Ten BC  graduate student interns and their partner companies came together to exhibit the results of their Mitacs-Accelerate internships to the CEOs and venture capitalists of British Columbia’s technology community who were attending the BC Innovation Council’s A Dialogue…Building and Sustaining BC’s Technology Ecosystem.

But one of the biggest costs greenhouse operators face is for the energy required to run their lighting systems.  Many greenhouses use inefficient electric lights to compliment light from the sun, particularly in winter.

GE Lighting Solutions, based in Lachine, Québec, sought to develop a new range of LED lighting applications for the greenhouse industry which not only cut down on energy use but also increase plant growth and yields.

However, it is difficult for doctors to determine which patients are not responding to the drugs early in the process, so alternative treatment options can be tried.  As a result, patients can be over-treated, and unnecessarily suffer the side-effects of chemotherapy before realizing it is having little effect.

Masters student Xiaohui Wang at the Department of Computational Mathematics at the University of Waterloo set out to change this through a Mitacs-Accelerate internship with Ontario-based Rna Diagnostics.

Kibooco (short for “Kids Book Company”) Interactive is a technology startup whose aim is to encourage children’s creativity by developing an online e-book tool where children can create their own virtual and physical storybooks.  Being a small company with limited research resources, Kibooco reached out to the Mitacs-Accelerate program for support and expertise – and found Allen.

However, the cost of research and development of natural health products is often impossibly steep as the products must be rigorously tested and proven before they can be placed on store shelves.

With this challenge ahead of them, the Alberta “phyto-pharmaceutical” biotech company, SinoVeda, turned to Mitacs-Accelerate to assist in the advanced testing of its latest natural calcium supplement which is currently undergoing clinical trials.

The company is developing a novel cancer vaccine based on a specific antigen and needed the research expertise to help them understand, at a molecular level, how that antigen is expressed in different types of cancer. They turned to Dalhousie postdoctoral fellow Olga Hrytsenko for insight. Olga’s 17 years of molecular biology experience is the “perfect fit” for the project says Marianne Stanford, Director of Research, at Immunovaccine.

For Cyborg Trading Systems (CTS) – a financial technology services company that serves an international network of banks, brokers and professional traders – keeping ahead of competition is absolutely essential.  Battling huge enterprises like Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs would seem an almost impossible task for a Canadian SME.  With the cost of infrastructure, technology and global employees rising by the second, Lukez is always looking for any and all opportunities to innovate.

It was Dr. Janice Singer, an IRAP-Industry Technology Advisor, who awarded Rafael the 1st prize in the poster competition and saw the great potential in Rafael’s and Larus' mutual interest in wireless sensors and robot networks.