Innovative Projects Realized

ioAirFlow, Summer Technical Researcher

Because of the renewed interest in building health due to COVID-19, there has been a surge in demand for building audits – particularly around air quality testing. This position is created to focus predominantly on expanding ioAirFlow’s analysis capacity into air quality testing, while continuing to build on the company’s existing indoor environmental quality analysis capacity.

The overall objectives for this project are to, through both primary and secondary research, identify issues and problems commonly found in commercial buildings as well as existing industry solutions that can resolve those identified issues. The project will include researching academic and industry literature to understand what common problems exist in commercial buildings, and how they are commonly resolved, for problems including (but not limited to) poor air quality, inefficiency energy consumption in buildings, issues causing negative health impacts in built environments (“sick building syndrome”), and other issues that generate unnecessary carbon emissions and/or greenhouse gasses.

Life Cycle Assessment of Lithium Extraction and Refining from Saskatchewan’s Brine Deposits

With the growth in demand for electric vehicles and mobile devices powered by rechargeable lithium batteries, demand for lithium is expected to increase by over 200% in the next decade. Current lithium production comes primarily from Australia, South America and China. There are significant lithium reserves in the same Saskatchewan aquifers currently being exploited for their concomitant oil reserves. Although the lithium concentration in these aquifers is lower than in brines being mined elsewhere, new lithium selective extraction technologies show great promise for making extraction of lithium from these aquifers economical. Prairie Lithium has previously identified a lithium selective ion exchange material that can extract more than 99% of the lithium in a brine sample in only 4 minutes. We have also carried out a successful field trial of our proprietary technology at a scale of 50 m3/day of brine. This field trial represents the first successful extraction of lithium at an operating oil and gas facility in Saskatchewan. The project described here involves assessing the environmental impacts of the lithium extraction, recovery, and refining process in support of the full commercial deployment of our proprietary technology.

Arusha Centre – Calgary Dollars Strategic Growth Manager

Calgary Dollars requires a student with combined technical and social skills to deliver innovative solutions for government, nonprofit, and local businesses. The student will deliver Calgary Dollars programming to create, maintain, develop collaborations with City of Calgary staff, business, non-profits, and funders. Calgary Dollars will scale up each segment of users.

Lionstooth Energy – Strategy & Business Analyst

Lionstooth Energy is developing a Dispatch as a Service (DaaS) platform that will automate commercial management and automation of power generation facilities. This is a software-based offering that will involve merging power plant operations, commercial power market fundamentals and artificial intelligence.
The project that will be undertaken by the analyst has the following components:

Review of the current Alberta power market to determine what similar offerings are available and pricing mechanisms.
Review of other North American power markets to determine if the DaaS offering is feasible in these markets.
Development of a go-to-market plan for Alberta, followed by other North American markets as applicable.

Bluesky Equities Ltd. – Summer Student Jr. Analyst

The Intern will be immersed with our team for the summer working on various projects from investment research and due diligence to data base and dash board management for internal financial reporting. Bluesky is an active investor in early stage venture capital and has 70 companies in our portfolio. We screen hundreds of deals a year and an intern will be able to assist in the screening and due diligence of potential portfolio companies. Bluesky will benefit as we have a small team of 7 individuals managing a large pool of capital. There are always projects of value that require attention and time that our team needs assistance with.

Characterization of Cura Tx’s multi-functional human immunotherapy CT101 against cancer

Cura Therapeutics is developing innovative immunotherapies to cure solid malignancies and infectious diseases. Cura Therapeutics immunotherapy platform simultaneously activates the immune response against cancer while disrupting the tumor blood supply. These immunotherapies also induce an immunological memory that prevent cancer recurrence. Currently, there are no treatments on the market or in clinical trials that combine these properties in one single therapy. The objective of this project is to complete the preclinical stage of Cura Therapeutics’ lead immunotherapy (CT001, aka human FIST). The pre-clinical stage includes in vitro experiments to characterize Cura Therapeutics immunotherapies (CT001 variants) and in vivo experiments to determine Pk, Pd, MTD and efficacy studies in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors in four mouse models of cancer (pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer and melanoma).The goal is to build a pipeline that targets a broad range of solid malignancies that can be used as a standalone treatment or as combination therapies with CAR-T, Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), or chemotherapy. The collaboration with Dr. Michel L. Tremblay lab will generate the data necessary to advance to IND-enabling studies.

