Awards
2008 summit award® recipients
the project achievement award
dr. chris. j. backhouse, p.eng.
This award is presented to a project demonstrating engineering, geological or geophysical skills and representing a substantial contribution to technical progress and the betterment of society. The Association will give credit to those firms and/or persons assuming key roles in bringing the project to completion.
Dr. Chris Backhouse, P.Eng., has successfully pursued the challenge of developing state-of-the-art medical diagnostic systems that have the potential to provide a dramatic societal benefit by improving the accessibility of our health care and providing a significant manufacturing opportunity for Alberta industry. He has done this through a diverse set of collaborative relationships with Canadian industry and researchers with the results published in leading journals.
In 1999 Dr. Backhouse joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta where he is currently a Professor and Director of Engineering Physics. He has been developing lab on a chip (LOC) microfluidic technologies that have the potential to put the functionality of an entire lab upon a single microfabricated chip. The fundamental engineering challenge has been to reduce the cost of the technology so that it is accessible.
In collaboration with Micralyne, a world-leading micro/nanofabrication foundry located in Alberta, Dr. Backhouse helped develop their Microfluidic toolkit (μTK). Sold around the world, the μTK uses microfluidic chips to perform chip-based diagnostics in minutes instead of hours or days and at much less expense than their conventional counterparts. He has used this system in collaboration with the Alberta Cancer Board and Capital Health to develop μTK-based prototypes for medical diagnostics.
With funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and Western Diversification, Dr. Backhouse developed a range of prototype microchip-based medical diagnostics as part of the Alberta Cancer Diagnostic Consortium (ACDC), a research consortium he formed with Dr. Linda Pilarski at the Cross Cancer Institute. From 2004 to 2007, ACDC developed and performed initial validation studies with health-care partners and produced an intellectual property portfolio to enable the commercialization of these technologies here in Canada. By 2006, his lab had developed a new series of instruments, the Tricorder Toolkit (TTK). Enabled by a convergence of microchip technologies and instrumentation, these systems have a variety of applications in cancer care, public health and general health care. True LOC devices, these chips are able to perform entire procedures in going from a droplet of a sample to a diagnostic signal in tens of minutes, including the labour-intensive steps of sample preparations, genetic amplification and genetic analysis. Dr. Backhouse’s latest version of the TTK is less than $200 in parts, approximately 5,000 times less expensive than the conventional instrumentation.
In contrast to the vast majority of LOC systems developed to date that have incorporated chips into expensive and lab-sized infrastructure such as external optical systems, thermal control systems and high voltage power supplies, the TTKs developed in Alberta are entirely self-contained, portable and are excellent prototypes for future product development. As such, the U of A has spun out the TTK technology in a company called iLOC, which plans to develop medical diagnostics based on TTK-like instruments for use at Capital Health and the Alberta Cancer Board.
Honours, Awards and Distinctions
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Louis B. Crosby Gold Medal, University of Alberta (1985)
Professional Affiliations and Activities
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Member, Editorial Board, Nanobiotechnology, Institution of Engineering and Technology (2006-present)
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Member, Editorial Board, Journal of Nanobiotechnology, Institution of Electrical Engineers (2005-2006)
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Member, APEGGA (1996-present)