Ebola is one of the most virulent diseases on the planet. Spread through contact with the bodily fluids of somebody who is infected, its symptoms can include fever, muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhea and internal and external bleeding. The average fatality rate is an astonishing 50 per cent.

When an outbreak begins, health organizations rush to contain the disease while treating patients. Quick intervention can save lives and reduce transmission. But in remote areas, including rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease is most common, it can take two to six weeks to set up a mobile clinic.

This was the motivation for the launch of INITIATE², a five-year initiative bringing together emergency response actors and research and academic institutions to create innovative and standardized solutions to health emergencies. The first project developed under this program is an Infectious Disease Treatment Module (IDTM), with researchers from Carleton University, a member of the World Health Organization’s Téchne network, contributing to its design.

The IDTM is a rapidly deployable patient-focused treatment centre designed to enhance the quality of medical care, infection prevention and control, patient comfort and community acceptance.

Supported by Grand Challenges Canada, Carleton industrial design program director Chantal Trudel and her team are focusing on one of its key elements: a transparent plastic screen separating health-care workers in “a low-risk zone” from patients in a contaminated “high-risk zone.” A glove box allows doctors or nurses to reach inside to treat a patient, performing “high acuity” procedures such as intubation without getting exposed to pathogens.

Among other features are a slider to safely pass medical supplies into the high-risk zone without air escaping, and a cable management system for safely feeding cables and tubing through the screen.

This setup, Trudel explains while demonstrating a prototype inside Carleton’s Abilities Living Laboratory, allows health-care workers to see patients and quickly treat people in distress while their colleagues don personal protective equipment to provide more comprehensive care. Patients can see care providers on the other side of the screen, as well as family members a safe distance away, which helps make the experience less traumatic.

“This is not only an effective way to curtail outbreaks of hemorrhagic viruses, it’s also a more humanitarian approach,” says Trudel.

“Health-care design has traditionally been driven by a biomedical-focused approach, but now innovations are focused on family- and community-centred models, even in the most challenging areas like infection prevention and control.”

Simulation Exercise a Success

At a simulation exercise held late last year in Accra, Ghana, an IDTM with all of the required medical equipment was set up in one day.

Trudel took a series of prototypes to Accra to demonstrate the transparent screen, which was refined and further evaluated in February at the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot in Brindisi, Italy.

“When you’re doing health-care design,” says Trudel, “you’re constantly thinking about the footprint and volume of the space and putting every single piece of medical equipment, furniture and feature in an ergonomic position.”

Moreover, the Carleton team — which includes industrial design master’s students Ben Tripp and James Lee, undergraduate Kennedy Chan, and alumni research assistants Martin Eisert and Shaghayegh Kalantari — must keep in mind the “manufacturability” of every component.

“Most of the components have such a specialized function that currently they are all custom-made — none are off the shelf,” says Trudel. “Every detail matters.”

Focus on Functionality and Positive Impact

To give communities dealing with outbreaks better access to systems like this, the design blueprints for the transparent screen will all be open source and many of the parts will be able to be 3D printed. Design files will be freely available so health agencies can fabricate the screens on their own and install them as needed to supplement existing health infrastructure.

“This is a unique, outward project because we want it to be accessed by as many people as possible,” says Tripp.

“It’s really rewarding to be working on improving the experiences of patients and clinicians in very challenging circumstances.”

“This is exactly what I want to do,” says Lee. “At the end of the day, we’re trying to have a positive impact on people’s lives.”

“We’re designing an environment for people who are in extreme distress,” says Chan, “so we had to create a space that’s as comforting as possible.”

“But it also has to be functional,” says Kalantari, whose role involved creating a virtual reality model of the treatment module.

“So many different elements have to come together for this to be effective.”

And for an innovation like this to succeed, so many different people have to come together first.

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More Health and Wellness

Nearly 45 per cent of Canadians will develop cancer at some point in their lifetime and one in five will die from the disease.

Radiation therapy, which uses beams of intense energy to kill cancer cells or shrink tumours, is one of the most effective treatments. It’s been in use for more than a century and, although refined over the years, can cause significant side effects, such as fatigue, hair loss and nausea, among many others.

This is one of the reasons why a group of Carleton University researchers, led by physicists Rowan Thomson and Sangeeta Murugkar, are working on a multidisciplinary project to learn more about the impacts of radiation at a cellular level.

Their research aims to improve radiation therapy, enhance the use of radiation as a diagnostic tool and help protect people such as nuclear power plant workers and x-ray technicians from low-dose exposure.

Ultimately, their goal is to develop a novel system for evaluating radiation energy deposited in cells and the associated cascade of biological events. This will not only be preventative, minimizing side effects and the risks of exposure, but could also lead to more personalized treatment.

“About half of all cancer patients will undergo radiation therapy,” says Thomson.

“In general, we don’t have a good understanding of the effects of low doses of radiation. If we can improve our knowledge, we’ll be in a better position to plan and evolve treatments. Anything we can do to improve radiation therapy has the potential to affect many, many Canadians.”

