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August 10, 2022

The Health Innovation Roundup, sponsored by Health Cities, is written and published weekly by Taproot Edmonton to bring you the latest news and events in research, technology, companies and people changing health for the better in Edmonton.

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Here are some highlights from this week’s Health Innovation Roundup:

 

Headlines

  • Future Fields, a company that pivoted from growing meat in the lab to making the necessary growth factor, is seeing additional opportunities in recombinant protein for industries other than cellular agriculture. “We truly believe that industry has so much potential in terms of sustainability,” co-founder and COO Jalene Anderson-Baron told Episode 25 of Bloom. “But we also realized that our platform has incredible potential to do a lot more things.” The company isn’t ready to jump into pharmaceutical manufacturing, she said, but there is other low-hanging fruit to capture with its biomanufacturing platform, which uses fruit flies instead of energy-intensive bioreactors.
  • The results of a collaborative project between Ceapro and University of Alberta researchers will be published in The Journal of Supercritical Fluids, the company announced. The peer-reviewed research is related to the use of an extract of brown algae as a delivery system.
  • The University of Calgary’s online wastewater data tracker now offers insights on COVID-19 variants and seasonal flu across Alberta. The wastewater monitoring partnership is led by the U of C and the University of Alberta, in partnership with several health agencies, municipalities, and EPCOR. Fourth shots of COVID-19 vaccine are now available to all adults in Alberta as long as it has been five months since their last shot.
  • A new report from the Injury Prevention Centre at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health may be the first effort to analyze data concerning unhoused people in emergency rooms in Alberta. Drawing on Alberta Health Services records of more than 11,600 cases from 2019 to 2020, the report found that the leading reason for visiting the ER was poisoning at 25%, followed by violence at 19%, and fall-related injuries at 13%. The report also found that 17% of instances (more than 2,000 cases) ended with the patient leaving the ER before their treatment was finished. Laurence Braun-Woodbury with the Bissell Centre told Postmedia the report “confirmed so much of what we see year in and year out as service providers.”
  • The Robert Tegler Trust Outreach Service at the Edmonton Public Library is helping to get resources into the hands of at-risk Edmontonians. Outside the office is a phone that connects people to one of three social workers, who offer help in accessing housing, navigating the justice system, finding mental health supports, and more. “A lot of people have in their minds that a library is just a place to read or get books or maybe go on the computer, but the library is actually at the front lines have a lot of social issues,” outreach worker Hilary Kirkpatrick told Postmedia. The service saw 1,084 interactions in 2021 and has had 1,057 so far in 2022.

Events

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Health Innovation Roundup
Health Innovation Roundup