He is the founder and former director of PharmaQAM,[3] a biopharmaceutical research center based at UQAM, focusing on the discovery of new bioactive molecules, their mechanism of action and the vectorization of drugs.

There, he also founded the PharmaQAM biopharmaceutical research center which gathers some 50 professors and 17 institutions with common interests in the molecular aspects of medicinal chemistry and drug discovery[10] working on new bioactive molecules, their mechanism of action and the way they are vectorized in vivo.

One of them, targeting the Haemophilus influenzae b (HIB) bacteria, has been designed jointly with the Cuban researcher Vincente Verez Bencomo to prevent lethal meningitis and pneumonia in developing countries.

[11] Rene Roy is a cofounder of Glycovax Pharma,[13] a biotech company operating in Montreal, developing glycochemistry-based treatments against cancer and other disease with unmet medical needs.

His synthesis of new glycan structures,[14] among which glycopolymers, glycodendrimers, and glycodendrimersomes (terms that he first developed) enabled progress in the area of multivalent molecular recognition mechanisms.