Determining the Correct Dose

One of the more challenging aspects of radiation therapy is determining the correct dose to give to a patient. If doctors are treating breast cancer, for instance, the dose must be strong enough to target the tumour but not so intense that it burns the surrounding skin.

To calculate dosage more accurately, Carleton researchers are zooming in to micron-scale resolution and studying how individual cells respond to radiation. This requires an all-hands-on-deck approach.

First, Carleton students “culture” cells — growing them in a controlled environment — in Health Sciences researcher Edana Cassol‘s lab. Next, the cells are irradiated at the National Research Council in Ottawa’s east end and brought back to campus, where a chemical analysis technique called Raman spectroscopy is performed in Murugkar’s lab. This provides an experimental map of how cells respond to radiation, with Carleton bioinformatics researcher Sanjeena Dang analyzing the results.

This project is supported by the federal New Frontiers in Research Fund, which facilitates high-risk, high-reward collaborations, and also involves partners at Health Canada.

Murugkar, a medical physicist at Carleton, is an expert in light-matter interactions. She is focused on developing new optical tools for the rapid detection, treatment and monitoring of diseases such as cancer.

“We are building optical instruments and developing data measurement and analysis methods,” says Murugkar.

“This will tell us, at a very microscopic scale, which cells have been exposed to ionizing radiation.”

A Step Toward Personalized Treatment

Beyond further refining radiation therapy, Murugkar sees tremendous potential for a “laser spectroscopy system” as a diagnostic tool to monitor the response to radiation treatment.

It typically takes around two weeks to get biopsy results back from a lab. Even a frozen-section biopsy, which is done during an operation to help guide surgeons, can take half an hour.

But Murugkar envisions a system that uses short pulses of light to determine in “near real time whether the tissue in question is responding to radiation treatment — whether a tumour is shrinking.”

Compact, user-friendly tools like this, she says, could be deployed in a diagnostic lab or a clinical setting.

“They can really help inform decision making. That would be a huge step in the right direction.”

It could also lead toward personalized treatment.

Everybody responds to radiation differently, according to Thomson, yet current therapies are essentially one-size-fits-all. They don’t account for how sensitive to radiation an individual patient is.

But what if, she asks, a sample of cancerous tissue could be irradiated and the cellular response assessed by the type of unobtrusive technique the Carleton team is developing?

“You could look at the response to the radiation and use that information to inform the treatment,” says Thomson.

“That would really help personalize the treatment. This would be a new level of care and protection. Right now, it’s just a research scenario. But imagine if we could do this one day. That’s why this is such meaningful work.”

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More Health and Wellness

Lead image by Povozniuk / iStock

For many Somalis, daily life in their homeland is complicated and, at times, dangerous. The country in East Africa has experienced an ongoing civil war since the 1980s. Drought frequently devastates crops and more than six million people currently face extreme levels of hunger. There have also been reports of an increase in sexual and gender-based violence, including domestic violence and child abuse.

Beyond the struggle for basic necessities such as food and safety, people experience trauma resulting from these humanitarian crises. In Somaliland, an autonomous but internationally unrecognized region in northern Somalia, limited resources, including a lack of mental health services, make this challenge more acute.

That’s why a small group of Somali-Canadian graduates from Carleton University’s School of Social Work helped Somaliland’s University Of Hargeisa create the country’s first social work program more than a decade ago.

Since then, about 550 students have earned bachelor’s degrees and gone on to provide trauma-informed psychological care. At the same time, they are breaking the stigma around seeking mental health support.

With a new master’s degree in social work set to launch, the University of Hargeisa aims to graduate researchers, mental health professionals and social policy specialists who can provide advanced counselling and inform government policies, a way to help some of the region’s most vulnerable people on an even broader scale.

“There is a lot of social injustice in Somalia, especially among women and children, and no strong support system,” says Nimo Bokore, an Ethiopian-Somali social work professor at Carleton who chairs the committee responsible for the university’s continued support of the Hargeisa program.

“Social work and Somali culture are a match made in heaven because caring for your community is something that comes naturally. There just wasn’t a formal training structure in place.”

Financial Support for Social Work in Somalia

Between 1988 and 1996, more than 55,000 Somali refugees came to Canada to escape the conflict at home, with over 7,000 settling in Ottawa. By 2011, the capital’s Somali community included about 20,000 people, many of whom were born in Canada.

The challenge of adjusting to life in a new country and a desire to give back prompted several Somali-Canadian students to study social work at Carleton. One of them, Asha Roble, joined up with four other students to start a conversation with university officials in Hargeisa, the capital and largest city in Somaliland.

Carleton’s School of Social Work provided financial and fundraising support, donated textbooks and helped the University of Hargeisa develop a social work curriculum. Fifty students enrolled in the first cohort, about three-quarters of them women, and like most of the graduates since the program started, they now work for local and government agencies as well as civil society and international organizations.

Providing counselling in hospitals, orphanages, schools and clinics, Somalia’s first generation of social workers are helping a wide range of clients, including people living with mental illness and other disabilities, youth experiencing homelessness, internally displaced people and survivors of sexual violence.

