Doug Kondro, an up-and-coming researcher at the University of Calgary, was among nine Canadian innovators recognized at a ceremony in Ottawa last month by Mitacs—a not-for-profit organization that fosters growth and innovation in Canada for business and academia—for their game-changing achievements in Canadian research. Kondro’s breakthrough work has earned him the Mitacs Award for Outstanding Innovation–PhD, awarded to a PhD student who has made a significant achievement in research and development innovation.
The local Calgarian is a PhD candidate in the university’s Biomedical Engineering graduate program and is working to advance stem cell research by scaling up a method used to engineer microtissues for both research and tissue-repair applications. By providing large quantities of microtissues for study, he is bringing the process one step closer to use in a clinical setting to treat diseases such as type I diabetes. Kondro is using and expanding upon the AggreWell™ system, a tissue engineering platform originally developed by Professor Mark Ungrin of the University of Calgary and commercialized internationally in partnership with STEMCELL. The PhD candidate is enhancing the platform’s ability to test small-scale microtissue production under a large number of different conditions at once, and then immediately switch to large-scale production using the best conditions for pre-clinical, and eventually clinical, testing.
“The idea is that there are a lot of possibilities to choose from, so we want to be able to test those combinations, pick the best one and then quickly bring it to full scale production for use in pre-clinical testing, in preparation for subsequent human applications,” he explained. Using his scaled-up version of AggreWell, Kondro is working with STEMCELL to make the system available to other research institutions around the world.
