Health

Organ transplantation requires powerful drugs to prevent rejection. To address this the team aims to develop accurate tests that can determine when rejection is present and when it is not, so that patients can be managed more effectively with fewer side effects.  The new technology of microarrays – gene chips – may be the solution. […]

Pandemic viral threats recur periodically as infectious agents recombine and disseminate in populations. In these instances, rapid identification of viral genome sequences is required in order to develop a targeted diagnostic test. This group has developed an approach called Metagenomic sequencing with spiked primer enrichment (MSSPE) which allows for highly sensitive detection of viral genomes

The goal of this project is to generate a portable and flexible platform that generates results from routine bioinformatics workflows, and adds the output to an accessible, database which can be integrated with additional data as needed. This goal will be achieved by the following three objectives: (1) develop a flexible database architecture to manage

Third-Generation Sequencing (TGS) technology offers an exciting breakthrough opportunity for virology researchers. However, TGS faces technical challenges including a relatively high base calling error rate that is hard to distinguish from the high mutation rate of viruses. This project will develop novel tools for TGS by taking advantages of existing development focusing on base calling

Rare genetic diseases are individually rare but collectively quite common, affecting approximately 3 million Canadians. Unlike common diseases, genetic causes for rare diseases must often be hypothesized from plausibility criteria and identified through progressive exclusion of candidate variants in a single case or a small number of heterogeneous cases. Few integrated software systems exist to

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global medical and economic crisis. Laboratory testing capacity has played pivotal role in our national response to this emergency. The shift from targeted, clinically oriented testing to widespread high-throughput community testing may dramatically increase the need for affordable COVID19 tests. Although many new assays are coming online, most of

Working in concert with Alberta Health Services Public Health Officers, leading clinicians and Alberta Public Laboratories, the team will recruit the Alberta Childhood COVID-19 Cohort (ABCCC), consisting of all children under the age of 18 who undergo testing for the SARS-COV2 virus. Specifically, the project will: 1) assess the role of children’s immune response as

Mutations are common and expected in coronaviruses genomes. Scientists can take advantage of these mutations to track the spread of the viruses in the community, providing vital public health information on the movement and potential sources of disease. To improve on the speed in generating this genetic information, this team will rapidly generate genetic sequences

Since 2007, over 1200 residents of Indigenous communities in the Northwest Territories (NWT) and Yukon (YT) have participated in research to learn more about Helicobacter pylori infection. A working group formed that included Indigenous community members, their healthcare providers, territorial health authorities, and academic researchers demonstrated that the community concerns were well founded. They estimated

Currently, it takes 2-5 days to identify bloodstream infection (BSI) pathogens and perform antibiotic susceptibility testing. Patients who receive the wrong antibiotic over this time are ten times more likely to die. To address this, the project has manufactured a new microscale metabolomics device that integrates all the steps of the microbiology testing pipeline into