Studies on the Biosynthesis of Nucleocidin in Streptomycetes

Approximately 80% of currently used antibiotics were first discovered from Streptomyces. In addition, many pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, are halogenated. In particular about a quarter of the top-selling pharmaceuticals are fluorine-containing compounds. The overall objective of my doctoral thesis is to elucidate the complete biosynthetic pathway of the fluorinated antibiotic, nucleocidin, in Streptomyces. Elucidating the biosynthesis of nucleocidin, will be greatly advantageous in helping future research in finding new fluorinated and bioactive natural products through genome mining. As well, the nucleocidin fluorinase can be developed for applications in fluorinating pharmaceutical compounds, offering a greener and more specific alternative to synthetic fluorination methods. My PhD thesis has four goals: 1) Identification of new and higher titre Streptomyce producers of nucleocidin, 2) Identify the minimal set of genes in Streptomyces necessary for nucleocidin biosynthesis, 3) characterize the encoded enzymes that synthesize the sulfamate moiety, 4) characterize the encoded enzyme(s) which catalyze fluorination. During this internship, I will focus on completing the second goal. I have identified key genes to focus on for gene disruption experiments to determine which genes in Streptomyces are necessary for nucleocidin biosynthesis.

Immunomodulating fusion protein (CT001) to treat solid malignancies

Cura Therapeutics is developing innovative immunotherapies to cure solid malignancies and infectious diseases. Cura Therapeutics immunotherapy platform simultaneously activates the immune response against cancer while disrupting the tumor blood supply. These immunotherapies also induce an immunological memory that prevent cancer recurrence. Currently, there are no treatments on the market or in clinical trials that combine these properties in one single therapy. The objective of this project is to complete the preclinical stage of Cura Therapeutics’ lead immunotherapy (CT001, aka human FIST). The pre-clinical stage includes in vitro experiments to characterize Cura Therapeutics immunotherapies (CT001 variants) and in vivo experiments to determine Pk, Pd, MTD and efficacy studies in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors in four mouse models of cancer (pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer and melanoma).The goal is to build a pipeline that targets a broad range of solid malignancies that can be used as a standalone treatment or as combination therapies with CAR-T, Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), or chemotherapy. The collaboration with Dr. Michel L. Tremblay lab will generate the data necessary to advance to IND-enabling studies.

Molecular Profiling of Survivin in Different Human Cancers

Survivin, a member of the inhibitors of the apoptosis protein family, is involved in multiple critical pathways of cancer cell growth and survival. Because of its selective expression in cancer cells but not in normal adult tissues, survivin is an attractive target for different cancer treatments. Immunovaccine Inc. (IMV) has developed a therapeutic cancer vaccine, DPX-Survivac, targeting survivn-rich cancer cells. The description should also indicate. Survivin over-expression was found in virtually all cancer types but not in normal tissues; however, it remains to be determined how its levels vary amongst different cancer types and within subtypes/stages of a given cancer. The goal of the proposed research is to identify cancer types/ subtypes, and stages with the highest levels of survivin expression. This will be achieved by a combination of microarray database mining and quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR)-based studies. The_results_of_this_research_will_help_IMV_and_others_to_select_patient cohorts that are best suited for survivin-targeted therapies.

Plasticity of gene expression and chemical defences in an invasive weed

Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is an invasive plant in North America that produces glucosinolates and flavonoids as defensive chemicals. Production of these chemicals includes both plastic and genetic components, but the genes involved in these responses have not been characterized. We propose to use high-throughput sequencing and comparative genomic tools to characterize the complete set of RNA transcripts produced by the genome (transcriptome) of garlic mustard in order to identify candidate genes in the glucosinolate and flavonoid pathways, then sequence the most promising genes in 200 genotypes sampled across Europe North America to look for evidence of evolution during invasion. Understanding if and how this species evolves during invasion can help us understand more generally the role that evolution plays in the spread of invasive species.

Filtering Process Optimization

Scrawlr is a platform for unconstrained, global interaction with all internet content and users. Scrawlr allows for user evaluation and unconstrained classification of any Scrawlr-hosted or non-Scrawlr content. For non-Scrawlr content, this evaluation and classification allowance will be first at the URL level but will subsequently be provided at the individual content component level.
The research conducted in this project will build an improved programmatic solution to the highly prohibitive database queries currently available when returning a precise result count for large and complex queries, a persistent issue that remains pervasive even with the use of advanced estimator usage tools.
This project will develop general and varying search and filtering optimization approaches for large tightly and loosely coupled datasets to be applied on a variety of technologies (rust/sql/php/lua/redis/redis search). Given current capability limitations, we must determine and optimize solutions for specific database and data storage performance issues at scale.

Pumped hydroelectric vs utility-scale battery energy storage solutions for Alberta: A Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment approach

Renewable sources of electricity continue to increase in market share across all jurisdictions. New wind and solar energy projects in Alberta will be the main drivers to reach the province’s 2030 target to have 30% of its electricity derived from renewable sources. Alongside these projects the power generation companies like TransAlta Corporation will need to look at energy storage solutions to help these intermittent sources of electricity provide reliable and consistent power to the consumer. My research will compare the two most commercially available storage options of utility-scale battery storage and pumped hydroelectric storage. Analysis of these options will include comparison of environmental indicators, capital and operating costs, and social impacts such employment and community impacts. This research will assist in decision making for TransAlta in terms of which type of energy storage solution to pursue in the future.