Research and Innovation : Innovation + Job News

Last week, Ontario took a step towards digital health with the launch of Akira.

Akira is a mobile app for iOS and Android that was developed by Dustin Walper after his own brush with thyroid cancer left him frustrated and annoyed with the Canadian healthcare system.

After founding and building his previous startup MyPlanet for five years, he felt that this was something he had to do.

“As someone who was busy trying to build a business, anytime you have any kind of medical issue you just want to get it over with,” a task which Walper recalls wasn’t easy to do.

“That was the core frustration that I felt with the health care system.”

Akira costs $9.99 per month and launched officially on Wed., May 18. Walper’s goal with this service was to put a doctor in the pocket of every Canadian.

Several physicians have already signed up to take part in Akira’s mission, enabling them to digitally interact with patients who’ve downloaded the app whenever the patient requires.

While Akira has the potential to lessen the burden on the healthcare system by redirecting non-critical inquiries to a digital service, Walper stresses that in order for Akira to serve its purpose, it shouldn’t be used for medical issues that require a physical examination.

“There are some things that just weren’t appropriate for this kind of service,” he says.

He anticipates however, that this is what Canadian patients need – a fast, reliable way to have their immediate healthcare needs met.

In order to do that, Akira has partnered with another popular Canadian health startup, PopRX. Unlike Akira, PopRX specializes in digitizing the pharmaceutical industry by offering prescription delivery, renewal and inquiries all though an app.

“What’s really important for our type of model is that we want to make healthcare accessible and convenient to everyone,” said Walper. “A big part of that is prescriptions.

PopRx fonuder Dr. Ali Esmail stated that as soon as the platform began allowing for specialists (Akira only supports general practitioners at the moment and Esmail is an ear, nose and throat specialist), he would gladly consider joining the platform.

Esmail goes on to agree with Walper in saying that redirecting non-critical medical issues can potentially reduce the strain on Canada’s medical system.

A lot of those people show up in emergency rooms or wait for hours in walk-in clinics,” said Esmail.

Overall however, he believes that Akira and PopRx share one mission: to bring the benefits of telemedicine to Canadians.

“What PopRx and what Akira are trying to do is provide a much more convenient service.”  

Currently, Akira is not covered under OHIP, though several tech companies have begun offering Akira as part of their employee benefits packages.

While undergoing research on an anticancer drug targeting colorectal cancer cells, researchers at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre found something surprising. The researchers discovered that the drug can actually trick the cancer stem cells into responding as if they had been infected with a virus, which in turn, limit the cancer cells' ability to multiply.

The findings were published academic journal Cell, and for Dr. Daniel De Carvalho, lead researcher on the project since its start in 2012, the finding is significant as colorectal cancer recurs in 50 percent of patients and is among the top three leading causes of cancer-related deaths. “We work with DNA methylation inhibitors, such as azacitidine and decitabine, both of which affect DNA methylation have already been approved by the FDA for use in myelodysplastic syndrome, a form of blood cancer,” Dr. De Carvalho said. “We are very interested in the ability of epigenetic agents to identify markers that are found mainly on cancer cells. Epigenetic drugs track down cells that have a lot of epigenetic markers, which are more likely to be cancer cells, whereas chemotherapy kills proliferating cells first, regardless of their epigenetic markers and regardless whether they are tumor or normal cells.”

The team found that these DNA methylation inhibitors make cancer cells more likely to attract immune cells, and in a phenomenon he calls ‘viral mimicry’, the drugs then trick the cancer cell to look like a cancer infected cell. “Combining epigenetic therapy with immunotherapy, where the brakes of the immune system are released, will probably improve patient response. We are currently starting trials to test this hypothesis.”

“By targeting colorectal cancer stem cells with a new anticancer agent, Dr. De Carvalho has succeeded in limiting the ability of these cells to grow and maintain tumors,” said Dr. Katie Wright, senior manager of Research Communications at the Canadian Cancer Society, Ontario Division. “This novel approach could potentially complement therapies for more effective treatment of other cancers.”

