SPECIAL GUEST EDITORIAL

BY EMMANUELLE TOUSSAINT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BIOQUÉBEC

INNOVATION IS THE FOUNDATION FOR IMPROVING HEALTHCARE

In life sciences, one word is on everyone’s mind: innovation. But how it so important in the development of new therapies?

Innovation is crucial for implementing ideas that lead to valuable discoveries, developing new ways of doing things, and introducing more effective techniques. By being creative and doing things differently, we can achieve more and improve existing medical treatments while enhancing the care given to patients and their quality of life.

FOSTERING INNOVATION

Scientists are building on the knowledge gained in the past to further develop our expertise, push boundaries, and find novel solutions. A terrific way to foster innovation is through collaboration. When companies with innovative ideas work together, innovation flourishes and discovery accelerates. An idea produced by one is often the impetus for another’s.

Quebec is replete with innovative companies that are intent on doing things differently to bring our knowledge and skills to another level.

Consider the CRISPR technology that is revolutionizing genomics and the multitude of potential applications that are currently being developed for these molecular scissors. Despite its potential, one of CRISPR’s limitations is having the agent properly delivered to the right organ. Jenthera (according to their website) Therapeutics is investigating innovative nonviral methods for efficient and safe delivery. Another company working on CRISPRs is Repare Therapeutics, which is using this innovation to replicate DNA mutations found in patients’ cancers to quickly test the efficacy of chemotherapeutic components and offer personalized treatments. a way to increase discoveries tenfold. Once an innovative technology has been implemented and mastered, it can quickly and easily be used for several other applications. Ventus Therapeutics combines its knowledge of the structural biology of proteins with computer science to develop molecules adapted to configuring restricted targets, while KisoJi Biotechnology has designed a platform that produces highly differentiated next-generation antibodies with specific or multi-species features aimed at hard-to-reach targets in oncology and other fields.

DEEPENING UNDERSTANDING

Many companies represented by BIOQuébec are experts in artificial intelligence, a sector that is experiencing exponential growth and which is crucial for us to be able to improve our knowledge and accelerate the discovery of new therapeutic targets. Valence Discovery is a start-up that uses deep learning to develop better therapeutic candidates faster. It collaborates with several prominent companies such as Repare Therapeutics, Charles River Laboratories, and Servier. In addition, Modelis focuses on rare diseases to deepen our understanding of them and find new treatments for these orphan conditions. Using its discovery platform, the team hopes to “decomplexify” the biology of orphan diseases to facilitate the identification and validation of new therapeutic targets which underlie their pathologies by analyzing biological data.

Fostering innovation is key to finding new treatments and improving care for the general public. BIOQuébec works to support the growth of its members by facilitating collaborations and business development.

BY DAVID SUZUKI WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM IAN HANINGTON

CANADA’S PLASTICS BAN

IS A NECESSARY FIRST STEP

Our excessive use of disposable plastics is disastrous, not just for wildlife, but for us as well. Canada is starting to take it seriously, with a ban on several singleuse plastic items, starting in December.

Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Learn more at davidsuzuki.org. Most of us have seen images of sea turtles malformed by plastic six-pack rings, dead birds with stomachs full of debris, animals smothered by plastic bags…

Manufacturing and importing plastic bags, takeout containers, single-use plastic straws, stir sticks, cutlery, and six-pack rings will be banned in Canada by December, followed by a banning of sales by the end of next year and a ban on exports by the end of 2025. The goal is to keep 15.5 billion plastic grocery bags, 4.5 billion pieces of plastic cutlery, 3 billion stir sticks, 5.8 billion straws, 183 million six-pack rings and 805 million takeout containers from littering lands and waters and ending up in landfills every year. (There’s an exception to the straw ban for people who require them for medical or accessibility reasons.)

Although the timeline seems long and the list of items short, government faced enormous pressure from industry, including legal battles. Plastics companies and organizations have challenged the government over jurisdiction, arguing that regulation should be left to provinces, and challenging scientific assessments and classification of plastic manufactured items as “toxic.”

Almost all plastic is a by-product of the oil industry, which has also pushed back. For example, Imperial Oil filed a notice of objection to the government’s classification of plastics as “toxic substances” under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

The restaurant industry and the provinces of Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec have also pushed back against regulations.

But given the excessive amounts of plastic choking lands, rivers, wetlands, lakes, oceans, and even air, industry should work to get ahead of the ban by phasing out the six targeted items and other non-essential plastics sooner rather than later. And the public and governments must get behind the call to expand the ban to more items. Public pressure has already helped, with the ban on exports, which was originally exempted, added last December.

The government is starting with the most common and harmful items but isn’t ruling out the banning of other single-use plastic products. That’s important because banned items make up only 5%(based on usage elsewhere in mag) of Canada’s plastic waste.

