We are excited to share that Drs. Leonard Foster and Sabrina Leslie are among ten UBC researchers who have been awarded grants through the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Innovation Fund.
The CFI Innovation Fund invests in infrastructure that supports Canadian research projects which have social, health, environmental and economic benefits. The funding awarded to Foster and Leslie, alongside their teams and trainees, will allow them to acquire new equipment including mass spectrometers, analytical equipment and higher-resolution imaging technology.
“We are in a field where the technology is still developing very quickly. CFI is a program that allows Canadian science to keep up with those advances in technology… it’s critical to stay current,” shares Foster on the importance of receiving this funding.
Foster’s research project aims to measure changes in protein expression in cells that have been infected by a virus, and learn how these proteins may interact with one another on a larger scale. In the short term, his team hopes to minimize symptoms from viral infections by inhibiting viral enzymes. In the long term, he sees this work speeding up response times to new emerging viruses.
