Genome BC recently announced $9 million in funding for a proof of concept (POC) program to help five research projects commercialize their innovations. The project is a partnership with Western Economic Diversification Canada.
The five projects to receive POC funding have yet to be announced. All will involve research that has progressed to the stage where it can be developed for practical applications.
“Where we’re really focused on these days is applications and translations,” said Alan Winter, president and CEO of Genome BC. “A translation would be taking that application and actually trying to get it into the hands of someone who can use it.”
The province’s share in the POC project comes from a $75 million commitment it has made to Genome BC for its five-year plan.
For every dollar Genome BC gets from the B.C. government, it gets three more from other funding agencies, including the federal government, trusts and foundations and industrial partners. The $75 million Genome BC is getting from the province for its five-year plan therefore translates to $300 million.
The POC program follows on the progress made under the Technology Development Innovation Fund, an earlier pilot program. One of the projects to receive funding under that program is being led by Hongsen Ma to identify and collect live metastatic tumour cells from blood.
Ironically, Ma does not come from a medical background. He is an assistant professor in the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) department of mechanical engineering. But the microfluidics process he has been working on could help cancer scientists identify and collect cancer cells for research.
“We think that some of my technology that I’ve been working on is applicable [to cancer research],” said Ma, “so we applied for funding from Genome BC to go and explore that.”
Ma and his research team are working on a mechanical process for identifying and filtering live metastatic tumour cells from the bloodstream. He said that’s currently done with an inefficient biochemical process that kills the cells it filters out. The process Ma is developing is designed to collect live cells, which researchers can then study.
“If we could figure out how many invasive cells there are, then we can tell something about the cancer, whether a particular treatment is working or not working,” Ma said. “We made a very good cell sorter. What we’re trying to do is scale up that capability so we can sort a [large] number of cells.”
Ma added that the $50,000 in seed funding he got from Genome BC was critical because he was able to parlay it into $500,000.
“When you have a new technology that’s not proven yet, there’s a lot of resistance from traditional funding sources. When you haven’t proven that it works, it’s hard to get funding to go and try it.
Ma said the Genome BC funding allowed his program to do some preliminary experiments and provided it with the leverage needed to secure 10 times the funding from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council) and Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Genome BC was founded in 2000 with funding from the B.C. government. Its goal was to identify and fund research in genomics (the study of genomes in organisms). Some of its more important research is in the medical field.
“There are some areas of health research that are really exciting and that really apply to genomics, and cancer is one of those,” Winter said. “Another is infectious diseases.”
But life sciences isn’t the only field where molecular biology and genomics are being used to spur important innovations. B.C.’s mining sector, for example, has been investing in genomics research.
Imperial Metals is funding a Genome BC-UBC project that’s exploring the use of microbes in the passive treatment of tailings ponds at its Mount Polley mine in B.C.
The 80-plus projects Genome BC has thus far funded include using:
•the genomics of grapes and yeast to produce better wine;
•molecular fingerprints to breed disease-resistant bees: and
•genomics to create fast-growing poplar trees for biofuel. •
