Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and deadly cancer arising from the adult brain. There is no effective treatment and a vital need for new, accurate biological models to understand the character and reveal new possible therapeutic strategies. The mouse has long been used to model human GBM, but the very small anatomy creates many limitations. Hera Biolabs has created the SRG rat with brain volume about 5 times those of mice. This proposed study will evaluate the growth of human GBM in SRG rats and the treatment response in this new model.

There is no cure for PD. Limitations of the current Canadian health care environment, compounded by the effects of the pandemic, have led to infrequent and imbalanced access to care for PwP, which may contribute to inaccurate assessments, incorrect medication dosages, and undermanaged disease symptoms. To improve the lives of PwP, a chronic disease management and monitoring system is needed that involves the patients, their caregivers, and clinicians.

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) can present in different ways. The relationships between the symptoms and their causes are mostly unknown, making it difficult to choose the best course of action. Being able to identify various contributor to symptoms would be extremely beneficial to determining the optimal course of treatment. We will develop a system that accounts for 3D joint movements, forces, and their relationships to symptoms using state-of-the-art technology.

For almost a century, Canadian Tire has been offering products and services to help Canadians with the jobs and joys of life in Canada. Today, with a network of over 1,700 retail locations, Canadian Tire is dedicated to improving products and services offered to the community they serve. With this project, the company aims to examine the patterns of sales among its stores to identify anomalous product sales patterns. The objective is to design and develop a system capable of generating high-confidence automated notification to the stores.

This project is focussed on developing an optical imaging technology called photoacoustic imaging. Photoacoustic imaging is able to distinguish healthy tissue from cancerous tissue during breast surgery and could one day eliminate the need for repeat surgeries. The technology uses a pulsed laser to selectively build up pressure in some tissues and microphones to listen for sound as the pressure dissipates. After reconstruction, the sound recordings are converted back into a pressure map representative of the tissues. The project funds will support two PhD students.

This project explores the use of new anaerobic digestion technologies such as the vacuum-assisted anaerobic digestion as well as innovative pretreatment technologies including the high-shear thermo-alkaline Lystek process and other mechanical, thermal, and chemical pretreatments to enhance the solubilization of the lignocellulose in cattle manure. Enhanced solubilization will result in higher biomethane yields and faster kinetics, resulting in smaller and more efficient farm digesters.

The metaverse and associated technologies are opening up a wide array of opportunities, including ones that allow for the advancement of personalized medicine. This project will use a common feature of modern virtual reality headsets, eye tracking, to provide screening and monitoring of two very common conditions in Canada and the world at large: autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyper disorder.

This project will use state-of-the-art advancements in artificial intelligence in order to automate and enhance the creation of virtual environments in virtual and augmented reality. By building upon previous successes incorporating artificial intelligence into the creation of 2D environments to enhance and guide the algorithmic generation process.

Over half of all below-knee amputees deal with sores due to an ill-fitting prosthetic socket, the deep cup that holds the limb and connects it to the rest of the prosthesis. Current sockets are bulky, complicated and rely on frequent manual adjustments based on feel. These factors lead to socket over-tightening, pain, and wound formation. Vessl aims to design an automatically adjusting prosthetic socket to free amputees from socket adjustments.

Mining employs ~400,000 Canadians and generates billions of dollars for the Canadian economy. Western University and Eloro Resources Ltd. recognize that innovation is central to responsible resource exploration and extraction. Canada is a world leader in mineral exploration and mining technology, but discovery of new mineral resources has declined, despite increasing exploration expenditures.