Early detection and prevention of ovarian and endometrial cancer

Team:ÌýLucy Gilbert, Ava Slotman, Lawrie Shahbazian, Andrew Arthur, Dzaner Dzafik, Maite Skowronski

Stage:ÌýDesjardins Deploy

Cohort:Ìý2025

Replacing eye drops with contact lenses to seamlessly and efficiently deliver medicine directly to the eye.

Team:ÌýBishakh Rout

Stage:ÌýDiscover

Cohort:Ìý2025

HisTurn is the first ever fertility treatment for men, featuring a genome-based technique to examine the epigenome of sperm. With a 94% accuracy in determining whether a sample is infertile, HisTurn is bound to change the Assisted Reproductive Technology industry.

Team:ÌýSarah Kimmins and Bryan Martin

Stage:ÌýDiscover, Develop and Deploy

Cohort:Ìý2022-2024

Cancer remains a leading cause of death in Canada. One of the keys to effective treatment is monitoring its progress, but this typically involves large pieces of equipment such as MRI machines, and often at infrequent intervals, e.g., every three months. The MoSERS team is developing a solution that can offer non-invasive, easy-to-use and accurate monitoring of cancer that only requires a tiny blood sample that is analyzed using a handheld device. Patients would have the ability to understand the disease’s progress more frequently, and the data would provide practitioners with better treatment options.

Team:ÌýMahsa Jalali

Stage:ÌýDiscover

Cohort:Ìý2023

Every person at one point in their lifetime will experience change or deterioration in capacity to move owing to illness, accident, injury, or aging. Our premier product targets walking, the most valued activity contributing to quality of life. The Heel2ToeTM sensor (Class I Medical Device) helps improve the quality of a person’s gait, giving verbal instruction and feedback to place the heel first when walking. The sensor combined with supporting educational products in our Walk-BESTTM line (BEtter, Faster, Longer, STronger) will make self-management of walking challenges a reality and support remote monitoring and rehabilitation of gait related impairments by therapists.

Team:ÌýNancy Mayo

Stage:ÌýDeploy

Cohort:Ìý2022

3D-bioprinted tumor models - capturing the properties that truly matter to human physiology.

Team:ÌýBenjamin Ringler, Madison Santos, and Isabelle Dummer

Stage:ÌýDevelop

Cohort:Ìý2025

The team has developed a solution to prolong the life of human cells for research. A major challenge for long-term cell culture is that current cell culture substrate coatings are susceptible to degradation by proteases secreted by the cells. This destabilizes the culture, and typically results in cell death. DendroTEK’s game-changing technology provides long-term support for cell cultures, up to 5 times longer. An alumnus of the 1st MIF cohort, the team has demonstrated its technology and is commercially active.

Team:ÌýTimothy Kennedy and Kean Pierre Clement

Stage:ÌýDevelop and Deploy

Cohort:Ìý2022 and 2023

This project is focused on developing an alternative to the typical way we treat severe bleeding, i.e., using compressed gauze. This is an important issue as uncontrolled bleeding is leading cause of trauma-related deaths. The team has created a liquid-infused, micro-structured bio-adhesive that requires no compression to be effective, has a long shelf life and is as easy to use as conventional band-aids.

Team:ÌýJianyu Li

Stage:ÌýDevelop

Cohort:Ìý2023

The project is targeted for molecular diagnosis of respiratory infections like COVID-19 and Influenza A/B via colorimetric detection of RNA in the saliva of the patients in a multiplex and automated fashion. The team's vision is to maintain the accuracy of the gold standard (PCR), while reducing the cost (15$ customer price), time (5 min turn around) and complexity (fully automated sample collection, preparation and detection). More can be seen in this video.

Team:ÌýSara Mahshid

Stage:ÌýDevelop

Cohort:Ìý2022

Revolutionary technology for illness diagnostics.

Team:ÌýSripadh Guptha Yedire, Sara Mahshid andÌýTamer Abdelwahab

Stage:ÌýDevelop and AMR Winner

Cohort:Ìý2025

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With a focus on biocompatible materials, this team is seeking to develop surface functionalization technology to improve vascular tissue repair. Normal stents used in heart surgery procedures fail 10% of the time in the five years following implantation. Capcyte’s solution aims to recruit the patient’s own cells to regenerate damaged tissue and enable human health.

Team:ÌýHugo Level

Stage:ÌýDevelop

Cohort:Ìý2023

Creating cutting-edge characterization devices for 2D materials-based electronics. Harnessing the unique properties of graphene, Cao’s micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) has potential to revolutionize the chip industry, offering an alternative to Silicon. - the industry standard since the 1950s.

Team:ÌýChanghong Cao

Stage:ÌýDiscover and Develop

Cohort:Ìý2022, 2024

Cells are not only biochemical entities, but exert significant contractile forces. Defects in these forces are associated with a broad range of pathologies, from cancer and heart disease to asthma. PaCS offers a dramatically simpler, faster, and higher-content approach for contractility quantification. This represents the first industrial translation of cell forces methodologies to a practical and readily implementable approach.

Team:ÌýAllen Ehrlicher

Stage:ÌýDevelop

Cohort:Ìý2022

With food demand exponentially growing, vertical farming offers a sustainable substitute to conventional farming that can help solve food scarcity and hunger. Monitoring nutrient levels is crucial for hydroponics, but current methods to do so are cost and labour intensive. Ikei has developed a user-friendly nutrient ion-sensor that farmers can use on-sight and in real time, drastically improving efficiency on farms and helping to scale the industry.

Team:ÌýMinh Tran and Thomas Szkopek

Stage:ÌýDevelop

Cohort:Ìý2024

As the world moves to increased electrification of transport, demand for batteries will only increase. But the current standard battery material – lithium – poses several constraints, including long recharge times, expense and issues related to mining this element. The team is developing a nano-graphite battery that potentially offers up to 10x faster recharge times, longer life cycles and the same energy density, all without using rare materials like lithium.

Team:ÌýYee Wei Fong

Stage:ÌýDiscover

Cohort:Ìý2023

Although wind and solar are widely seen as successful renewable energy alternatives to carbon-producing fossil fuels, their intermittent nature requires some kind of storage system to offset their fluctuating power generation. At grid-scale capacity, batteries are prohibitively expensive. Altiro Energy is developing a metal-powder based energy storage system that offers high capacity and reusability, at exceptionally low cost.

Team:ÌýSamson Bowen-Bronet

Stage:ÌýDevelop

Cohort:Ìý2023