Lallemand Health Solutions announces 2019 Innovation Grant Winner

Under the Rosell Institute for Microbiome and Probiotics Innovation Program umbrella, Lallemand Health Solutions (LHS) has recently held its first Canadian national funding competition in collaboration with Mitacs (www.mitacs.ca/en). This funding opportunity was created to stimulate innovative research in the field of probiotics for human health applications. The goals of the LHS Innovation Grant competition were to create opportunities for new sustainable partnerships with researchers across Canada, to provide training opportunities for students, and to foster breakthrough research.

The Lallemand team was satisfied by the quality and number of submissions received and are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2019 edition is Angus McQuibban, associate professor in the department of biochemistry at the University of Toronto.

Angus McQuibban did his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, and his post-doctoral fellowship at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge, UK. The McQuibban lab is studying the fundamental mechanisms of mitochondrial quality control pathways and how they impinge on human disease. Dr McQuibban’s work has pioneered both cellular and animal models of mitochondrial dysfunction to not only understand molecular mechanisms of disease but to also test potential therapeutic approaches in neurodegeneration. His contributions to this field have been greatly recognized; Dr McQuibban and his collaborators have recently been awarded a $2.3-million grant from Genome Canada to develop drugs for Parkinson’s disease.

This is also the opportunity for us to thank Naghmeh Nikpoor, Scientific Innovation Program Manager at Lallemand Health Solutions, who was instrumental in setting up this program and making it such a success.