Our very own Lu Deng, postdoctoral fellow with University of Alberta’s Department of Computing Science and Department of Biological Sciences, has been rewarded for her achievements. She has won the Mitacs & National Research Council-IRAP Award for Commercialization 2016.
Lu’s research was conducted during her Mitacs Elevate fellowship with Edmonton-based Metabolomic Technologies Inc. (MTI). She developed PolypDx, an inexpensive urine test used to screen for polyps, the precursor to colon cancer.
Previous screening had to be done on cost-prohibitive highly specialized equipment. With the development of PolypDx, medical laboratories in Canada and the U.S. can now proceed using pre-existing mass-spectrometer technology. The product was launched in the spring and has already been in use for months in labs across the U.S.
Lu has completed her Mitacs fellowship and has moved on to a full-time senior scientist position at MTI. We wish her well.
