The news of a $375,000 Knowledge Translation Strategic Initiative  grant from the Alberta Innovatives – Health Solutions program to University of Alberta spin-off company and TEC Edmonton client Metabolomic Technologies Inc. (MTI) is exciting enough unto itself. It allows MTI to continue validation tests for its promising, novel colonic polyp screening diagnostic test - PolypDx™ and to establish a clinical workflow for processing  PolypDx™ samples accurately, swiftly and inexpensively in a medical laboratory. But just as exciting is the evolution of an all-Alberta partnership or medical eco-system to bring made-in-Alberta medical innovation to the national and international marketplace. In the beginning, University of Alberta professor and medical doctor Richard Fedorak and his team discovered recurring patterns in urine analysis that could accurately indicate the presence of polyps in the colon. Polyps alert medical doctors to the possibility of colon cancer and when found are ...

  Back about seven years ago, Shawn van Drecht and his former partners developed a measurement tool for oil wells,  a patented machine that accurately measured the length of rod heading down into an oil or natural gas well. It was a nice piece of machinery. Count-Rite currently leases the technology out to a 3rd party. But like all technologies, Count-Rite’s tool as it stood could be improved. “I needed to make Count-Rite’s G3 Wear Tool  more versatile,” says Shawn, who bought out his partners in the interim. “Continuous rod is inserted into a well through tubing. The rod is subject to wear and tear within the tubing as it spins. “When rig workers are removing the rod from a well, somebody has to hold a wrench along the rod as it passes. That’s the standard means at this point to measure the thickness of the rod when removed from a well.   If the rod is getting thinner, it reduces the amount of torque the rod can take. Eventually it wil ...

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."

Greg O’Hare, co-founder of TEC Edmonton client GO Technologies, is one of those guys who enjoys thinking as he works. Having spent 17 years as a journeyman gasfitter, he has been around thousands of natural gas and oil wellheads out in the Lloydminster/Vermillion area of Alberta, Canada. He was seeing patterns. As formation pressure in certain fields dropped, subterranean natural gas was pushing into the reservoir, resulting in more natural gas being pumped to the surface. Which is not a bad thing in itself. But when the cost of gathering, storing, processing and moving that gas exceeds the value of the product, it’s a serious problem. In the past, excessive low-value gas was used on site. The remainder was flared, or vented off into the atmosphere. As environment standards and regulations improve, flaring has become less acceptable. Wells unable to dispose of excess natural gas in an environmentally responsible fashion can be shut down. O’Hare saw something else going on. High-pressure ...

  ‘Regulatory Services’ is not the first thing an inventor thinks of when he or she arrives at TEC Edmonton’s door, seeking TEC’s help in taking a prototype to a successful business. “Usually it hits them like a brick wall,” says TEC Edmonton’s  John Simon, head of TEC Edmonton's regulatory services and quality assurance team. “Investors of medical devices, or natural health products, drugs or diagnostics don’t realize that the government’s job is to protect the general health of the population, to ensure that any claims made about the product are true and are backed up by clinical data.” Here’s the inventor, up to his/her eyeballs in marketing, in raising investment money, in putting together a business plan. And here’s the regulatory affairs team from TEC Edmonton telling them they have to think about the requirements of Health Canada or the American Food & Drug Administration (FDA) from the very beginning of ...

  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 2013 VenturePrize Awards will be remembered for its multitude of firsts: The first time a Student VenturePrize Award winner, Calgary’s Orpyx Medical Technologies, has gone on to win the VenturePrize Fast Growth overall business plan award. First time a female CEO, Orpyx founder and president Dr. Breanne Everett, has won the Fast Growth prize. First time a Calgary company has won VenturePrize, Alberta’s best-known awards honouring innovative, technology-driven startup companies in the province. First time that three of the four awards went to Calgary companies. Joining Orpyx in the winners’ circle was Surface Medical for the People’s Choice Award (see below) and the Screeners’ Award of Merit (SAM) went to Calgary’s StrokeLink. Way to go, Calgary! First time VenturePrize, in a most rewarding partnership with the Edmonton Journal, has had a People’s Choice Award:  The Journal developed, ran and publicized an online system for the general public to v ...

  For a researcher to be awarded one I2I (Idea to Innovation) grant from the Natural  Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) is considered quite the feat. To be awarded three I2I NSERC grants within 12 months is nearly unheard of. So it’s a resounding vote of confidence, from the federal NSERC office, in Dr. Walied Moussa’s promising nano-sensor technology, as it moves off the laboratory bench, through field research and now into prototype development. From research emerging out of his team’s MEMS/NEMS Advanced Design Lab, the University of Alberta mechanical engineering professor and researcher has received three Idea to Innovation grants of over $123,000 each. The funds have been used to build prototypes of Dr. Moussa’s unique nano-sized strain sensors, nano-sensor activated touch screens, and, most lately, a prototype nano-sized “energy harvester” from which the nano-sensors can be powered for wireless data transmission. “The NS ...

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 ...

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 ...