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The Mini-Medical Innovation Fellowship (MIF) is a program organized by WORLDiscoveries to introduce the biodesign process approach to medical innovation. It is open to Western’s medical health professional and engineering students, as well as practicing clinicians based in London, who are interested in medical innovation.

A shorter spin-off of the full Western Medical Innovation Fellowship, the aim of the Mini-MIF program is to train entrepreneurial participants to use a design thinking-based approach to address clinical problems.

Entering its second annual cohort, the program recruited four clinicians from Children’s Hospital – London Health Sciences Centre, as well as 16 students from Western University working towards a professional medical health or engineering degree. Each clinician was paired up with two medical health professional students and two engineering students.

Led by Dr. Susan Scollie, a team of researchers at National Centre for Audiology at Western University are receiving a Governor General’s Innovation Award for developing the world’s first pediatric hearing aid prescription software.

For nearly 20 years, Desired Sensation Level (DSL) software has helped clinicians around the world provide infants and children with the gift of hearing.

It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

The DSL software has helped clinicians provide infants and children with access to sound by assessing, treating, and properly fitting and tuning hearing aids to patient’s specific needs. This results in improved hearing outcomes – while boosting long-term educational and social potential for patients born with permanent childhood hearing loss.

Students bring home $5K prize for health tech go-to-market pitch

Another exciting year for the Proteus Innovation Competition has come and gone with five teams taking home over $25,000 in prizes.

Founded at Western by WORLDiscoveries and grown to collaborate with McMaster, Windsor, Waterloo and Guelph universities, the competition brings students together to propose viable paths to market for novel technologies developed at the partner institutions.

It’s a key event within the Western entrepreneurship ecosystem, awarding each winning team $5,000 and the chance to license the new technology and form their own startup.

Nearly 200 people from the Southern Ontario’s growing life science ecosystem, gathered virtually for the final showcase event for Innovation Factory’s ninth annual Synapse Competition, Ontario’s premier life science pitch competition. 

Following an intense three-month training and commercialization program, 14 of Ontario’s innovative early-stage life science companies unlocked a $5,000 grant to support their commercialization journey to business success.  

The Idea to Innovation (I2I) grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) exists to accelerate the pre-competitive development of promising technology originating from research organizations and promote its transfer to a new or established Canadian company. The I2I grants provide funding to university faculty members to support research and development projects with recognized technology transfer potential. This is achieved through defined phases by providing crucial assistance in the early stages of technology validation and market connection.

David Muir, BSc’89, PhD’94, with decades of experience in technology research and development in the private and public sectors, joins Western University as the inaugural Associate Vice-President, Innovation and Strategic Partnerships. He comes to Western from the National Research Council Canada where he served as Director, Research and Development since 2015. Previously he held various technical and managerial roles at 3M Canada.

By working with partners in Western’s Faculty of Engineering, WORLDiscoveries has helped establish a Memorandum of Understanding between key mobility technology partners EnerTech Capital, Alectra, and Linamar that will allow for research and development collaborations in the mobility sector. Mobility technology focuses on autonomous vehicles, electrification, fleet management, and connectivity and transportation logistics.

WORLDiscoveries has a history of working with a wide range of industry verticals to help overcome technical challenges and open new and exciting market opportunities. Our team is dedicated to helping both industry and inventors find the solution that could make a difference to a company and a community.

For the culmination of their work through the 10.5-month program, the 2020-21 cohort of Western Medical Innovation Fellows (MIF) have launched a startup for one of their program projects. Tenomix will help commercialize a bench-top robotic scanning device that can automate the detection of lymph nodes in resected colorectal cancer tissues. The purpose of the device is to help pathology staff shorten sample preparation time, accelerate sample throughput, achieve productivity gains, and contribute to the current standard of care with the use of fewer laboratory resources than existing manual methods.

The nascent company just received six-figure funding from FACIT, a commercialization venture firm that builds companies with entrepreneurs to accelerate oncology innovation, with a portfolio that has attracted more than $1 billion in investment to Ontario. FACIT receives support through its strategic partner, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), which is funded by the Government of Ontario. FACIT also runs an annual pitch competition for Ontario-based oncology innovations, and selected Tenomix as a finalist in the 2021 event.

In the midst of the global pandemic, one of the region’s busiest pediatric doctors also became one of the country’s most prolific researchers in service to a broader public good.

Dr. Doug Fraser’s work in developing state-of-art technologies in COVID-19 and traumatic brain injury research is poised to have a national and international impact – and has earned him the prestigious Vanguard Innovator of the Year award by WORLDiscoveries.