Provincial funder seeks healthtech that's ready to level up

Alberta Innovates has opened its Accelerating Innovations into Care (AICE) program for 2026 applications, with two intake cycles starting June 29. The program offers staged, non-dilutive funding to advance health technologies from validation to scale-up, supporting Alberta companies working to improve health outcomes using innovative technologies.

The provincial agency recently promoted the work of the AICE-funded Northernmost, a company working to revolutionize kidney transplant technology. Founder and CEO Ron Mills told Taproot in May that his company's advanced machine perfusion technology is a vast improvement on the ubiquitous LifePort Kidney Transporter, which he worked on ahead of its launch around 2003. Mills is now working on a Series A funding round following investments by the UA Innovation Fund and Innovobot Resonance Ventures. Another AICE success story is Pacylex Pharmaceuticals, which received funding for clinical trials of its cancer drug, an oral therapy called zelenirstat. So is Nanostics, whose ClarityDX prostate cancer test offers highly accurate screenings that can prevent needless and invasive procedures. The Alberta Cancer Foundation featured the company and the role philanthropy played in getting it started in the latest edition of Leap.

A healthy amount of AICE funding goes to lab work at the University of Alberta. John Lewis — who is the CEO of Nanostics in addition to his role at the U of A — received funding to find an improved way to screen for bladder cancer in 2022. Last year, AICE funded a number of researchers with early-stage projects, including Milad Nazarahari for MotionInsight, an AI tool for post-stroke care personalization; Daniel Charlebois for a machine-learning-driven tool that identifies clinically important yeast; and Xuehua Zhang for an ML-powered tool for personalized gout management.