For 2016, Dr. De Carvalho is excited to continue research and hopes that this basic discovery will eventually improve patient care. “We are continuing this work in multiple fronts. First, by doing clinical trials to evaluate the synergistic effect of epigenetic inhibitors with immunotherapies,” he said. “We are also evaluating the effect of epigenetic therapy on the T cells. T cells are the ‘soldiers’ of the immune system. We want to know whether we can make these soldiers stronger by using epigenetic therapy.”

One of the biggest keys to preventing or treating cancer effectively is rapid detection and diagnosis; for the two of four Canadians that will have cancer in their lifetime, detecting it early can mean the difference between life and death.

Dr. Shana Kelley, a professor from the University of Toronto’s faculty of pharmacy, has discovered a tool to make diagnosis easier. Currently, doctors employ surgical procedures to extract samples from tumors that are then tested to determine the type of cancer a patient has, a process process that is both invasive and time consuming.

In contrast, Kelley has developed an extremely sensitive blood test that uses sensors on a chip to detect cancer mutations. “Dr. Kelley’s new blood test using microchips to detect cancer mutations has the potential to transform cancer screening. Finding cancer before symptoms are noticed greatly increases the chances of successful treatment.” said Dr. Katie Wright, Senior Manager of Research Communications, Canadian Cancer Society, Ontario Division.

The development is based on recent research that show that significant levels of cell-free nucleic acids (cfNAs) are present in the blood of cancer patients, and contain the potential to reveal the mutational spectrum of a tumor without the need for an invasive sampling of the tumor. Currently, conventional means of using these samples requires differentiation between the nucleic acids that originate from healthy cells and the mutated sequences shed by tumor cells, which can take time and is often complicated by excessive handling.

With Kelley’s chip-based technology, the test would not require sample purification, and would be capable of detecting the presence of mutations within 15 minutes. The same day that she published her findings in Nature Chemistry, Xagenic Inc., a molecular diagnostics company developing the lab-free Xagenic X1 platform, announced the exclusive acquisition of this technology.
 

For musicians interested in learning classical music, taking music theory classes can be a good choice—but for those who want to learn genres like R&B, folk, rock, and pop, there’s a disconnect, says Alex Andrews.

Andrews is a developer and founder of Ten Kettles, a small indie dev company behind Waay, a mobile app meant to help DIY musicians with music theory. Before creating Waay, Andrews, from a young age, was passionate about music. He’s spent years 
working on developing his skills and touring with local Toronto bands.

"After teaching music and playing in bands in and around the city for years, I wanted to combine this passion for applied music theory with my background as an engineer, and that's how 
Waay was born!” says Andrews.

Waay works by offering short video lessons emphasizing practical music theory and practice with interactive music lessons. While there are currently three achievement levels like Melodies and Chords, Ten Kettles is working on adding more lessons. At 
$4.99 for the iPhone and iPad app, it can also be a better alternative to expensive private lessons. In the meantime, users can work with the current lessons and easily track their progress using the app.

“There are so many fantastic ways to use music theory when you write music, ways that help you be more creative, get more songs written, and have more fun,” says Andrews. “For many people, they'd never seen music theory used as a creative tool before. It was great to see what they could do with it.” 

Andrews says that music theory that requires musicians in non-classical fields to learn how to analyze Bach and Beethoven can make musicians feel they aren’t getting the most out of the education. And as someone who has taught private music lessons tailored to each student, Andrews hopes that his app will similarly help students learn theory at their own pace and in whatever genre they choose. He hopes the app will attract people who aren’t necessarilly interested in an overly-structured approach to learning music.

“Why are you learning music theory to write a music exam, when you could be learning music theory to, you know, write music?” Andrews says. “That's the approach I took when teaching private lessons and writing music with bands in Toronto, and it was such a fantastic way to make music theory genuinely useful and get people excited.”

As protests against Uber and City challenges rage on in Toronto, the taxi industry has been grappling with the question of how to deal with the disruption of its industry and bring its technology to the 21st century. 

eCab, a global alliance of taxi companies committed to bringing innovative digital technology to the industry, has teamed up with Royal Taxi in Toronto to develop a smartphone app for the company. The eCab app in Toronto follows the app’s successful presence in Vancouver of last year. According to Royal Taxi, the availability of an app helps the company cater to a younger demographic that expects efficiency in their daily life, as well as leverage the fact that they are a safer option. 