Recycling is only a partial solution as less than 10% of plastic waste in Canada is recycled, with 3.3 million tonnes, much of it packaging, thrown out annually, according to the CBC.

With the ban, Canada is catching up to other countries. France banned most of the items last year, and is now phasing in further bans on items such as packaging on fruits, vegetables, and newspapers, as well as plastic in teabags and toys handed out with fast food meals.

Ensuring that bans are effective requires education and making sustainable options available when needed. Because the ban is limited, sustainable options may prevent companies from switching to alternatives that are no better, such as shrink wrap instead of drink container rings.

The greatest challenge is from industry. As the oil industry faces rising concerns about pollution, climate disruption, and global instability, it’s been looking to plastics to increase demand. Oil giant BP has predicted plastics will represent 95% of the net growth in oil demand between 2020 and 2040. Because of increasing restrictions and public pressure in the industrialized world, the plans hinge on pushing plastics in places like Africa.

As well as being a major pollution source, plastic is fuelling the climate crisis. Carbon dioxide emissions are produced at every stage of its life cycle, averaging about five tonnes of CO2 per tonne of plastic, and even more if it’s burned. According to a Vox article, “That’s roughly twice the CO2 produced by a tonne of oil.”

Plastics can be useful, especially in medical and public health settings, although alternatives are increasing. But most of the plastic we use and throw away is unnecessary. Just as we must stop using fossil fuels, we must also move away from their plastic by-products. Canada’s ban is a good start, but we need to go further, and faster. It’s one area where our personal choices can make a big difference. New government standards make that easier. There’s no future in plastics.

Crystal structure of the NRPS complex. Image: Courtesy of Canadian Light Source

Miniscule bio machines in bacteria open door to new medicines

With the help of the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan, researchers from McGill University are trying to unlock the full potential of tiny biological machines that can have a huge impact on human health.

Applying powerful beams of light available at the CLS, a national research facility with a powerful synchrotron and linear accelerator, the researchers were able to explore molecular structures in bacteria in great detail.

According to the CLS, these structures or “machines” known as nonri-bosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) are key to creating therapeutic molecules found in a range of medicines, from antibiotics to immunosuppressants.

“Microbes like bacteria and fungi have these NRPS machines that are responsible for making molecules that act as important drugs and therapeutics,” said Camille Fortinez, a recent PhD graduate of McGill’s Department of Biochemistry.

Understanding how NRPSs create therapeutics will help researchers design new drugs and combat health issues like antibiotic resistance.

With the help of the CMCF beamline at the CLS, Martin Schmeing, Professor of Biochemistry at McGill, and Fortinez were able to explore a common NRPS in great detail.

“CLS has allowed us to get a really high-resolution diffraction of our NRPS crystals,” Fortinez said. “This high resolution is really integral for allowing us to answer questions and better understand the NRPS.”

The team analyzed an NRPS, found in many bacteria, that helps generate a chemical that kills algae. In the process, Fortinez and Schmeing discovered that a separate enzyme is responsible for enabling the production of this chemical.

The researchers are hopeful that their discovery and the detailed data they’ve collected, will lead to new therapeutics and that the algae-killing compound might be modified to kill bacteria that threaten human health.

A common ingredient in household products may trigger superbugs

University of Toronto researchers found that a chemical in consumer products could be leading to a rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They showed that triclosan, often included in hand soaps, toothpastes, and cleaning products to fight off bacteria, was the dominant antibiotic rinsed down drains into Ontario’s sewage systems. The researchers believe that bacteria exposed to triclosan in this way may evolve into antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

$628 MILLION IN FEDERAL FUNDING FOR 19 CANADIAN RESEARCH FACILITIES

More than $628 million in federal funding will be going to 19 research infrastructure projects at leading Canadian institutions for ongoing operations and maintenance. Channeled through the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s Major Science Initiatives Fund, some of the receiving organizations include SNOLAB, an ultra-clean facility located two kilometres underground in Sudbury, ON, that studies neutrinos and dark matter; the Advanced Laser Light Source at the Université du Québec's Institut national de la recherche scientifique, which has Canada’s most powerful laser used in the investigation of matter; the Canadian Cancer Trials Group Operations and Statistics Centre at Queen’s University; and the Global Water Futures Observatories, a network of 76 water monitoring sites across the country.

UBC RESEARCHERS DISCOVER ‘WEAK SPOT’ ACROSS MAJOR COVID-19 VARIANTS

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have discovered a weakness in major variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including the BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron subvariants. Using cryo-electron microscopy, they found vulnerable spots on the virus’ spike proteins, known as epitopes. An antibody fragment called VH Ab6 was able to attach to these spots and neutralize each major variant.

