By TREVOR KENNEY Southern Alberta’s vast prairies can often be harsh 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 …