Xpan Inc. is developing a patent-pending expandable laparoscopic access port device. Xpan needs to develop its proof of concept prototype into a high-fidelity prototype through a series of iterative design, prototyping and benchtop testing.
Research must be performed to select appropriate biocompatible material that achieve user requirements. Research must also be performed to evaluate the performance and efficacy of several different designs that Xpan is contemplating to develop.

Currently there is a huge challenge in drug screens as the vast majority of the candidate drugs fail in clinical trials either due to no efficacy or drug toxicity. As an alternative to traditional animal models, zebrafish have recently emerged as a powerful vertebrate paradigm to study human disease and to use its developing embryos for drug screens. In contrast to traditional cell-based screening, the zebrafish provides a whole vertebrate system for drug screening. It combines the biological complexity with the ability for high throughput screening and quick assessment of potential toxicity.

The explosion of popularity of deep learning owes a lot to the success of convolutional neural networks, widely used in diverse fields including computer vision and natural language processing. Recently, the group equivariant convolutional neural network (G-CNN) was introduced, where equivariance of symmetries inherent in the data set is built in the architecture of the networks.

With the ever-increasing growth of the consumer Electric Vehicle (EV) market and environmental awareness of federal and provincial governments, electrification of public transit systems has come under the spotlight in recent years. Currently, there is limited practical knowledge on how to efficiently deploy EV buses across different Canadian regions, which results in a wide gap between advanced EV technology and Canadian environmental parameters.
EV batteries are negatively affected by cold temperatures, bad road conditions, and aggressive driving behaviours.

Canada has committed to combatting climate change. To do this, Canada must find ways to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the country’s most polluting sectors. Transportation accounts for roughly a quarter of the country’s total GHG emissions, and though electric vehicles have been identified as a promising strategy for passenger vehicles, a viable alternative to diesel for Canada’s trucking industry is unclear. This research will identify the most promising alternatives to diesel for implementation in Canada based on their ability to reduce GHG emissions at the lowest cost.

With the increase in polyurethane foams in manufacturing applications such as car seats, shoe soles etc., there has also been a rise in demand for higher quality and more sustainable products. This project involves the collaboration of Evoco Ltd with Dr. Hani Naguib’s research team at the University of Toronto to work on the fabrication of flexible polyurethane foams containing natural fibers. These fibers will help enhance the mechanical properties of the fiber enabling a cost-performance benefit. Additionally, microbes will be added to the foam, aimed at making it eco-friendlier.

The world we live in is becoming increasingly dependent on electronic devices. With emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities, these devices will strongly influence the way we work, live, and play. In many applications, high reliability is desired, and the understanding of how and why a device should fail is essential in preventing future, potentially catastrophic events from occurring.

MYANT is a pioneer in the field of smart textiles, with the first connected e-textile ecosystem that can serve as a DSL cable connecting humans to their surroundings, others and themselves. This connected eco-system or platform is named SKIIN, representing a second skin, an intelligent interface, an augmentation of the human sensory and nervous system, through a textile medium.

The purpose of this project is to develop encapsulation technologies that enable probiotic cells to maintain their dormancy and shelf stability within new food products. The project covers a discovery, validation, and scale-up phase. It addresses the use of various materials to produce capsules of probiotics and formulation of different products using them. The outcome of this project will allow DoseBiome to formulate probiotics in different kinds of food with extended stability, shelf life, and potency for everyday consumers.

Chitin is a vastly available resource in the form of waste from the fishing industry in Canada and worldwide. BOCO Bio-Nanotechnologies has currently the infrastructure in place for scalable extraction of CNWs (Chitin nano-whiskers) from crab shells. CNWs are crystalline regions of chitin, possessing high strength, stiffness and aspect ratio, making them ideal for reinforcement of polymer matrices. A significant market opportunity for BOCO is to incorporate CNWs in epoxy matrices to develop epoxy nanocomposite resins with high fracture toughness and mechanical properties.