Heart failure is a complex cardiovascular disease with increasing global burden while the prognosis for patients remains poor. Risk factors and the type of heart failure differ between men and women. These differences can be due to sex – referring to biological differences – or gender – referring to social differences. In our project we […]

Mediphage Bioceuticals aims to leverage its DNA ministring platform for personalized genetic medicine. Mediphage Bioceuticals Inc. greatly appreciate Mitacs Accelerate program in providing support to (1) validate msDNA for gene delivery by carrying out a two-phase study, (2) develop and validate phage display libraries for the specific targeting and delivery to target host cells, and […]

Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness in the world, mainly induced by increased pressure in the eye. Marijuana has been shown to reduce such pressure, thus benefit glaucoma patients. In this project, we test several components from marijuana extracts that are unlikely to cause psychoactive symptoms, for their therapeutic effects on glaucoma. This […]

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 […]

Lipid-based nanoparticular drug formulations are a successful technique to enable targeted treatment. The Canadian company Precision Nanosystems Inc. (PNI) develops the innovative instrument family NanoAssemlr for lipid nanoparticle preparation based on microfluidics. These instruments are fast, easy-to-use and provide a high batch-to-batch reproducibility and quality. Recently, we developed a novel lipid nanoparticle formulation with the […]

National Legalization of Cannabis has occurred in Canada. Very little is known about the different compounds in the Cannabis Plant. The two main compounds are THC and CBD. Both of them have shown some benefits for different conditions. We would like to determine the best dose and ratio of compounds within the Cannabis plant for […]

Parkinson’s Disease is the second most common neurological disorder. Over the course of the disease the brain cells that produce dopamine are slowly dying. The loss of these dopamine-producing cells means that less dopamine is available in the brain, causing many symptoms such as tremors. Unfortunately, brain cells cannot regenerate, so a patient’s symptoms will […]

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases (COPD) is a lung disease that cause a lot of suffering to the Canadian population. To accelerate the drug discovery process, an old blood pressure lowering medication was tested to block the progression of COPD. A patient study showed that the old medication did provide some protective effect to the lung […]

Herbal medicines are mainly used to maintain health, prevent diseases and treat chronic conditions. Although many Canadians have taken or are regularly take herbal products, there still are concerns about the safety and quality of these products. Osteoporosis is a chronic disease called silent thief since there are no symptoms until bone fractures happened. The […]

To design effective and patient-specific cancer therapy, sensitive detection of relapse and distant metastases by non-invasive medical imaging is essential, for which MRI offers tremendous potential due to wide availability of the equipment in clinic and avoidance of ionizing radiation. Although gadolinium-based contrast agents are the most frequently used for MRI, they are associated with […]

Operant chambers equipped with touchscreens are a new technology that has been used for the mass behavioural phenotyping of rodent models of neurological disease. These chambers have the potential to make behavioural testing more reliable, faster, and translationally valid to human cognitive testing. To further increase the utility of these systems, technology capable of tracking […]

The goal of the project is to determine if the cannabis-derived, non-psychoactive compound, cannabigerol (CBG) (a key component of Cannabis), which is known to reduce inflammation in a mouse model of colon inflammation, can also prevent intestinal strictures (fibrosis) and narrowing of the intestine in the setting of intestinal inflammation. We will use cell culture […]