TEC Edmonton client Clinisys has announced an alliance and integration with Calgary Scientific. Here's the press release. http://clinisys.ca/node/36 Clinisys and Calgary Scientific join forces   Calgary Scientific Inc., a company known for creating transformative technology for the medical industry and beyond, has entered into a partnership with Clinisys, a company dedicated  to developing secure, scalable and user-friendly Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solutions for healthcare practitioners. The agreement between the two Alberta-based companies will see Calgary Scientific’s Health Canada and FDA diagnostically-cleared medical imaging solution, ResolutionMD™, integrated into Clinisys’s cloud-based EMR solution. The integration of powerful visualization, collaboration and mobile tools with the patient record helps clinics to realize many benefits including high quality diagnostics and improved workflows, resulting in a complete circle of care for healthcare ...

 The Alberta-Pfizer Translational Research Collaboration is receiving new support from Pfizer and the Alberta government to advance leading-edge health care research towards real-world application.

The relentless march of medical knowledge is no better illustrated than by one of the University of Alberta’s contributions to the fight against the world-wide epidemic of hepatitis C. The KMT Mouse™ is a marvel of ground-breaking genetic engineering, the creation of a mouse with a “humanized” liver which can pass on the desired traits of its greatly modified liver to successive generations. The story of the ground-breaking University of Alberta research it took to create, and then propagate, a mouse with a human liver would be the stuff of a Hollywood movie. But the fact is the KMT Mouse™ has almost concluded its maiden voyage. The mouse, as genetically modified and then patented by Drs. Norman Kneteman, David Mercer and Lorne Tyrrell (hence the initials KMT), was the first non-chimpanzee research animal on which potential cures for the liver disease could be tested. The three researchers, in collaboration with the University of Alberta, formed a company known as KMT Hepat ...

It is a daunting task to be close to a scientific breakthrough that could improve the lives of thousands of people suffering from a previously untreatable disease … only to know the testing that must be done to ensure safety and effectiveness is two to three years, and several millions of dollars, away. University of Alberta neuroscience researcher Dr. Simonetta Sipione has studied the baffling Huntington’s Disease for most of her career. She is working closely with Dr. Oksana Suchowersky, a practicing physician and University of Alberta medical professor. Dr. Suchowersky is considered one of Alberta’s foremost experts in treating patients with Huntington’s. Here is a neurodegenerative disease about which not much is understood, other than it is caused by an inherited defect in the genetic material (DNA) of affected individuals. If one of your parents has it, you have a 50-50 chance of having it too, but generally the symptoms don’t show up until mid-life. It’s a tough, ...

  Smoke NV is in rather an enviable position. After five years of hard work, the “electronic cigarette” company, based in Edmonton, is seeing gross sales across Canada of $6 million. “Cigarette” is a misnomer. There’s no tobacco, no nicotine, no combustion. An “e-cigarette” may look like a cigarette and act like a cigarette, but, by producing a puff of harmless flavoured water vapor when the end is sucked on, has none of the harmful effects of a cigarette.  If anything, e-cigarettes are an aid to smoking cessation, a harmless replacement for real cigarettes that provides psychological comfort to the individual in the midst of quitting. Over the years, Smoke NV Managing Director Shanu Mohamedali has continually improved the quality of its components – a suction-activated disposable atomizer and cartridge containing the flavoured liquid for the vapor. He collaborates with manufacturers of the various components in China, Japan and the United Kingd ...

Your correspondent, being male, is at a disadvantage with this story. “Don’t worry,” says From The Earth Naturally’s Anita Dyrbye, “about 25% of the visits to our website are from men, saying ‘help!’ ” Anita is the founder and president of From The Earth Naturally, a “solutions” company for menopausal women. From The Earth Naturally has developed, with due diligence and much expertise, the herbal remedy Vivaca™ to smooth out the “highs and lows”, Anita says, of menopause. Accompanying the actual product is a menopausal women’s support group website, Menomission® (menopausemission.com) and a patent-pending “injector cap” device to package Vivaca™ in a concentrated-liquid form. Vivaca™ is a combination of four botanical ingredients, Rhodiola Rosea, Black Cohosh, Saint John’s Wort and Red Clover. From The Earth Naturally’s consulting scientists and naturopaths have determined these key ...

