By Anna Sinova, CBR Program Manager
A CBR Team from the McNagny and Rossi labs received 2nd place at the LSI Start-Up Competition 2017.
Diana Canals, Elena Groppa and Regan Zhang presented their company, TheraTrix. The company develops innovative technologies to control pathological tissue repair. Their main product is a disease modifying drug for heart failure, a major chronic disease that lacks treatment.
The competition was announced in September 2016, and was open to teams of UBC students, post docs and research associates interested in exploring commercialization of ideas in life sciences, biotech and other areas of human health.
Dr. Natalie Strynadka received a prestigious Jacob Biely Research Prize from UBC.
Winners of these awards were selected by UBC’s Faculty Research Award Committee, which spans arts and humanities, business, education, applied science, science and medicine.
Dr. Strynadka is a pioneer in the study of proteins and protein assemblies essential to bacterial pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance. Her agenda-setting dissection of the membrane assemblies involved in infection, virulence and bacterial cell wall synthesis is having a major impact on the development of therapeutic agents; both antibiotics and vaccines.
Dr. Ed Conway was renewed as the Canada Research Chair in Endothelial Cell Biology.
Dr. Conway was the first to discover the importance of thrombomodulin for our immune response to infections and for inflammation. He is currently working to further understand the exact role that it and others play.
His work now aims to investigate how thrombomodulin and its protein partners work; to determine how mutations in thrombomodulin may contribute to vascular, immune, inflammatory, infectious and malignant diseases in humans; and to develop new treatment strategies based on this new-found knowledge.
Dr. Conway’s research could have a wide impact, leading to new genetic insights to explain both common and rare diseases, and to develop innovative treatment approaches.