Innovative Projects Realized

Evaluation of a micro homes pilot project in Ontario; co-designing best practices for the implementation of housing projects to address chronic homelessness

In recent years, significant attention has been paid to ending chronic homelessness in Canadian communities. As communities implement these initiatives, they confront many practical problems. Given the nuances of implementation and the many decisions and compromises that communities need to make, having a robust and thoughtful community engagement and co-design process that incorporates the relevant stakeholders is essential. Using a 10 unit micro home project as the research site, the aim of this project is to: 1) Research how community members, policy makers, researchers, and service providers can be brought together in a participatory and co-production process to design and implement local supportive housing projects; 2) Understand the impact of the micro-homes project from the perspective of four main stakeholder groups: residents of the homes, residents of the surrounding community, local business owners, and the frontline staff.

Meta-information Extraction from Large-scale Streaming News for Entity-level Media Intelligence and Reporting – Year two

Gnowit is an Ottawa-based information services company that employs artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the process of monitoring web sources at scale to provide real-time briefings and notifications for the purposes of competitive intelligence, evidence-based policy research and media monitoring. The company currently monitors more than 40 thousand web sources and generates atleast 1.2 million fully analysed documents daily. Gnowit’s customers currently only employ traditional Boolean full-text queries and simple meta-information-based filters to extract documents that are of interest to them. The current technology allows an undesirable quantity of noise and requires substantial improvement. Our main goal is to create (i) new set of customer-facing filters based on the geographic location of news publications, genres, central topics and themes (ii) extract meta-information that can be applied to web-sources, individual articles and segments of documents and (iii) develop entity-level analytics pipelines. Applying these tags to individual sources and documents is beyond the capacity of human effort, and so could benefit from techniques from the field of natural language processing and deep learning. Additionally, we will contribute to the field of machine learning research by developing innovative methods for tackling interpretability challenges associated with deep learning models.

Biomarkers for detection of breast cancer and multiple myeloma using liquid biopsy – Year Two

Blood tests are highly sought after to enable earlier cancer detection. We previously developed a blood test for breast cancer that is in prospective clinical study in Alberta, Manchester (UK), Oklahoma (USA) and South Korea. The proposed project will investigate some clinical samples collected through this work to support the primarily focus of identifying biomarkers for a new cancer, multiple myeloma (MM). MM has a need for new monitoring approaches as it accounts for 10% of hematologic malignancies and is hard to cure, with a low five-year survival rate. MM is characterized by cancerous plasma cells in the bone marrow (BM). Invasive BM aspirates are the primary method of diagnosing the disease and following response to therapy. In this study, we will evaluate patient samples (BM and blood) to identify potential MM biomarkers, test a new cell culture model, and validate results in patient samples. These studies will allow partners to participate in publishing research study results, as well as potentially develop a new clinical laboratory tests for MM. This could enable earlier detection and provide a method to determine response to therapy, resulting in increased survival, as well as enhanced quality of life through optimizing treatment and monitoring recurrence.

Canada-Wide Study: Clinical and Economics Outcomes of Mental Health and Addictions

The annual economic impact of mental health illness and addiction on the Canadian economy is estimated to be around $50 billion, with projected increases in future years. Little research exists that has evaluated mental health illness and addictions in the Canadian workplace. The provision of counselling and therapy services helps to boost both mental health well-being and employment productivity, with gains well exceeding the cost of treatment itself. Economic costs associated with mental health and addiction interventions seem promising, but we need better community collaboration of mental health and addiction services, which translates to reducing mental illness stigma and providing effective treatment to a wider group of people, and in a timelier fashion. This proposed project will provide the first objective evaluation of the cost, quality, and effectiveness of Mental Health and Addictions treatment through EHN Canada.

Deep Immunophenotyping of the Immune Response in Obstructive and Interstitial Lung Disease: Optimizing a Cellular and Protein Biomarker Discovery Pipeline for Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), is a chronic debilitating lung disorder that affects thousands of Canadians and millions of individuals worldwide. The signs and symptoms of IPF often overlap with other common respiratory illnesses making a definitive diagnosis of this disease difficult. As a result, patients are frequently misdiagnosed and treated with inappropriate therapies. As such, there is a unmet clinical need to develop blood-based biomarkers for the confirmation of IPF to minimize the incidence of misdiagnosis. The intern will analyze immune cells and their expressed proteins at a single cell level to understand the immune response in IPF with the goal of discovering novel blood-based biomarkers and to differentiate the characteristic immune response in IPF to other chronic lung disorders like COPD and asthma that present with overlapping signs and symptoms. The biomarkers discovered through this research will play an important role in guiding clinical decision making at the Providence Airway Centre under the Providence Health Care partner organization.

Mechanical locking and durability of engineered floor products

Despite the global growth of the flooring market and the need for more sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective flooring designs, there is little comparative information for the Canadian flooring industry to improve the design and fabrication of laminated floor panels to address both the mechanical performance and durability of their designs while manufacturing cost-effective products. The project aims to examine the potential for the design of novel flooring panels that more efficient in terms of mechanical assembly and joining, in the meantime, more durable when exposed to harsh service conditions. The project will gather critical knowledge about the mechanical designs of flooring panels, their durability performance, and the means to improve their properties under extreme conditions. The project has the design, characterization, and manufacturing phase and will be conducted in collaboration with a Canadian partner organization. It will help the Canadian flooring industry to offer local consumers a more durable product and keep its competencies in the global market.