Natural and synthetic embryos. Credit: Amadei and Handford/University of Cambridge

STEM CELL-DERIVED EMBRYOS WITH BRAINS AND HEARTBEATS

Researchers at the University of Cambridge, and the California Institute of Technology have developed a stem cell-derived mouse embryo with a beating heart and brain.

While creating mouse embryos from stem cells is not new, arriving at the point where the entire brain, including the anterior portion at the front, begins to develop has never been accomplished.

Lead researcher and study co-author, Magdalena ZernickaGoetz explained, “This opens new possibilities to study the mechanisms of neurodevelopment in an experimental model.”

The synthetic embryos were made of three types of mouse cells: embryonic stem cells (which form the body); trophoblast stem cells (which develop into the placenta); and extraembryonic endoderm stem cells (which help to form the egg sac). The researchers were able to guide the cells to interact with each other, causing them to self-organize into structures that progressed through developmental stages to the point where they had beating hearts and foundations for the entire brain. Like naturally conceived embryos, the synthetic variation developed beating hearts, an egg sac for nutrients, and nascent organs including neural tubes that form the brain and spinal cord.

The embryos were developed in an artificial incubator created by the study’s co-author, Jacob Hanna of the Weizmann Institute in Israel, who recently kept realistic-looking mouse embryos growing in a mechanical womb for several days until they developed beating hearts, flowing blood, and cranial folds.

The team also removed a gene called Pax6, which is essential for the formation of the central nervous system, as well as brain and eye development, to test how the model embryos would react. The synthetic models went on to exhibit the same known defects in brain development as a natural animal carrying the mutation.

These findings could help scientists learn more about how human embryos develop and provide insights into diseases, in addition to providing an alternative to animals for testing.

Thinning out crowded molecules makes the invisible visible

MIT researchers have now developed a novel way to make “invisible” molecules visible. Their technique allows them to “de-crowd” or spread out the molecules by expanding a cell or tissue sample before labeling them, making them more accessible to fluorescent tags. This method, which builds on a widely-used technique known as expansion microscopy, which was previously developed at MIT, enables scientists to visualize molecules and cellular structures that have never been seen before.

MATERIAL THAT CAN THINK

Researchers at Penn State and the U.S. Air Force have engineered a new material that can think. They have developed an alternative to integrated circuits typically found in household electronics where information is processed on semiconductors made from silicon. Instead of silicon, the scientists used a soft polymer material that can sense, think, and act. The material functions as a brain that can receive digital strings of information that are then processed, resulting in new sequences of digital information that can control reactions.

TINY SENSOR DETECTS DRUGS IN SWEAT

Patients who use potentially dangerous lithium to manage their bipolar disorder have to be monitored using a cumbersome process. However, just recently, UCLA scientists designed a tiny, touch-based sensor, smaller than the head of a thumbtack, that uses sweat to detect the level of lithium in the body in 30 seconds. The team engineered a water-based gel containing glycerol and an ion-selective electrode that trapped the lithium ions. The accumulating ions generate a difference in electrical potential as compared to a reference electrode. The researchers used this difference to infer the concentration of lithium present in sweat.

PAPER

DREAMS

Research into thinner-than-paper carbon-based electronics opens new ways of living in the world— and it isn’t science fiction anymore

BY ROBERT PRICE

Imagine sensors that attach to the body like a second skin and detect biomarkers that come out of sweat. Paper-thin television screens that roll up like blinds. Comic books with animated pages. Heart monitors that attach directly to the heart. Medical sensors that dissolve inside the body. Some of these applications of carbon-based electronics are still a dream away. Others are already happening in a laboratory run by Benoit Lessard, where the paper-thin circuitry rolling off printers has the potential to change the daily lives of Canadians in countless ways.

SUPER THIN, SUPER TEAM

Organic electronics, also known as carbon-based electronics or printed electronics, differ in important ways from their silicon sisters. Unlike traditional silicon chips that need temperatures of thousands of degrees and high purity, carbon-based electronics can be manufactured faster and at a much lower cost. Functional conductive inks can be produced with inkjet printers on paper or specialty plastics that bend and stretch.

If it sounds like science fiction, it’s because it is—or has been. Ultra-thin, bendable, wearable, ubiquitous tech has been a staple of science fiction for about as long as the genre has existed. The tech is finally reaching maturity for mass market deployment. But researchers still have a lot of work to do before anybody’s using a newspaper with moving images to swat flies.

“One of the challenges is that [printed electronics] are less efficient and so therefore a lot of the research is on trying to increase its efficiency or to tune it for a certain application,” says Lessard, who is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Ottawa.

