News

The Western Medical Innovation Fellowship was the best thing that could have happened to John Matheson.

“Medical residency was always the goal, but this program is going to be invaluable for my future as a clinician,” he said. “You don’t get the opportunity to stop your clinical training and basically be offered this chance to just innovate for a year.”

As a recent medical school graduate, Matheson is one of the program’s three inaugural fellows. Created in partnership with the Western Bone and Joint’s Collaborative Training Program in Musculoskeletal Health, the 10-and-a-half-month fellowship focuses on developing new medical technologies.

LONDON, ON – Scientists from Children’s Health Research Institute, a program of Lawson Health Research Institute, and Western University have developed a new blood test that identifies with greater than 90 per cent certainty whether or not an adolescent athlete has suffered a concussion.

Diagnosis of a clinically significant concussion, or a mild traumatic brain injury, can be difficult as it currently relies on a combination of patient symptom assessment and clinician judgement. Equally problematic are the decisions to stop play or activities, or when patients who have suffered a concussion can safely return to normal activities without risking further injury.

London researcher Ting-Yim Lee is working toward what he calls a “next-generation” form of medical imaging.

Imagine a health-care professional treating a stroke patient. Imagine technology that can deliver three maps of the patient’s brain showing where the blood is still flowing and what portions of the brain already have been damaged. Now imagine that the information about structural changes in the patient’s brain come in such a simple form, it can be interpreted by virtually anyone. And imagine it can all be done in a matter of minutes, saving crucial time that could mean the difference between life and death.

Since graduate school, Eva Turley has been interested in how and why cells move in our bodies. This curiosity led to her discovering, characterizing and cloning RHAMM, a protein that regulates cell movement and stem cell differentiation, during the early 1980s.

Fast forward to the present day.

The Western Oncology, Biochemistry and Surgery professor, along with Chemistry and Oncology professor Len Luyt, has determined that blocking RHAMM provides the safest and most effective means to, among other things, selectively stimulate fat growth under the skin, moderate inflammation and reduce scarring by controlling the body’s own natural regenerative processes. This is good news for millions of patients, ranging from premature babies to breast cancer survivors.

In a discovery that owes as much to serendipity as science, Western University researchers have developed a thinner-than-thin polymer that could exponentially expand the memory storage of our computers and smartphones.

It is the tech industry’s and consumer’s dream: a virtual house-full of memory capability in a device smaller than a fingernail.

The polymer is made of organic material, rather than the silicon now used in flash drives, and can be stretched ridiculously thin — 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. In commercial application it could be used to help store undreamed-of volumes of data.

WORLDiscoveries® is pleased to present our annual Vanguard Awards on September 22nd 2016 at Windermere Manor, located in the Western Research Park. The Vanguard Awards are dedicated to celebrating researchers who, through partnership with WORLDiscoveries®, have achieved various market-readiness milestones.

Western University’s BrainsCAN initiative received a substantial $66 million investment from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) today – the largest research grant in the university’s history – providing a significant boost to ongoing research in cognitive neuroscience and imaging at Western.

Already ranked amongst the best in the world in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, Western excels in the breadth of cognitive, computational, clinical, technological, and translational approaches required for understanding and intervening in brain function.

TORONTO, Ontario – Precision Proteomics, a pre-clinical stage biotechnology company commercializing a novel precision medicine platform, announced its launch today.

The company will focus on accelerating the development of novel diagnostics and therapeutics based on groundbreaking proteomics technology pioneered by Shawn Li, PhD, an oncology professor and researcher at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.

Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins, particularly their structures and functions. This new precision medicine platform focuses on the development of novel diagnostics to enable more precise utilization of therapies, and novel cancer therapeutics to overcome resistance.

A racquetball. A condom. A plastic cup. To Dr. Nicholas Power, these random objects may help urostomy patients find a better quality of life. And now, thanks to a new Western innovation fellowship program, his idea may soon be reality.

“There will always something,” Power said of the complications faced by these patients, citing a study that stated 100 per cent of urostomy patients faced discomfort, stress and inconvenience within the first three months after surgery. “It will leak; you’ll need a different bag or a different connection. All the cost is to the patient and the taxpayers. You are using so many supplies and returning to the hospital too often.”