Articles – News

A new and exciting medical app has been released! Written by physicians, it targets current medical students and works as a “study buddy”. It makes the perfect study buddy, as it is portable, knowledgeable and ready to study at all hours of the day when you need to.

Charles Ishak was awarded the WORLDiscoveries Scholarship for Commercialization / Entrepreneurship for his project on the development of novel cancer biomarkers. Charles is a fifth year PhD student in the lab of Dr. Fred Dick. Charles’ PhD project centres on the molecular changes associated with loss of the Rb tumour suppressor.

This award is generously supported by funds from WORLDiscoveries with the goal of fostering opportunities for entrepreneurship and/or commercialization.

The Western Medical Innovation Fellowship – the first-of-its-kind in Canada – was established in partnership with the University of Minnesota Innovation Fellows program in 2015. Highly qualified individuals with an engineering, computer science or life sciences doctoral or medical degree are sought to take part in this 10 month intensive training and hands-on program. You will have the opportunity to work in a team to identify unmet clinical needs and learn how to evaluate them from a business perspective. Designing, prototyping and testing your solutions to these needs in collaboration with clinicians/faculty members while under the guidance of expert community mentors will round out your fellowship experience.

Following a well-established blueprint for success, Western University has established the Western Medical Innovation Fellowship program – a new endeavour that immerses highly talented young scientists, engineers, and clinicians in a training and research heavy environment with the goal of developing future leaders and innovators of world-class medical technologies.

Ali Tavallaei is making better use of his time these days. As one of three young scholars chosen as part of the recently launched Western Medical Innovation Fellowship program, his focus has been streamlined.

“As a researcher working in the medical device domain, I am at risk of wasting a great deal of time, effort and resources on research ideas and projects that may never translate to the clinic,” Tavallaei said.

When Susan Scollie says millions, she means millions. The Communications Sciences and Disorders professor’s work inside Western’s National Centre for Audiology is helping millions of infants, children and adults hear a brand new world.

“People needed a good solution developed for fitting hearing aids on babies. We worked hard on that. It didn’t feel like pressure; it just needed to be done,” said Scollie, who leads the Child Amplification Laboratory Team.

How does Natalie Raffoul, BESc’01, approach her golf game?

“With a sense of humour.”

Don’t get her wrong. The Managing Partner at Brion Raffoul loves the game and her time on the courses of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club. In fact, she considers it a welcomed respite from her hectic world.

“That’s my retreat,” she said. “That’s my sanity – right there.”

Raffoul, BESc’01, spends her days off the greens as one of the country’s top patent attorneys, managing worldwide intellectual properties for clients. She is also an in-demand speaker and lecturer at Sprott School of Business at Carleton and McGill universities, where she teaches courses for entrepreneurs that cover patents, trademark, copyright and industrial design issues. “Just this morning, I corresponded with someone in Mexico. I spoke to someone in China and someone in Japan,” she said. “We’re really reaching out to folks all over the world. We’re constantly butting up against deadlines and timelines and time zones.”

Maybe you remember fumbling with the wires while building a circuit board in a high school science class. If you do, you likely remember it being an arduous and time-consuming task, figuring out what went wrong if the circuit wasn’t working.

Tengyuan Zhang hopes his latest project will not only make this classroom experience more fun for students, but also instil in them the kind of scientific spark he found and continues to enjoy.

The patent covers the composition of RHAMM-Binding peptides as well as the use of peptides for diagnosing, and determining the prognosis for, cancer patients. The issuance of this patent is a significant milestone for Novare, which has an exclusive license to the patented technology.

Novare Pharmaceuticals today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued patent #9,090,659, with claims covering the composition-of-matter and use of RHAMM-binding peptides with a wide range of potential therapeutic uses. The patent also has claims for the diagnosis and prognosis of cancer, and for prescribing a course of treatment for the diagnosed cancer.

Yabao Pharmaceutical Co, Inc. (Shanghai Stock Exchange 600351), a leading pharmaceutical company in China, today announced that it entered into an exclusive license with Lawson Health Research Institute (Lawson) to discover, develop and commercialize products based on annexin A5 for the treatment of sepsis in July 2014, and that by this month it has successfully completed discovery validation work and moved the program into preclinical development. The use of annexin A5 to treat sepsis was discovered by a team led by Dr. Qingping Feng, a scientist at Lawson and Western University.