to manage the process from call to selection, the partnership is a turn-key solution for industry.

 

The potential of this partnership in research to drive innovation in orthopaedic medicine cannot be overstated. Already, the partnership is exploring the boundaries of kinematics in knee alignment, with projects in robotics, AI, and data mining, to mention a few, to come.

 

On behalf of the Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation, it would be my pleasure to explore the possibilities of partnering to expand the horizons of discovery with you.  Please reach out to me directly at todd@canorth.org.

 

Sincerely,​

​

Todd Charlebois

Chief Executive Officer

Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation