MaRS client, Kalgene, sees some cash
Kalgene Diagnostics (a division of Kalgene Pharmaceuticals – a MaRS client company and incubator tenant) has just raised $500,ooo from the PARTEQ Venture Fund to develop novel diagnostic tests for cancer. PARTEQ Venture Fund is a provincially sponsored investment fund set up by PARTEQ Innovations. See the news release, “Four Kingston startup companies receive $1.6 million vote of confidence”.
Celebrate good times, c'mon!
To shed further light on Kerri Golden’s excellent recent post, the stumbling block that has been removed in this case is the Section 116 – a series of tax requirements that imposed onerous restrictions on foreign investors in Canadian firms.
Faced with an undercapitalized Canadian VC sector and the Section 116 restrictions, our emerging companies were either forced into premature public listings (often via a CPC mechanism) or had to concede that it made no sense to develop a knowledge economy-oriented enterprise here.
Nitric oxide, neurotransmission, MaRS!
Nitric oxide (NO), known commonly as a ozone-depleting pollutant, is produced naturally in the human body and fulfills a variety of physiologic functions including acting as a neurotransmitter, vasodilator and anti-infective. NO has been implicated in a variety of diseases and conditions including pain, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury, stroke and inflammatory disease.
MaRS and NeurAxon Inc. are presenting an international symposium on this exciting field with 20 world-leading researchers, including 1998 Nobel Laureate Dr. Ferid Murad of the University of Texas, at MaRS on May 27-28, 2010. Why is the next Future of Medicine™ conference, “International Symposium on Nitric Oxide and Other Gaseous Neurotransmitters” important?
"Tennis for yes, drive down the DVP for no"
British and Belgian scientists have developed a fascinating way to communicate with patients with severe brain injury as reported in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Martin Monti and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to visualize real-time brain activity in response to questions in a group of patients in either vegetative or minimally conscious states.
The ingenious feature in this work is that the patients were asked to respond to questions by thinking about either a motor activity (playing tennis) or a spatial activity (driving around a familiar location). Since these mental activities “light up” different parts of the brain they can be used to signal a “yes” or “no” in response to questions.
Unlocking the natural history of DNA
As every biology major knows, “Phenotype = genotype plus environment.” We can’t do much about our genotype (or at least until Craig Venter has his way), but what about modification of gene expression?
The addition of a methyl group to our genes (DNA methylation) is a potent way to silence expression. Aberrations in gene expression due to methylation/demethylation have been well characterized in various cancers. Also, as the stem cell field has shown, tight control of gene expression occurs in early development and clearly governs cell fate.
Christian Popp and colleagues at the Babraham Insitute and UCLA have shown (in their recent Nature paper) that the enzyme Activation-Induced cytidine Deaminase (AID) has a profound effect on DNA methylation.
