A Medical Device Daily

Axela Biosensors (Toronto) reported that it will be a commercial partner in the University of Toronto ’s “BioOptics: Transformative Technologies for Life Sciences Project,” which was recently awarded a $7.8 million grant through the Research Excellence program of the Ontario Research Fund (ORF).

BioOptics Project researchers are developing devices that are expected to enable medical testing and treatment at a patient’s bedside.

University of Toronto Department of Physics and Chemistry professors R.J. Dwayne Miller and Cynthia Goh and their teams will base these devices on a newly developed laser technology to diagnose and treat disease.

Those instrument platforms will detect trace amounts of specific proteins and other biological molecules in cells, observe how they interact with each other, and determine what factors lead to expression of certain proteins and disease states.

“In the long term, our understanding of the detailed mechanisms underlying cellular functions is what will drive our ability to repair or prevent disease,” said Miller. “The suite of technology platforms being developed under this grant will offer unprecedented new techniques of seeing what is going on inside cells. There is knowledge that exists in advanced research labs in the university that has traditionally taken far too long to reach end users and start making an impact. By focusing on commercialization and company partnerships from the start, the goal is to get our discoveries out into the ‘real world’ on a much shorter time scale.”

“Axela has taken technology developed at the University of Toronto and incorporated it into the dotLab System which is commercially available,” said Rocky Ganske, president/CEO of Axela. “Diffractive Optics Technology (dot) is being used to accelerate biomarker assay development in clinical research. The domain expertise relative to interactions between light-based technologies and biological molecules as well as other nanotechnologies within the University is a strong asset to Axela as we move forward with our development of novel diagnostic devices.”

Axela Biosensors provides products that accelerate the validation of protein biomarkers from discovery into routine clinical use.