For Lessard, who is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Advanced Polymer Materials and Organic Electronics and a world expert on the technology, the unresolved problems of this computer circuitry fascinate and challenge his research team. The team includes chemists and engineers who work together to test new materials and creative applications. They constantly experiment. A chemist will make five different molecules—all slightly different—and hand those molecules to the engineers who process them into film and use the films in an application.

“And then we optimize in that way and go through, you know, hundreds of molecules and figure out which one is the one that’s great,” says Lessard.

What the team produces is baffling. Some of the electronics are so super-thin–one tenth the thickness of a single hair and transparent to boot—the group needs highpower imaging technology, like the synchrotron at Canadian Light Source, to make sense of what’s happening inside the materials.

When the group discovers cracks—literal cracks in the ink that carries currents—they work to solve the problem. That might mean going back to the chemistry to align molecules

better or change the process so that the inks dry in a way that leads to better performing applications.

A daily question for the lab, Lessard says, is “How do we mitigate those cracks and how do we make betterperforming materials?” The joy comes through trying to get the molecules exactly right.

TESTING FOOD, TESTING POT

Carbon-based electronics sound sci-fi, but they’re already on the market.

One recent example uses organic electronics as sensors for cannabinoids, like THC and CBD. Sensors on the market are expensive and require a lab run by a PhD, since the THC and CBD molecules are structurally similar. It’s a costly affair that can’t be avoided, either. Growers growing for medicinal cannabis want a high CBD ratio and low THC content, and those growing for recreational uses want high THC and low CBD. And the hemp industry doesn’t want any THC in their plants because otherwise they’re no longer categorized as hemp.

Smart packaging has enormous

potential to reduce food waste, save billions of dollars in food production, and help consumers across the globe save at the checkout lane . . .

To lower the cost of testing, Lessard’s group spun out a start-up company called Ekidna Sensing. Launched in 2022, the company sells a test kit that uses printed electronics to test samples for cannabinoids. The precision in the printed sensors is impressive. Ekidna Sensing’s kits can differentiate the molecules and determine the quantity of each present.

It’s a small example, but it demonstrates the revolutionary potential that inexpensive, highly calibrated organic electronics can have on an industry.

Another example—one closer to home for most people—is smart packaging. Smart packaging is the kind of application that might, in a few years, be so commonplace that it becomes invisible, the sort of tech that children will assume has been around forever. It’s also one Lessard’s group is championing through its research.

Smart packaging has enormous potential to reduce food waste, save billions of dollars in food production, and help consumers across the globe save at the checkout lane by fine-tuning best before dates. As it happens right now, the best before date on a loaf of bread, a carton of milk, or a block of cheese is a statistical average. “And actually, it’s quite inaccurate,” Lessard says. Milk that goes directly from the grocery store, into a cooler, and then into the fridge, has a best before date that is far more accurate than milk that rides the bus in a plastic bag in 35C weather—which is how many Canadians get to and from the grocery store.

Lessard says he’s spoken to bread companies who say that if they can extend the best before date by one day, they’d save billions of dollars.

“It’s huge because 50 percent of food is thrown out,” says Lessard.

Smart packages with smart sensors can show the best before date in real time. One day, Lessard says, a person will be able to run a phone over the pack of ground beef they found in the back of their fridge. The app will activate a printed sensor that detects amines that come off decaying meat. If the sensors detect any amines, the app will alert the consumer that the meat is close to spoiling or spoiled. With a series of sensors available across the food supply chain, retailers and suppliers will be able to determine exactly where along the chain food spoils, allowing them to burn only what needs to be burned, rather than burning everything.

Applications like sensors for amine, E. coli, salmonella, and other bugs aren’t available yet, but other applications, like temperature sensors for pharmaceuticals, are nearly there, and smart wine labels have already arrived.

Wine collectors spend a lot of money on their collections. The average $5,000 bottle of wine will travel some 5,000 kilometres before it's consumed.

“But if you’re actually the person who wants to drink the $5,000 bottle of wine, you want to make sure that it isn’t spoiled, and you want to make sure that that bottle in all that flying and travelling never went above 35 degrees or below zero. You want to make sure,” says Lessard.

Enter smart labels that change colour if the bottle ever goes above a set temperature, giving wine collectors accurate information about whether that $5,000 bottle of wine is a $5,000 bottle of vinegar.

MERCENARY

Lessard says that working with such a malleable technology delivers the versatility he craves.

“I don’t know if it was an insult, but someone called me a scientific mercenary once, and I think that’s what’s sort of beautiful about this,” he says. “I love that one day I can talk to a biochemist who wants to research concussions and we can make a concussion sensor that can do the scans he needs. And then the next day I’m making better batteries, and then the next day it’s making flexible displays.”

Like a mercenary, Lessard dives into any challenge and fights all battles.

“The fact that I get to touch so many different things, and I can tell so many different stories, is quite appealing to me. I never get bored.”