Bed bugs are not something polite society admits to having, in their homes, schools or hotels. It ranks on about the same scale as openly talking about one’s STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease). But bed bugs are quietly becoming an epidemic. Most second-hand furniture handlers – private and charitable – will not handle used mattresses, for fear of bed bugs. The National Post newspaper ran a story about those with bed bugs being treated like pariahs in hospitals. Health-care workers feared bringing bed bugs home with them. In every crisis there is opportunity. TEC Edmonton is working with Alberta bed bug exterminator We Kill Bedbugs. Why would TEC Edmonton, a not-for-profit provider of business guidance to high-tech, innovative startup companies, work with a company that does nothing but kill bedbugs? Because We Kill Bedbugs is exploring new technology to create a “do-it-yourself” system to kill bed bugs, not unlike a do-it-yourself home carpet-cleaning solution. “We h ...

TEC Edmonton in the news: Winter 2012/13 "Research to make a difference":  In the lead story in the fall 2012 edition of  Research News, the house magazine of Alberta Innovates Health Solutions,  no fewer than five companies and Alberta researchers that are featured have been assisted in one way or another by TEC Edmonton. Dr. Breanne Everett's Orpyx Medical Technologies, featured on Page 12, won the TEC VenturePrize student business plan competition in 2012.  MTI Metabolomics Technologies Inc, featured on Page 20, is a TEC Edmonton client company. TEC Edmonton Executive-in-Residence Reg Joseph serves as CEO of MTI. On Page 22, Osteometabolix Pharmaceuticals Inc. is a TEC Edmonton client.. Finally, on Page 23, researcher Rui Zhou is featured. Ms. Zhou collaborates with Dr. Vivian Mushahwar, who has worked closely with TEC Edmonton on the setting up of Biomotion, a U of A  spin-off company developing  technologies to assist those with paralysis.   * * * Edm ...

  Med-HF story for TEC Edmonton’s TEC Talk blog  The front-line doctors have spoken.   Within just a few weeks of being available at the online Apple App Store, Med-HF, a medical app developed at the University of Alberta in collaboration with Alberta Health Services and the assistance of TEC Edmonton has seen 1,328 downloads around the world.   Cardiologist and U of A professor Justin Ezekowitz has been developing the medical instructional form, guiding physicians through a recovering heart-failure patient “check list”, for years.    Through a series of steps, Med-HF guides the physician in choice of medications, initiation times, monitoring drug reaction and many other aspects of guiding the recovering heart-failure patient back to full health.   Ezekowitz  and pharmacist/assistant professor Sheri Koshman started the project back in 2006, as a  University of Alberta and Heart & Stroke Foundation  of Canada joint effort. What o ...

Cancer docs are caught on the horns of a dilemma. Taxane chemotherapy, best known as the brand drug Taxol™, is one of modern medicine’s most potent weapons in fighting metastatic breast cancer. But half the women using taxane drugs to shrink breast cancer tumours develop resistance to the  chemotherapy treatment before the  treatment is complete. For them, it means going through the difficult (and expensive) chemotherapy treatment for naught. Here is potentially good news for breast cancer fighters. University of Alberta researcher Dr. Ing Swie Goping and her team are studying a particular bio-marker (a bio-marker being any substance in the body that changes when we have a disease) that can predict, ahead of time,  individuals whose breast cancers will be resistant to certain kinds of chemotherapy treatment. If changes in the bio-marker  can be translated into a simple and practical diagnostic test, Goping’s research will give the  front-line breast cancer doct ...