“Traditional taxi companies have typically relied on calls coming in to their Dispatch centre. An APP changes that and adds a greater dimension to the transportation industry—not to mention increases demand by a diverse demographic group,” said Spiros Bastas, general manager for Royal Taxi. “The glaring difference between our App and that provided by services such as Uber is safety, reliability and compliance.”

The Toronto app works by allowing users to get connected to the nearest Royal Taxi in the area, choose from regular, executive, and wheelchair accessible cars, and—most importantly—pay through the app. Users also have the option of enjoying WiFi in the vehicle.

“Urban mobility is facing a major evolution and the smartphone generation keeps evolving. The digital revolution and the unprecedented new competition entering all sectors of activity has to be addressed positively,” said Gilles Gomis, regional head of eCab. “eCab brings to the industry the tools to fill these needs while focusing on technology and quality of services.”

Toronto Hydro is teaming up with Toronto startup Hydrostor to launch the world’s first underwater energy storage system. Three kilometres off Toronto Island and located 55 metres underwater, Hydrostor's system is connected to Toronto Hydro's electricity grid, and uses compressed air and the pressure of water to run its system. The technology works by running electricity through a compressor and converting it into compressed air. The compressed air is sent underwater where it is stored in large balloon-like structures, made out of the same type of material used in marine lift bags to raise shipwrecks. When electricity is needed again, the weight of the water pushes the air to the surface through a large pipe and an expander converts the air back into electricity.

“ As this technology is a world first, we’ll be evaluating the system’s versatility during the pilot project under real world operating conditions,” says Jack Simpson, director of generation and capacity planning. “

The technology has the potential to create a new generation of clean energy, as it produces zero emissions and stores electricity during off-peak hours when demand is low and electricity is cheapest. The electricity can then be released again during short-term power outages or high-demand times.

“In these situations, the HydroStor system would be able to release stored energy and provide the grid with an additional resource to help limit peak energy prices, improve power quality and help restore power during an area outage,” says Simpson. 

It will remain there until a two-year pilot study is complete.

The Toronto-based Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), which works to drive the commercialization of research in the province, will work with the China Canada Angels Alliance (CCAA) to bridge the gap between Ontario-based businesses and the Chinese investment community. 

OCE and the CCAA will partner with Zhongguancun Haidian Science Park, a high-tech innovation centre in Beijing often referred to as China’s Silicon Valley, and River Capital, an investment fund in China. “It’s about building relationships,” said Dr. Tom Corr, president and CEO of the OCE. “ While the market there is massive, navigating it can be difficult for many reasons. We are creating an environment in which there’s an established relationship that can be incredibly beneficial for the companies seeking 
inroads in China.”

Currently, Zhongguancun Haidian Science Park is home to 10,000 business. “Given the size of the market, China offers tremendous opportunities for  businesses,” said Corr.

“Connecting Ontario companies and the technologies developed here with investors and other partners in China becomes much easier and more fruitful when you have agreements in place like the one we signed in Beijing.”

This isn’t the first time that the CCAA and the OCE have partnered to help Ontario entrepreneurs benefit from access to Chinese markets. The two already have a partnership through their China Angels Mentorship Program, which has already seen 10 Ontario companies benefit from $2 million in investments, as well mentoring and training on how to access the Chinese market. 

“Ontario has some exciting technologies to share with the world,” said said Huang Lei, Deputy Chief of International Cooperation of ZHSP.  “We are excited to be able to bring our expertise to this partnership to help them develop and grow.”

Dr. Sampa Bhadra, a York University physics professor, is part of Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) team that won the prestigious 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. 

The prize is meant to “recognize those individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge,” according to the website, and includes a reward of $3 million. 

The team won the prize for “for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.”

