Projects co-led by APSC researchers to receive nearly 2M in federal health research funding

UBC Engineering researchers and their collaborators in the UBC Faculty of Medicine will receive almost $2 million in funding from the Collaborative Health Research Projects (CHRP) program, a Government of Canada initiative that supports innovative, knowledge translation-focused research projects in engineering and the natural or health sciences.

The teams will address health problems such as non-healing wounds, head and neck cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Each group will also collaborate with a “knowledge/technology user organization that could benefit from the research results.”

By encouraging engineers and scientists to collaborate and integrate their expertise in interdisciplinary, health-related research projects, the CHRP program aims to produce knowledge and technologies that improve the Canadian healthcare system and potentially create new economic opportunities. The program also aims to train new highly qualified personnel. 

Of the six CHRP-supported projects led by UBC researchers, five are co-led by APSC researchers. These projects are:

Therapeutic Use of Micro-Sponge Embedded Nutritional Liquid Scaffold for Treatment of Non-Healing Wounds ($381,244)

Frank Ko (Materials Engineering)


Deformability based Cell Sorting Enabling Quality Control of Stored Red Blood Cells ($312,155)

Hongshen Ma (Mechanical Engineering)


Confidential Automatic Monitoring, Examination, and Recognition of disease Activity (CAMERA): Application to Parkinson and Alzheimer Diseases ($517,818)
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Jane Z. Wang (Electrical and Computer Engineering)


Bioprocess Engineering for Therapeutic T-cell Manufacturing ($306,802)
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James Piret (Chemical and Biological Engineering)
Bhushan Gopaluni (Chemical and Biological Engineering)


Intraoperative Surgical Tools for Advanced Reconstruction Workflow to Optimize Outcomes of Head and Neck Cancer Treatment ($360,914)

Sidney Fels (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Anthony Hodgson (Department of Mechanical Engineering)

For more information about this year’s CHRP funding recipients, please see the official Government of Canada release.