Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is an inflammatory disorder of the lung, and one that affects 2.6 million Canadians and 380 million people worldwide. Although the disease affects a large population worldwide the therapies used for treatment remain imprecise. With the lack of disease modifying therapies there is a pressing need to discover novel targets to promote new therapeutic discoveries and ultimately improve the care and health outcomes of patients with COPD.

Software have been used, always, to deliver various needs to people. In this aspect, Roseto Health Innovations have developed a software that can deliver fact-driven wellness information to their customers. In its effort to elicit mutual benefit for research in Software engineering and company, Roseto Health Innovations has partnered with Prof. Behrouz Far and Prof. Ray J Turner to better understand a software development process that includes user requirements related to health and wellness, while adhering to the IEC 62304 standards.

PITCH is a new initiative focussed on understanding new models for delivering sustainable and proactive health assessments with a focus on patient engagement. It is a collaborative program that includes computer scientists, engineers, data scientists, clinicians, home care providers, and industry partners. In this work, we aim to develop novel security, auditing, analysis and visualization tools to support this and other emerging digital health systems and connected devices.

Osteoarthritis is a progressive joint disease that causes pain and stiffness, resulting in a decrease in quality of life for patients. Treatment include intra-articular administration of crystalline corticosteroids or hyaluronate. Intra-articular corticosteroids, due to the large doses required, short residence time in the joint, and crystalline structure, are associated with cartilage damage and a short duration of action requiring multiple injections.

Currently no regenerative therapy exists for spinal cord injury. This project aims to optimize and generate the ideal cell type for stem cells to be used to treat cervical spinal cord injury. It aims to do so by testing the transplantation potential of different derivatives of the cells responsible for formation of neurons and other supporting cells within the spinal cord and central nervous system – the neural precursor cells (NPCs). The study will be performed on rodents and will simultaneously optimize the most suitable method to deliver the cells to the site of injury.

The one-to-Zero (OTZ) Tension Adjustment is a chiropractic technique which corrects articular dysfunction of the articulation between the skull and the top vertebrae of the neck, also called the atlas. The goal of this study is to determine whether correcting dysfunction using OTZ affects brain processes and overall health and well-being. Participants will complete questionnaires relating to health and well-being before and after treatment.

Treatment of metastatic breast cancer is often unsuccessful and lead to 5000 deaths in Canada each year. Therefore, there is an unmet need for new drugs for prevention and/or treatment of metastatic disease. Ezrin is a protein marker commonly over-expressed in metastatic breast cancer. Preclinical studies show that blocking ezrin can significantly reduce metastasis in breast cancer models. In this proposal, the intern will develop novel biosensors to screen large numbers of compounds with the ability to block ezrin’s activity in cancer cells.

Over the past three decades the time it takes for clinical laboratories to diagnose an infection has decreased from two weeks for culture to 3 hours for DNA testing following the introduction of large, automated bench top equipment. Despite this tremendous improvement, three hours is still too slow to allow rapid and accurate diagnosis of a viral or bacterial infection and the cost is too expensive for resource poor developing countries.

Heart disease is the main reason of death worldwide. One way to understand better and detect heart diseases without need for biopsy via surgery is by using medical imaging such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Cardiac magnetic resonance is a specific kind of MRI which allows great visualization of inner parts of the heart and can be used for measuring the size of the heart and its chambers, which can be very useful for understanding blood flow and other potential markers of disease.