However, working with a team of 1,370 other scientists, she admits she won’t see a large chunk of the $3 million prize—but is excited to have been part of such a discovery. “it will be a pretty good dinner and maybe I can celebrate with some of my other colleagues!” Dr. Bhadra says. “I am lucky to be working on neutrino physics at a time when several experiments, including our T2K experiment, have made critical discoveries within a relatively short time period.” 

While Dr. Bhadra says that this technology is possible to apply to photosensor technology, as with most scientific breakthroughs, it’s hard to tell whether this discovery will be integral to others in the future. “In science there is often a time lag between new technology and widespread application,” explained Dr. Bhadra.

In a collaboration between Toronto-area hospitals, health care professionals and the University of Toronto, students are encouraged to submit ideas for the HealthEDGE initiative, a year-long health care hackathon aimed at improving healthcare delivery. 

“We are all touched by the health system from birth.  And at times we have all experienced moments where we have witnessed snags, frustrations, delays, fundamentally illogical processes or practices, and outdated devices or approaches.” said Joseph Ferenbok, a University of Toronto professor and co-director of the Faculty of Medicine’s Health Innovation HUB (H2i). “But though we may have had these experiences, we are not all in a position to do something about these frustrations.” 

The current call for proposals is the first round of the initiative. A panel of industry experts will curate the submissions and channel them to teams of students with expertise in a variety of disciplines, and the groups that present the most interesting ideas will get at least $10,000 in funding. “The advantage of the HealthEDGE initiative is that it is an on-the-ground attempt to reach out to a variety of people, curate and categorize their experiences into practical challenges that are put in front of creative entrepreneurial minds to generate, develop, test and evaluate potential innovations,” said Ferenbok. “In doing so, we empower people in communities that may not be able to address the issues they identify.”

While the health care system in Canada is notorious for being slow to adopt innovative solutions, Ferenbok said that the fact they are working with hospitals as partners is an advantage. “Not only will some of the challenges come from within the hospital communities, mentorship and development will also be done in coordination with the hospitals, said Ferenbok. “We hope that this type of buy-in will create local champions who are aware of the innovation and act as internal advocates to help improve the chances of adaptation.”

In Canada and the United States, 15 million women rely on oral contraceptives to prevent pregnancy — yet one in 10 of these women will become pregnant during their first year on the Pill, mostly because they take it irregularly or forget to take it completely. These statistics demonstrated a need for University of Toronto MASc students Eric Ma and Tony Zhang, and PhD candidate Valentin Peretroukhin, to come up with the idea for Pillsy, a smart pouch to help women consistently take their birth control pills.

The pouch, which is outfitted with sensors, stores the pills and detects if the user has actually taken the pill. The pouch then communicates this to the user’s smartphone via BA luetooth, and doesn’t require any manual input.

Currently, the project is undergoing beta testing, while the student group behind the project will move on to a Kickstarter campaign in 2016.

“We chose Kickstarter as it will provide further market validation as well as increased funding,” says Courtney Smith, a student working on the Pillsy project and an MPH candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “Kickstarter is known to be popular among our target demographic of young women and their partners, so this will serve as a cost-effective mechanism for organic advertising.”

While the pouch is being marketed to women who use birth control, eventually the group will expand to other pill markets. “It is definitely our plan to expand to other time-sensitive medications in the future like heart disease medications, especially as new generations of older adults become more and more tech savvy,” says Smith.

 

Nanoleaf, a Toronto-based green tech startup, has developed the Nanoleaf Smarter Kit, what the company calls “the most energy-efficient light build in the world.”

Currently, Apple is moving into the smart home industry with its HomeKit offering — a framework for developers that allows communication and control for connected accessories in a user’s home — and Nanoleaf has received one of the first seals of approval from Apple to develop their Smarter Kit using the HomeKit.

The Smarter Kit allows users to control the lights in a user’s home with Siri voice commands, set lights in interesting ways depending on the context (such as dimmed lights for a date night) and the ability to control lights with customized names; for example, one could turn off the lights in “Sarah’s room” only.

