Latest news with #PeterGilganCanadaGairdnerMomentumAward
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Adela's Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Daniel De Carvalho, Receives 2025 Canada Gairdner Momentum Award Recognizing World-Renowned Scientists for Exceptional Scientific Research Contributions with Continued Potential for Impact on Human Health
The Canada Gairdner Awards celebrate the world's best biomedical and global health researchers FOSTER CITY, Calif., April 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Adela, Inc. is proud to announce that Daniel De Carvalho, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, has been honored with the prestigious Peter Gilgan Canada Gairdner Momentum Award recognizing his outstanding scientific contributions, including early breakthroughs in methylation and the discovery of Adela's best-in-class technology for blood-based cancer testing. Dr. De Carvalho's contributions have the potential to transform cancer screening and surveillance by enabling earlier detection of many new and recurrent cancers with a blood test, resulting in more effective treatment. The Canada Gairdner Awards recognize outstanding researchers whose unique scientific contributions have increased the understanding of human biology and disease. Since 1957, 426 awards have been bestowed on laureates from over 40 countries, and of those awardees, 102 have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes. The Gairdner Foundation is recognizing Dr. De Carvalho as a global leader in cancer epigenetics, immunotherapy, and liquid biopsy research for "the ground-breaking discovery of the role of transposable elements in regulating anti-tumour immunity through viral mimicry, which holds transformative potential for cancer therapy, and for pioneering the development of a novel blood-based test for early cancer detection, classification, and therapy monitoring." The novel approach to blood-based cancer detection, discovered by Dr. De Carvalho at University Health Network's Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, overcomes a significant challenge in the field - isolating genomic material for sequencing. Dr. De Carvalho's approach specifically isolates the information-rich (methylated) regions of the genome through a high-affinity enrichment process, allowing efficient capture of extensive, biologically-relevant genomic information. This advancement allows a single platform to be applied across many use cases in cancer, and also enables greater opportunity to detect cancer signals in the blood compared to other technologies that target a smaller set of genomic regions. Adela is developing the technology for minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring and multi-cancer early detection (MCED). "We congratulate Daniel on this tremendous honor recognizing his profound contributions to the field of cancer research," said Lisa Alderson, CEO of Adela. "Daniel's discoveries have the potential to improve the lives of the millions of people impacted by cancer each year. We are excited to take these breakthrough innovations forward with the development of Adela's genome-wide methylation platform to improve the diagnosis and management of cancer." About Adela Adela is developing best-in-class technology to accelerate the diagnosis and improve the management of cancer through blood tests for minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring and multi-cancer early detection (MCED). Adela's blood-based, tissue-free product ensures universal accessibility to MRD testing for patients with cancer, eliminating any dependency on tumor tissue availability. Adela's approach efficiently captures extensive, biologically-relevant genomic information from the methylome, providing greater opportunity to detect cancer signals in the blood compared to platforms that target a smaller set of genomic regions. Adela's first product utilizing this genome-wide methylome enrichment platform was recently clinically validated for predicting and surveilling for recurrence in patients with head & neck cancer and published in Annals of Oncology. Adela's investors are F-Prime Capital, OrbiMed, Deerfield Management, Decheng Capital, RA Capital Management and Labcorp. Find more information at View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Adela Sign in to access your portfolio
CBC
11-04-2025
- Health
- CBC
Nurse wins prestigious award, for helping kids with chronic pain
A nurse practitioner whose research at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children is dedicated to helping children and teens manage pain has won a Gairdner Award. The Toronto-based Gairdner Foundation says Jennifer Stinson is the first nurse to receive one of the prestigious awards it hands out annually to recognize scientists who contribute to human health around the world. Reached by phone in Australia where she was set to speak at a scientific gathering, Stinson says it's "great" the prize is recognizing the role nurses play in research. "Nurses are very good at listening to patients and learning from them and then trying to figure out what kind of solutions would be best for them," Stinson said, noting that a lot of her research is "team science" with researchers from multiple disciplines. Stinson is one of two recipients of the 2025 Peter Gilgan Canada Gairdner Momentum Award, a $100,000 prize given to Canadian mid-career investigators for "exceptional scientific research contributions," the foundation said in a news release issued Friday. The other recipient is Daniel De Carvalho, a senior scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre at University Health Network and an associate professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto. He won for his "groundbreaking" research of alterations in cancer cells and how to make the cells more recognizable to the immune system. Five scientists working at institutions in the United States won Canada Gairdner International Awards of $250,000 each. Another scientist working at a university in Finland received the John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award, worth $100,000. Stinson is co-director of the Pain Centre at SickKids Hospital. Her research focuses on developing digital tools — from apps to robots — that help kids with chronic pain due to illnesses such as arthritis, sickle cell disease and cancer. One app, called iCanCope, helps children and adolescents track their pain and learn to manage it. "A lot of kids don't see the connection between, for example, if they overdo it one day or they have poor sleep that their pain is going to be impacted. So it's just a quick check-in every day and it shows them, kind of like a heat map, how their activities have influenced their pain," Stinson said. The app also helps them set goals, such as improving their sleep or going to school, and get evidence-based advice on how to achieve them. "It can be mindfulness, meditations, it could be physical activities such as yoga, it could be strategies on changing the way they think and feel about their pain," she said. iCanCope also provides a "safe space" for kids to get social support and share experiences, such as their favourite ways to distract themselves from pain, said Stinson, who is also a professor at the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto. Her team also developed a four-foot tall robot named Medi that interacts with children undergoing painful procedures at SickKids. Medi is a "perfect example" of how to teach younger children about what will happen during their procedure and ways to help reduce the pain, Stinson said. "So the robot would go through how to do belly breathing with a child. It would distract them using dancing and music," she said. Stinson and her team are now running a clinical trial on a robot enhanced by artificial intelligence that can observe a medical procedure and react if it's not going well or if a child becomes upset. For all of the pain management interventions, input from patients is critical, she said. "We really try to listen to them and learn from them and involve them in all aspects of research, so not just as participants, but actually helping us design research studies and then translating that knowledge," she said. In fact, a "handful" of Stinson's now-adult former patients have decided to pursue medicine, nursing or health research, she said. One of them works in her lab. "It's so rewarding to see patients that are really inspired to do research as well," she said. The Gairdner Awards were established in 1957 by Canadian businessman and philanthropist James A. Gairdner. The 2025 international winners are: Dr. Michael Welsh of the University of Iowa and Paul Negulescu of Vertex Pharmaceuticals for research that has transformed cystic fibrosis from a fatal disease to a manageable one; Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas of Harvard Medical School, Iva Greenwald of Columbia University and Gary Struhl of Columbia University for pioneering work in "Notch signalling" cell communication and its impact in cancer and developmental disorders. The 2025 Gairdner Global Health award winner is Dr. Andre Briend of the University of Tampere in Finland, for his role in inventing a ready-to-use therapeutic food paste for treating severe acute malnutrition.
