Dr. Lewis and Dr. Cannon presented the vision for a new Canadian Centre for Clinical Diagnostics at the Idea Exchange in San Francisco, Oct 29, 2018. Click to listen to the audio recording of the presentation.
What's in your bloodstream? Calgary researchers want to find out
You can't miss the vehicles zipping around Calgary and parts of Southern Alberta with the green Calgary Laboratory Services logo on the side. Kind of a taxi for blood samples with the passenger's trip being a time sensitive one with the possible life saving purpose of testing the blood sample for infections or pathogens.
No matter how fast the sample makes it to the lab from any of the 1 million people who end up using the service every year, testing takes time but with new research funding in hand, Ian Lewis and Deidre Church hope to change that. They received GAPP funding through Genome Alberta last year and are using it to take a prototype machine to a final version that can cut the time it takes to identify bloodstream pathogens from up to 4 days to as little as 4 hours. With new funding announced this week (January 25th) the 2 researchers are taking on the broader challenge of treating infections while not adding to the problem of antimicrobial resistance. Here's what Genome Alberta's President and CEO David Bailey had to say in his remarks at the official funding announcement at the University of Calgary.
Compelling Calgarians 2016 — 20 people to watch
Maybe Dr. Ian Lewis and his Calgary team aren’t going to save the world. But, then again, maybe they are.
The 37-year-old biochemist is the new Alberta Innovates Chair in Translational Heath — Metabolomics, and is leading a team tackling what he calls a global health crisis that sees one in every 25 hospitalized Canadians getting an infection (220,000 hospital infections per year, resulting in 8,000 deaths).
The Colorado-born scientist was recruited to Calgary from Princeton University to work in the field of metabolomics (the emerging science of measurement and analysis of metabolites) that will use radically different analytical tools to identify patients at risk of infection “to prevent them from dying.”
