Over the past five years, the MIF has supported the following teams.
Healthcare
Wise Genomics
Early detection and prevention of ovarian and endometrial cancer
Team: Lucy Gilbert, Ava Slotman, Lawrie Shahbazian, Andrew Arthur, Dzaner Dzafik, Maite Skowronski
Stage: Desjardins Deploy
Cohort: 2025
OcuVista
Replacing eye drops with contact lenses to seamlessly and efficiently deliver medicine directly to the eye.
Team: Bishakh Rout
Stage: Discover
Cohort: 2025
HisTurn
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: Sarah Kimmins and Bryan Martin
Stage: Discover, Develop and Deploy
Cohort: 2022-2024
MoSERS
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: Mahsa Jalali
Stage: Discover
Cohort: 2023
Physio Biometrics Inc.
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: Nancy Mayo
Stage: Deploy
Cohort: 2022
Tissue Tinker
3D-bioprinted tumor models - capturing the properties that truly matter to human physiology.
Team: Benjamin Ringler, Madison Santos, and Isabelle Dummer
Stage: Develop
Cohort: 2025
DendroTEK
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: Timothy Kennedy and Kean Pierre Clement
Stage: Develop and Deploy
Cohort: 2022 and 2023
Clickclot
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: Jianyu Li
Stage: Develop
Cohort: 2023
Beeta Biomed
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: Sara Mahshid
Stage: Develop
Cohort: 2022
PhenEXA
Revolutionary technology for illness diagnostics.
Team: Sripadh Guptha Yedire, Sara Mahshid and Tamer Abdelwahab
Stage: Develop and AMR Winner
Cohort: 2025
Capcyte
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: Hugo Level
Stage: Develop
Cohort: 2023
CaoTech
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: Changhong Cao
Stage: Discover and Develop
Cohort: 2022, 2024
Live Cell Technologies Canada
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: Allen Ehrlicher
Stage: Develop
Cohort: 2022
Additional Lifescience Teams
Itaconate
Molecules to re-sensitize bacteria to itaconate produced in macrophages as a new treatment for infections.
Team: Karine Auclair and Andéanne Lupien
Stage: Discover, Develop and AMR Winner
Cohort: 2024 and 2025
Bruxism
Oscillating device for non-invasive correction of Bruxism
Team: Natalie Reznikov and Vinay Ashok Kumar
Stage: Discover
Cohort: 2025
BubbleSense
Advancing bubble continuous positive airway pressure (bCPAP), a non-invasive respiratory support therapy for preterm infant lung development.
Team: Amanda Gross, Emily Campbell and Wissam Shalish
Stage: Discover
Cohort: 2025
Bit Healix
The traditional medical approach is "one size fits all", leading to resource inefficiency, extended delays, and prolonged treatment for patients. Bit Healix tackles this problem by leveraging genetic information and the power of AI to personalize diagnostic treatment, so patients can receive the right care the first time.
Team: Yannis Trakadis, Bill Qi, Sameer Sardaar
Stage: Discover
Cohort: 2024
Patholyzer
A first of its kind device for real-time detection of viruses and bacteria, offering on-site diagnostics in milliseconds. Patholyzer is a smaller, portable Nano-digital inline holographic microscope used to identify and measure airborne pathogens. This project has enormous potential to fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which poses one of the largest threats to human health in the coming century.
Team: Devendra Pal, Parisa Ariya, and Robert Panetta
Stage: Develop and AMR Winner
Cohort: 2024
BioOptic
BioOptic™ seeks to offer a quick and easy way to measure one’s intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) which is shown to influence spinal stability and hence linked to back pain. Specifically, the device design and methods employed will be refined towards improving the accuracy, reliability, and usability of the device to get fully ready for market.
Team: Mark Driscoll
Stage: Develop
Cohort: 2022
Ion Channel Target
Activation of peripheral pain sensing neurons (nociceptors) is central to the experience of pain, and several chronic pain conditions are caused by the sensitization of nociceptors to mechanical stimuli, including osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis pain. We have identified an ion channel expressed in nociceptors and involved in sensing mechanical pain which represents a potential therapeutic target in chronic inflammatory pain. Determining a small molecule inhibitor to specifically target this ion channel would prevent the pain signal and may have valuable therapeutic potential in OA and RA patients, as well as other inflammatory pain conditions. Watch this video to learn more.
Team: Reza Sharif
Stage: Discover
Cohort: 2022
Invicare
INVICARE develops an innovative biomedical technology to address infections around implants, with a two-fold approach to include prevention and more effective treatment. The company's core technology is a proprietary two-dimensional nanocrystalline hydrogel; the outcome of seven years of collaborative research between McGill scientists and researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Montreal.
Team: McGill Researchers
Stage: Deploy
Cohort: 2022
CleanTech and Engineering
Ikei
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: Minh Tran and Thomas Szkopek
Stage: Develop
Cohort: 2024
Voltleaf
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: Yee Wei Fong
Stage: Discover
Cohort: 2023
Altiro Energy
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: Samson Bowen-Bronet
Stage: Develop
Cohort: 2023
Low Cost Water Treatment
Conventional water filtration techniques rely on high amounts of chemicals used in large volume tanks that leaves behind a toxic sludge that can later pose serious environmental problems related to its disposal. The project proposes a low-cost, easy-to-manufacture solution that utilizes fibrous materials to act as a filtration mechanism. The solution would greatly simplify treating water, and would be more adaptable to both large and small-scale filtration systems.
Team: Nathalie Tufenkji
Stage: Develop
Cohort: 2023
Programmable Shellular Metamaterials
Few would doubt the value of shock-absorbing materials such as those found in safety helmets or automobile bumpers. However, in practice they are disposable items that are thrown away after each major collision, thus creating significant environmental impact. The team is developing a bio-mimetic material that can reform after impact, enabling objects to withstand repeated impacts, which can lengthen the service life of the item, and reduce the volume of material that ends up in landfills.
Team: Hamid Akbarzadeh
Stage: Discover
Cohort: 2023
