(TEC Edmonton is passing on a reminder Re: 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. conference in Fort Saskatchewan on Friday, May 24, 2013: Full Circle - Advancing the Bio-Economic Opportunities in Alberta's Industrial Heartland.)   Just a reminder to register if you have not done so as yet.  We have over 100 registered to date.   Please feel free to forward to others that may benefit from this event.   FULL CIRCLE - ADVANCING THE BIO-ECONOMY OPPORTUNITIES in the HEARTLAND - Friday May 24, 2013, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Down Centennial Centre, Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta.    Registration and Agenda                         Deadline date: May 20th    Join us as we learn: ·        What a bio-cluster is; ·        How to get started ...

Good news for TEC Edmonton client Ceapro, signing a major agreement with German multinational provider of natural active ingredients, Symrise.

Ceapro will provide product from its inventory of oat and other plant extracts to Symrise.

Symrise will provide Ceapro with financial support with a "significant" line of credit for the next three years.

See Marketwired press release, "Ceapro signs a license and distribution agreement with Symrise."

Treasury Board President and Government of Canada cabinet minister Tony Clement visited TEC Edmonton on April 3, 2013, and liked what he saw. “I’m not as involved in business assistance models as I was as Minister of Industry,” the minister said in a brief interview following a tour of the TEC Centre in Enterprise Square. “But with Treasury Board, you have your fingers in many different pies. This is an interest of mine.” Two weeks earlier, the minister was at a meeting in his Ontario home riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka, to discuss setting up a business incubator/accelerator in Huntsville. He took in a presentation on TEC Edmonton by TEC Edmonton Chief Operating Officer Pamela Freeman. “Pamela talked about TEC Edmonton and its success to date. She was truly inspirational.” Since the minister was coming to Edmonton, he asked to tour TEC Edmonton. In addition to an informal lunch with TEC Edmonton representatives, he visited the labs of livestock genomics service pro ...

  Edmonton-based Delta Genomics, and the Canadian beef-breeding industry, is getting a hand-up from the Canadian government’s Agricultural Innovation Program through a $575,000 investment. The investment will allow the non-profit genotyping lab and its breed association partners to offer a new more cost effective sire identification tool that will help accelerate the adoption of new genetic profiling. This new tool is more accurate, less costly and less time-consuming than traditional DNA tests. The new “parentage” gene technology can now tell the beef producer more with less cost – not only identify the sire of a calf conceived in a community pasture, but also the bull calf’s potential to pass on desirable traits such as feed efficiency, disease resistance, weight-gain, and  meat quality.  The investment, announced at Delta Genomics’ home in the Edmonton TEC Centre on the fourth floor of Edmonton’s downtown Enterprise Square on Jan. 10, 2013 by A ...

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 ...

Edmonton-based biotechnology company (and TEC Edmonton client and tenant) Ceapro was excited to announce earlier this month   that it will be the sole licensee of a new variety of oats developed by scientists at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, a variety capable of greatly increasing the ingredient in oats that Ceapro is most interested in, avenanthramides. TEC Edmonton has been assisting Ceapro in the development of its all-natural product lines. Ceapro's expertise lies in unique technology to extract and purify minute amounts of the avenanthramide compound found in oats. The oat-based product is a vital ingredient in  cosmetics and skin care, and holds great promise as a future nutriceutical "functional food" and a plant-based pharmaceutical. The previous challenge was the sheer amount of oats it took to produce small amounts of avenanthramides. The new variety of oats, selectively bred by plant scientist Dr. Bill Collins, produces far more avenanthramide per kernel than ever bef ...

  Rarely has such agreement arisen from so many different speakers, coming at a challenge from so many different angles.   At last week's Health Symposium: Digital Health and the Future of Health Care, held Nov. 7, 2012 in Edmonton, Alberta at the Delta Centre Suite Hotel, seven themes came up time and time again. TEC Edmonton was a program partner in the symposium.   1. Patient driven medicine:  A paradigm shift is happening. Patients (users) are researching their medical conditions on the Internet and are carrying around that information with them on mobile devices. Patients are no longer doctor-directed.  Pilot projects involving electronic monitoring of elderly patients' for diabetes, hypertension, heart are proving that the elderly are quite capable of using electronic devices.  If a device works well and provides a level of comfort to a patient in his/her home, patients will more willingly adhere to recommended schedules. Adherence goals are more easily met ...

      Health Technology Symposium 2012: Digital Health and the Future of Health Care Jeffrey Simpson, author of Chronic Condition: Dragging Canada’s Health-Care System into the 21st Centure and keynote speaker at Health Technology Symposium 2012: Digital Health and the Future of Health Care , was “amazed” and “thrilled” to hear his predecessor to the podium, Alberta Minister of Health Fred Horne, speak frankly about the pressing need to improve Alberta’s health-care system. The symposium, a collective effort of companies and associations spearheaded by Clinexus, was held Nov. 7, 2012 at the Delta Centre Suite Hotel in Edmonton, Alberta. Simpson’s book, as per its title, argues that Canada’s provincially-run health-care system should be delivering a much better bang for the buck, that Canada is in the top five countries of the world for spending on health care but is only in the middle of the pack when it comes to outcomes, that Canada can no ...

  Imagine you’re a busy doctor, a surgeon at a teaching hospital.   You’ve got to deal with patients, personnel, operating room schedules, teaching courses, interns, attending conferences, organizing workshops, keeping up with advancements in your field, conferring with colleagues, running a research laboratory, distributing and marketing your own books or surgical manuals … and remember to be at Johnny’s Little League game by 5 p.m. and don’t forget that your wedding anniversary is this weekend. It’s all on computer of course, all electronic … but the doc is faced with a bewildering number of organizational and knowledge software programs, all with high security levels, all needing individual sign-on, ID, passwords etc. And few of the programs, if any, talk to each other at even a most basic level. Enter Qwogo. Developed originally by Dr. Robert Hayward, a medical doctor, health informatician, professor and director of the Centre for ...

 

TEC Edmonton earns a mention in Edmonton Journal Business Columnist Gary Lamphier's column of Sept. 11, 2012, entitled Struggling Alberta biotech sector shifts towrds marketability.

Ryan Radke, president of the Alberta life sciences industry associationBioAlberta, uses TEC Edmonton clients Exciton Technologies andMetabolomic Technologies Inc. (MTI) as examples of the shift in the life-sciences sector from phamaceutical development to medical devices and diagnostics.

Exciton makes wound-care products and MTI is developing a non-invasive test for colorectal cancer.

"Through organizations such as TEC Edmonton," writes columnist Lamphier, "there is also more ongoing support and mentoring available for promising biotechstartups."