Additive Manufacturing of Functionally Graded Materials and Shape Memory Alloys with Biomedical Applications

Functionally graded materials (FGM) offer a better alternative than the conventional coating techniques since it eliminates the sudden change in composition between different materials. This project proposes to print FGM biomedical implants using a combination of titanium (Ti) powder and hydroxyapatite (HA) powder. Titanium will offer the required mechanical strength for load-bearing implants, while HA will enhance the biological properties of the implant surface to enhance bone cell attachment. The project will follow a comprehensive approach to cover the gaps in the literature. Firstly, powder mixing of Ti and HA process will be optimized to choose the best mixing parameters and weight percentage of each material. Then more focus will be directed to the laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process to study the process-structure property relationship, thus choosing the preferred process parameter window. Afterward, the Ti-HA FGM concept will be applied to lattice structures and print novel radial FGM parts that mimic bone geometry and composition. Finally, the static and fatigue properties of the printed FGM parts will be characterized to check if they will withstand the requirements for bone implants.

Data Visualization of GIS Data for Managing Land Access (#2)

Access to private or leased land is currently not a simple problem. Landowners would like to know who is on their land, when, and for what purpose. Getting permissions from landowners to use their land is often not straight forward; often leading to bypassing obtaining permission. Some landowners do not want hunters, but do not mind artists or photographers accessing their land. To simplify this process, VeriGrain is building the SaskLander Platform that provides an easy-to-use interface for managing interactions between landowners and those seeking permission to access their land. Saskatchewan Polytechnic will be working with VeriGrain to provide a scalable visualization of GIS data that offers high level detail that can be drilled down to every piece of land across multiple provinces. Land-users will be able to locate land they wish to access and request permission from landowners to have access to the land. Landowners will be able to manage land use requests automatically or at an individual request level.

Synthesis and characterization of various nanocarriers and ministring DNA product for ocular gene delivery

Gene therapy has the potential to effectively treat a wide range of ocular disorders. However, the introduction of foreign therapeutic genes to cells is incredibly challenging. Compared to viral vectors, non-viral vectors (NVV) are far less immunogenic and less toxic. However, NVV are less efficient than viral vectors at delivering therapeutic genes because they must overcome numerous cellular barriers. An appropriate design of the components of the NVV will enhance the properties of the vector to improve delivery into the cell. Our group is working to optimize various nanocarriers and develop a DNA NVV that exploits Mediphage’s proprietary miniaturized DNA construct, called ministring DNA (msDNA). msDNA vectors confer higher transfection efficiency than traditional plasmid DNA strategies, and their smaller size allows for the delivery of higher copy numbers of therapeutic genes. We are confident that our strategy will lead to the development of an effective NVV for ocular gene delivery.

Supporting positive well-being of early career veterinarians

The aims of this research are to 1) assess mental health status and challenges longitudinally as veterinary students transition into working in the profession; and 2) develop a tool that is especially suitable to support positive mental health of early career veterinarians.

Questionnaires will be distributed to all Canadian veterinary undergraduate students in their final year and during their transition into the workplace to assess mental health status longitudinally. Individual one-on-one interviews with recent graduates will provide additional in-depth insights. We will involve veterinary undergraduate students and recent graduates to develop and evaluate a resilience training tool that provides strategies to increase mental health especially during the first years as practitioners.

This research will raise awareness of mental health issues in the veterinary community. Once its benefit is established, the program will be made available to all Canadian veterinary colleges, students, and recent graduates. VetStrategy will benefit by gaining information about the mental health status of veterinarians in Canada, including veterinarians employed by their organization.

Evaluation of CO2 Storage Potential in the Deep Mannville Coals – Phase 1: Vertical Well Injection Testing

To support blue hydrogen economy processes that generate CO2 as a by-product, and greenhouse gas (GHG) sequestration studies in general, the injection and storage of CO2 into deep (~1500m), un-minable coal seams hosted in the Mannville Formation of Alberta will be studied. A vertical (pilot) well will be drilled, cored, and completed in the target Mannville coal seams, and tested to determine the suitability of deep Mannville coals of Alberta for CO2 sequestration. The interns hired for this research program will perform laboratory and field data analysis associated with the vertical pilot well testing program to assist with the evaluation of the Mannville coal as a target for CO2 storage. This evaluation is of great importance to the partner organization because they they require a suitable repository for CO2, which is a by-product of their hydrogen-generating process.

R&D to Design a Sustainable SolvoMetallurgical Process for Extraction and Recycling of Platinum Group Metals (PGMs)

The project will focus on a new branch of metallurgy, SolvoMetallurgy to apply green and bio-degradable solvents for selective extraction of Platinum Group Metals (PGMs). The research will provide industry with a solution for sustainable extraction and near zero environmental impact of PGM extraction from secondary and primary resources. The proposed methodology will eliminate wastewater and toxic off-gassing in the process of PGM recycling while reducing the energy consumption and carbon footprint of PGM recycling/extraction production. The project will enable pH7 Technologies to apply its vision of sustainable low-cost extraction in Platinum Group Metals mining and recycling by designing an eco-friendly closed-loop process for PGM extraction in an economic manner.