Nanoleaf CTO Anders Ohrn says that the company chose to integrate Apple HomeKit into their product, instead of making their own app, to remain competitive in the smart home evolution. “By integrating the Smarter Kit with the Apple HomeKit protocol, it’s possible to control the lights with voice commands like ‘set bedroom lights to 20 percent’” says Ohrn. “Too many devices on the market are incompatible with other devices, which force people to buy products from only that manufacturer. HomeKit is an opportunity to be part of something bigger.”

The light also has a unique geometric shape — a design that Ohrn says is not just to look cool. “Merging the worlds of design and engineering has always been an integral part of our creation process,” says Ohrn. “What most people don't know is that the dodecahedron shape is more than just aesthetics, there are also many technical benefits for the user. The shape gives the bulb its own heat dissipation system as well as 360 degrees of equal light distribution without any inefficiencies.”

In an age of Uber and Airbnb, tech startups everywhere are in the business of disrupting traditional industries that are slow to change, and making them more efficient, faster, and of course, cheaper.

This is exactly what Zak Homuth, founder of Upverter, did with the launch of the company’s Parts Concierge service. Upverter, which already works to make hardware engineers’ lives easier through their cloud-engineering platform, established Parts Concierge as a “virtual assistant for engineers”. With Parts Concierge, hardware engineers can request any part to be built on Upverter and added to the design on their behalf. This process can normally take weeks — as engineers have to wait for unique parts to be built and shipped before continuing with their design — and costly mistakes are only found once the manufacturing is done.

Once a unique part is made using Parts Concierge, it’s added to the library to make it easier for other engineers to access instead of having different engineers constantly request the same parts. “We looked at our stats, and the very first thing everyone did when they tried Upverter was to search for a part,” said Homuth. “If they found the part, there was a pretty good chance they’d stick around. And if they didn’t there was a pretty good chance they’d leave.”  

While Upverter wasn’t originally focused on the parts industry, the stats had Homuth thinking that this is something that his company could tackle. “We couldn’t just build every part in the world, but maybe we could build every part that a user needed fast enough that it would be like it was there in the first place.”

Homuth said that the reason why the hardware industry has been so slow to develop a comparable service is because it is still largely dominated by offline desktop software. The cloud, however, is disrupting this industry. “To provide a service like the parts concierge users would have had to email someone, ask for a part, the service provider would then have to make the part in the right format, and then email the part back. Most engineers would probably wonder why not just do it themselves,” said Homuth. “It just wouldn't work as well without the cloud. It would feel very rough and inefficient.”


 

Dimitri Nakassis, a University of Toronto professor in the department of classics, is the first U of T professor to win the MacArthur Fellowship, colloquially known as a “genius grant”.

The award comes from the John D. and Catherine T.  MacArthur Foundation, an independent foundation dedicated to supporting creative people and institutions. The grant recognizes the potential of people that “show extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits,” according to the Foundation. MacArthur Fellows receive $650,000 through the grant, and they can use the award to advance their expertise, take on new work, or event follow an entirely new career path. However, Nakassis isn’t sure how he’ll use the money just yet. “The grant is both an affirmation that people see value in my work and an invitation to do something new and innovative, so I don't want to rush into anything,” he said. “I will only have one crack at this, so I need to think carefully about the best use of the money, one that will have maximum impact on the study of the ancient Greek world.”

According to the Foundation’s website, Nakassis was recognized for changing long-held views on prehistoric Greek societies. Most notably, Nakassis challenged the long-held view that Late Bronze Age Mycenaean palatial society (1400–1200 BC) was a highly centralized oligarchy, distinct from the democratic city-states of classical Greece. Instead, he proposes that power and resources were more broadly shared, and is currently testing his hypothesis in an archaeological survey. His ideas came from a reinterpretation of Pylos’s administrative and accounting records found on clay tablets written in the early Greek script, Linear B.
 
Nakassis says that his passion for both classics and archaeology is what made it possible for him to study Linear B in the way he did.  “Classics is a discipline that encourages you to find solutions to the study of the ancient past that aren't necessarily specific to any one discipline. If you wanted to work on the economy of ancient Greece, for example, you couldn't limit yourself only to archaeology, nor could you ignore archaeology altogether,” he said. “So it's a discipline that really encourages interdisciplinarity, even if that's not how every Classicist ends up operating.”
 
