BioLab Business Magazine Together, we reach farther into the Canadian Science community

By Heidi Loney Established in June 1951, the Canadian Institute of Food Science & Technology (CIFST) arose from the recommendations of the National Research Council Committee on Food Preservation, which was formed during the Second World War. The committee recognized food technology as an identifiable science and saw a need for trained people in the secondary handling and processing of …

Photos courtesy of the University of Guelph Can we establish a global bio-surveillance system? Can we avert a planetary mass extinction? Helping to answer these and other large-scale questions about life on Earth is the goal of Bioscan, a project awarded $24 million in federal funding this past January according to a University of Guelph news article.Led by Paul Hebert, …

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By Sean Tarry The past couple of years have been disruptive and chaotic, to say the least. Communities all over the world have been impacted by the COVID-19 global pandemic, changing the way we do things, share information, and communicate with one another.For scientists working in laboratories that specialize in researching and tracking infectious diseases, it’s been a time that …

Last fall, the sun spewed a violent mass of fast-moving plasma into space that came crashing into the planet’s magnetosphere, igniting the sky with shimmering coils of dramatic colour – a light show we know as the Aurora Borealis. And as lovely as the sight was, the event could have been far worse. In 1989, a similar geomagnetic storm caused …

At the University of British Columbia, there’s a study that offers new evidence that protected natural areas promote mammal diversity. Researchers at UBC’s Faculty of Forestry analyzed data from a global data set drawing from 8,671 camera trap stations spanning four continents, the largest number of wildlife cameras ever analyzed in a single study.They found more mammal diversity in survey …

It goes as far back as the Assyrians who documented the use of willow leaves for rheumatic inflammation on stone tablets during the Sumerian period, around 2000 BCE. They found that willow leaves and bark reduced fevers and inflammation. Willows naturally produce salicylic acid in response to stress and to help fight against bacterial infection. It’s an anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial …

By Jana Manolakos Joy Cummings Photo UNB Resolute is one way to describe Christopher Gray. A member of the Natural Products Research Group and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of New Brunswick (UNB), Gray is on a relentless, lifelong search for new molecules, that in the distant future, might hold the key to new therapeutic drugs. He’s searching …

By TREVOR KENNEY Southern Alberta’s vast prairies can often harsh be and unforgiving. Windswept and prone to temperature extremes of 35 C during baked dry summer months and -35 C in the bone-chilling winter, its landscape is still surprisingly rich in flora, producing an array of hearty plants that are just now being recognized for their unique properties of medical …

By JANA MANOLAKOS In the face of a critical shortage of ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of physicians and engineers from the University of Calgary have developed an award-winning device that safely increases available machines at a low cost.The Valence InVent Xtend allows a single ventilator to provide air for up to four patients, with the capability of …

By Jana Manolakos There’s no sugarcoating it. Diabetes is growing at an alarming rate in Canada, afflicting one in three Canadians. It’s particularly worrisome for Canada’s First Nations and Inuit populations, where rates of diabetes on some reserves are three to five times higher than the general population.In the face of this threat, two leading Canadian scientists and their teams …

By Jana Manolakos While medicines have been extracted from plants for centuries, plants and plant cell systems today can be genetically engineered to serve as drug-producing factories for a range of antibodies and other protein-based therapeutics and vaccines.At the forefront stands Canadian biopharmaceutical company PlantForm, which is harnessing plants for cost-effective therapeutic drugs for cancer and other life-threatening conditions — …

Ongoing research into cannabis in the public sector, coupled with both the emergence of large cannabis corporations and a newfound interest in the power of cannabinoids within the pharmaceuticals sector, is increasingly translating into exciting research that aims to close the gap between the many anecdotal uses for medical cannabis and what the science shows. And plenty are interested in …

By Kieran Delamont The cannabis plant, even today, offers us a pathway into a world of mysteries and questions. Thousands of years of both formal and informal human use, much of it set against a backdrop of prohibition, has caused the plant to evolve from a naturally occurring landrace shrub in central Asia to what it has become today: an …