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BY CHRISTINA FRANGOU
il and gas tends to get all the buzz, but Calgary also has resources aplenty in the health-care sector that are changing the way illnesses are diagnosed, treated and prevented. The city is home to two universities with a life sciences presence, and their researchers have access to a centralized health database for the entire province — a rarity even by Canadian standards. The local health field gets an additional boost from Calgary’s burgeoning tech industry and incubators like Alberta Innovates that bridge gaps between industry and academia. Currently, the city is home to more than 120 life sciences companies that are saving lives and improving the quality of lives, be it as one-person startups or multi-million-dollar companies. Here are seven innovations that are changing the health field.
KINETYX BY ORPYX MEDICAL TECHNOLOGIES Since its founding in 2010, Orpyx has been a perennial star on Canada’s health innovation scene. The startup made its name with a remotemonitoring technology, designed for shoes, that can help prevent diabetic foot ulcers. Now, Orpyx is moving into an expanded market with its new product line, Kinetyx. This product, also a shoe-based technology, measures how a body moves in the real world, similar to the way that a wrist watch can measure movement, but Kinetyx provides details on what’s happening in the space between the bottom of a foot and the ground. “There are more than 24 billion pairs of shoes produced annually,” says Breanne Everett, Orpyx’s CEO and co-inventor (and a member of Avenue’s Top 40 under 40 Class of 2012). “If you can drive the innovation behind footwear, you can have massive impacts on the way that people move.”
PURPOSEMED Virtual care is a booming industry world-wide, but PurposeMed taps into underserved areas — HIV prevention, and ADHD diagnosis and treatment. People across Canada face long waits for ADHD care and barriers to HIV prevention services. In Alberta, only two per cent of prescribers are licensed to prescribe pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), the medication that’s 99 per cent effective in preventing HIV transmission. With PurposeMed’s Freddie service, patients can have a virtual assessment with a clinician who can 34
ADVANCINGOUR
HEALTHCARE These seven local innovations are
saving and improving lives for people in Calgary and beyond. may/june 2023