And while the Fellowship celebrates individuals who display creativity in their work, Nakassis just credits his “super-critical eye”. In his work, he always tries to ask others how they know something is 100 percent true to try to probe weak arguments, while also taking into account the criticism of his colleagues. “Anytime someone says that something is ‘clearly’ or ‘obviously’ true, alarm bells go off in my head: these are, to me, props for a weak argument,” he said. “The other thing that helps is talking to other critical people about what you're thinking. Sometimes I can allow myself to settle into an argument that's conventional, and friends and colleagues will usually point out to me that I can push it forward. You need people who are willing to challenge you, too.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

At the University of Toronto a group of researchers have developed a microchip that will help doctors better assess the quality of a potential lung transplant. 

According to Professor Shana Kelly, one of the scientists who lead the team that developed the technology, doctors usually only have several hours to decide if they're going to go through with a lung transplant operation. 

As a result, 10 to 25 per cent of lung transplant patients begin to suffer from a condition called primary graft dysfunction. While doctors conduct a variety of tests to ensure that a lung is suitable for transplant, these tests do not have the ability to currently catch subtle tissue damage. 

In many other fields of medicine, doctors use a technique called "biomarker profiling" to catch the smallest degree of tissue damage. Unfortunately, until now that technique has been too time consuming to conduct in the time doctors had to make a decision on whether to operate.

"This [breakthrough] could help eliminate the leading cause for post-operation death," she says.  

Using the data collected from the microchip and with the help of a algorithm Professor Kelly and her team developed, this new technology is able to generate a risk rating for a lung. It's also able to provide this assessment in 20 minutes. 

"We hope that this will lead to improved utilization rates for donated organs," says Professor Kelly. 

Like most medical breakthroughs, additional testing is required before this technology makes it way to hospital operating rooms. 

"We will be running a larger scale validation study to prove out the accuracy of our method, and also building automated instrumentation that will allow the technology to be used anywhere that transplant-related decisions are being made," she says.

At the end of last year, Yonge Street Media featured five Toronto startups we thought would make a big splash in 2015. More than half a year after that piece was originally published, one of the companies included in that list, OTI Lumonics, has finally shipped its first product.

OTI’s Aerelight A1 OLED desk lamp can now be purchased for $299 CAD from the company’s website.

Besides being able to claim that it is the world’s first OLED desk lamp, the A1 includes a couple of nifty features not usually present in your everyday lamp. For one, the entirety of its aluminum frame is touch-sensitive; instead of turning the lamp on and off, adjusting the panel’s brightness is done by simply touching the frame. It also supports both the Qi and PMA charging standards, meaning that those that have an Android smartphone can charge it by placing it on the lamp’s base (Apple, unfortunately, does not currently support either of those standards with the iPhone).

Initially envisioned as a way to help the average person understand the organic light-emitting diode technology the company has been working on, Albert Lam, a product manager at OTI Lumonics, says the launch of the Aerelight is a big milestone for him and his colleagues. “We’re really proud to have an product that almost anyone can buy,” he says. “The other thing that’s exciting is that this marks the beginning of many more OLED-enabled products, and we’re excited to be leading that.”

At first blush, the cost of the Aerelight appears expensive, but Lam argues that there’s a lot of value to the product. “Even if you go to Crate & Barrel, a desk lamp there can easily cost you $300, and still all you’re getting is a regular bulb,” he says.

More so than the lamp itself, what’s exciting about this launch is the technology OTI has developed to enable. As mentioned before, the Aerelight is the world’s first OLED lamp. OLEDs are ubiquitous in smartphones and HDTVs. However, they’re just making their way into lighting technology, and the have the potential to completely change every aspect of the field.

“Organic LED is an exciting technology because it is made completely out of carbon-based molecules, which are easily degradable and disposable. We’re using simple dyes that are in everyday clothes and cosmetics,” says Lam. The philosophy of our lighting and designs moving forward, because OLED is such a thin form and it can be any shape and flexible, it’s going to enable designs that weren’t possible before. We’re going to be able to do sculptural designs that weren’t possible before and even redefine what we even consider lighting.”