Biomedical engineering innovations drive discovery and commerce

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Calgary is fast becoming a hotspot for medical technology innovation, thanks in no small part to the University of Calgary (UCalgary) and its biomedical engineering program.

“Scientists work at discovering molecules involved with certain diseases,” says Dr. Michael Kallos, PhD, the head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary. “But it’s really biomedical engineering that turns important discoveries like these into products, like point-of-care diagnostic tests that, for example, allow a doctor to monitor stress levels in their concussion patients.”

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The innovations taking place in medical and health-care technology — known as ‘med-tech’ and ‘health-tech’ — involve groundbreaking research in diagnostics, medical imaging, biomechanics, regenerative medicine, wearables, health data and novel medical technologies.

Notable among them is a blood test for breast cancer.

Dr. Kristina Rinker, PhD, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, developed the test following lab research that found a biomarker highly correlated with breast cancer. The diagnostic innovation has proven so successful it has attracted investors from around the world, including the United States Department of Defence. It envisions using the test for members stationed far away from hospitals and traditional diagnostic tools.

In order to commercialize the technology after its initial development, Rinker co-founded Syantra Inc., adding to the city’s growing life sciences and technology sector.

Her story is just one of many emerging from UCalgary’s entrepreneurial, multi-disciplinary biomedical engineering program that has been 25 years in the making.

From the start, as a graduate program in the late 1990s, biomedical engineering at UCalgary has been a multi-disciplinary program, at first involving engineering across its many disciplines plus the faculties of medicine and kinesiology. The program now involves six faculties and counting, including researchers and students from science, nursing and veterinary medicine.

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“Biomedical engineering combines different engineering disciplines and other faculty researchers to solve problems for good reason: it’s incredibly complex,” Kallos says. “You’re applying engineering problem-solving, tools, equations and methods to solve health and medical problems.”

Adding further complexity is the fact that the solutions are being applied to living organisms — people.

“That’s why we partner with researchers in science, medicine and other faculties to the point where we refer to biomedical engineering as being more than interdisciplinary; it’s truly transdisciplinary because it encompasses so many areas of expertise,” he says. This extends to training initiatives in biomedical engineering at the undergraduate and graduate level, with key components from multiple disciplines.

That expansive scope is not just limited to the university. It involves many partners in the public sector and business community, which often provides much-needed financial support and advice.

An illustration of this collaborative approach is A-MEDICO — short for the Alberta Medical Device Innovation Consortium. It was created with funding from the provincial government and brought UCalgary together with research teams at four other post-secondary institutions, as well as local industry.

The overarching goal of A-MEDICO, and UCalgary’s biomedical engineering program itself, is accelerating meaningful discoveries that can be turned into real-world technological applications that not only improve lives, but often save them.

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“A big piece of this, too, is economic development, which benefits, for example, our first crop of undergraduate biomedical engineering graduates from Schulich this year,” Kallos says. “We would like them to be able to stay in the city, finding employment with successful, growing Calgary companies, spun out of discoveries made at the university.”

He further notes that among the key goals of initiatives such as A-MEDICO is fostering accelerated med-tech commercialization and economic development, with programs such as UCalgary’s biomedical engineering providing research and expertise to spur more innovation and growth in the sector. These efforts are already making a substantial impact in health care and on the Alberta economy.

Illustrating this is the work of two graduates of Schulich engineering programs, Julian Mulia and Megan Leslie, who co-founded a local company called NanoTess. The company is commercializing NanoSALV, a treatment that dramatically reduces recovery time from pressure wounds while decreasing incidence of amputation from chronic wounds.

These researchers-turned-entrepreneurs have attracted millions of dollars of investment to the city, Kallos says. “All of this is to say that one of the reasons Calgary is now on investors’ radar is because of the med-tech development coming from our biomedical engineering program.”

Kallos adds that being in “one of the most liveable cities in the world” with Alberta’s “can-do, entrepreneurial spirit” further boosts the program.

“There is really a confluence of all the right ingredients at the right time to the point where we’re at an inflection point for rapid growth, and we are excited to help lead and see where we go from here.”

To learn more, visit https://schulich.ucalgary.ca/biomedical.

This story was created by Content Works, Postmedia’s commercial content division, on behalf of the University of Calgary.

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