Teaching Social Work in Somalia

“We teach social workers how to sit with and listen to people, how to ask questions about the problems they are facing,” says Hargeisa professor Keltun Abyan.

“They learn how to provide talk therapy and tackle these problems. Now, there is more recognition of the roles that social workers can play. We are overcoming the social taboo.”

“People who are impacted by violence are often silenced by the culture in Somalia, but our new master’s program will help give them a voice,” adds Mukhtar Mohamed Abby, dean of the university’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities. “As government institutions create policies about issues like child protection, our master’s graduates will be able to provide recommendations. We can help the country develop regulations.”

Bokore’s latest research in the region identifies an urgent need for mental health services to address depression, anxiety and traumatic stress disorders. It also shows that social work is becoming more accepted, and she says the new master’s program could expand services even further.

“Carleton’s social work program has a clinical stream and a policy stream,” explains Bokore, who plans to teach a master’s course in Hargeisa, as will a Carleton PhD student.

“I want to help because that’s where I’m from. But I also want to help because social workers are flexible and wear different hats, no matter what country we’re in.”

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Lead image by Vadim_Nefedov / iStock

Drug development is a complex, costly and time-consuming process.

To ensure that pharmaceuticals are safe and effective, the interval between a laboratory breakthrough and a therapy that’s ready for clinical trials can be a decade or more.

That long wait is no comfort to patients who are suffering from debilitating or potentially deadly medical conditions. The price of new treatments can also be a bitter pill for families.

But a pair of Carleton University researchers are playing key roles in promising efforts to accelerate health advances from the lab to the market and, at the same time, make some meds more affordable.

Biochemists Kyle Biggar and Jeff Smith both work with startup companies based in Carleton’s Health Sciences Building. These collaborations, supported by local biotech accelerator Capital BioVentures, are focused on springing off university research to swiftly improve health outcomes for people across Canada and beyond.

From Bench to Bedside

Biggar works with peptides, short, Lego-like chains of amino acids that can be used to target problems within cells, and to treat cancer, metabolic disorders and illnesses caused by microorganisms.

Biggar and his group test peptides created by his Carleton engineering colleague Jim Green‘s AI algorithm to determine which ones have the potential to target problematic cells. Once these candidates are identified, the team conducts wet-lab experiments to validate their computational models and then selects therapeutic candidates, a step toward medical use.

This is where NuvoBio comes into the picture, moving its head office onto Carleton’s campus in fall 2024. The company, co-founded by Biggar and former Corel Corporation CEO Michael Cowpland, expedites the development of peptide therapeutics.

“To bring innovation closer to patients,” Biggar says, “we’ve teamed up with an exceptional Canadian entrepreneur to bring our medicine from bench to bedside.”

NuvoBio’s development pipeline includes peptides that show potential in oncology and infectious diseases. But for now, the company is concentrating on a product called NeoPeptix that’s effective at treating Cryptococcus neoformans, the pathogen that causes fungal meningitis and is responsible for 20 per cent of all HIV-related deaths globally.

Early preclinical tests indicate that NeoPeptix is significantly more potent than available therapeutics. NuvoBio is aiming to submit a request for authorization to begin clinical trials to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by 2027.

“Often, a researcher will make a therapeutic lead, then publish a paper or maybe patent it, but they don’t know where to go next,” says Biggar.

“We’re motivated to translate scientific discovery into practical healthcare solutions.”

‘Fixing’ Faulty Genes

Like peptide therapeutics, gene therapy is a rapidly evolving medical technique that’s used to treat diseases and conditions such as cancer, cystic fibrosis, diabetes and AIDS. It can involve exposing a patient to a virus that “fixes” the faulty gene at the core of the ailment and then stops replicating itself.

These viral medicines are difficult and very costly to manufacture.

A dozen years ago, Carleton’s Jeff Smith helped longtime collaborator Jean-Simon Diallo from the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute develop a set of molecules that enhanced the growth of viral medicines. That advance prompted Diallo to co-found a company that has developed a line of proprietary cell enhancers to increase the yield and improve the quality of viral medicines.

Virica, which is located beside NuvoBio, is successful, according to Smith, because its technology has the potential to reduce the financial barriers to effective treatments.

Smith specializes in mass spectrometry, analyzing the chemical composition of substances and how their molecular structures change over time, a technique that’s central to the creation of drugs for a wide range of conditions and is a crucial part of Virica’s process.

This collaboration also gives Carleton students a chance to contribute to leading-edge research and, potentially, to step into jobs after graduation — “a seamless transition between environments,” says Smith.

“The opportunities for this type of medicine are phenomenal,” he adds.

“It’s great to help industry solve analytical challenges, but there’s an extra layer of gratification in making grassroots scientific discoveries with another researcher and seeing that turn into a company that’s helping produce advanced therapeutics.”

Companies like Virica and NuvoBio, which are ultimately dedicated to ensuring that patients have access to safe, effective and lower-cost treatments as quickly as possible.