The Pulse: Nov. 2, 2022

Kidney-Chek, a non-invasive test for chronic kidney disease in dogs and cats, is available in stores as of this week, marking an important milestone for a company that started in a biomedical engineering lab at the University of Alberta.

"We're really excited about just getting staff at these stores engaging with pet owners on it, getting feedback, and seeing what happens there," CEO and co-founder Hillary Sweet told Taproot as her product was about to be made available to consumers online and in nine Global Pet Foods stores in Alberta and Ontario.

Sweet said she hadn't planned on an academic career, and yet she found herself pursuing a PhD in materials engineering and biomedical engineering. Luckily, her supervisor was Robert E. Burrell, inventor of Acticoat, an antimicrobial silver dressing that keeps bacteria at bay. He challenged Sweet and fellow doctoral student Matthew Nickel to think like entrepreneurs from the beginning.

"If it wasn't for working under Rob, I don't think I would have made through my PhD," Sweet said, crediting Burrell for challenging her to consider things like cost-effectiveness and ease of use. "His outlook was, 'What can we have you working on for the next four years during your PhD? And how can we make sure we're thinking about how it will be commercialized?'"

Sweet and Nickel knew they wanted to work on simple and affordable diagnostics. They found a mentor in veterinarian-turned-businessman Merle Olson of Alberta Veterinary Laboratories in Calgary. He made them aware of the prevalence of chronic kidney disease in dogs and cats, and the importance of early detection. That seemed like a problem they could try solving, so they got to work.

The result is Kidney-Chek, a fast, affordable test that requires a swab of your pet's saliva on a test strip that will indicate whether all is well or a visit to the vet is warranted.

The company Sweet and Nickel formed, called sn biomedical, initially planned to start with Kidney-Chek, then work on a pregnancy test for livestock, followed by some kind of regulated product for humans, using the profits from the previous project to bankroll the development of the next. That's not quite how it has turned out, at least not yet.

"Being a little bit oblivious to the time periods and energy it would take, we always saw ourselves going into the human sector," she said. "Now we've gotten to where we are, and it has taken longer than we thought and more money than we thought. And so we are trying to focus on getting Kidney-Chek out there, getting the revenue, and not trying to get too far ahead of ourselves. But we do see the potential for additional saliva tests for both humans and pets."

• Boyle Street Community Services announced that, without any government assistance, it has raised 75% of the fundraising goal for its new facility to be located at 100 Street and 107A Avenue. The facility was also gifted the name okimaw peyesew kamik ("King Thunderbird Centre") by Elder Cliff Cardinal during a ceremony. Major donors include the Edmonton Oilers Community Foundation ($10 million), Capital Power ($2 million), Pat and Diana Priestner ($1 million), and Station Lands ($1 million), a joint venture of Qualico and Ledcor. Boyle Street is inviting the public through its Build with Boyle website to help raise the remaining 25%.
• Marginalized people and households are experiencing the harms of the tight residential rental market in Edmonton. A recent city assessment said one in four households currently pays higher rent than they can afford or live in crowded or unsafe conditions. One third of those households are Indigenous, and half of them are led by women. "When there's such a shortage of accommodations and rental spaces, landlords can cherry-pick," said social justice advocate Mark Cherrington. "You just have to look downtown and see tent city or walk downtown and see all the people wandering about with no access to shelter."
• In a piece for CBC First Person, local writer and avid traveller Davin Tikkala said Edmonton's LRT is the scariest train he's ever been on and described one frightening experience on the LRT in March. "The willingness of our city to let passengers fend for themselves as incidents pile up — documented and otherwise — suggests an indifference that is not part of the Edmonton that I want to call home," wrote Tikkala.
• @yegwxnerdery shared a look back at Edmonton's weather for October 2022. According to the analysis, the average high of 15.5°C ranked as the 5th warmest since 1880. Monthly highs were mostly above average, with six days recorded as the warmest in 30 years.
• Megan Clark, co-owner of Studio B Fitness YEG, told Global News that boutique fitness centres have been hit especially hard by inflation. GYMVMT had a different experience. Its membership is almost back to pre-pandemic levels. "What we have seen is people will make decisions on their prioritized spending elsewhere, and will have prioritized fitness at a much higher level," said sales director Dennis Gardner.
• Advance voting has opened for the Brooks-Medicine Hat byelection, set for Nov. 8, which will determine whether Premier Danielle Smith has a seat in the legislature. She is running against NDP candidate Gwendoline Dirk and Alberta Party leader and former Brooks mayor Barry Morishita. Analysts have suggested that the conservative Brooks-Medicine Hat riding is a "safe seat" for Smith, who lives three hours away in the riding of Livingstone-Macleod.

As Edmonton welcomed 24 new electric vehicle chargers within city limits at the end of October, municipalities within the region have also been slowly adding to the network of stations.

Between the EV chargers on city-owned sites and those installed at private businesses, there are now 106 public charging stations in Edmonton and a growing number in surrounding municipalities, including Stony Plain, Spruce Grove, Beaumont, St. Albert, Sturgeon County, and Strathcona County.

Devon decided in September to proceed with an EV charging program that could see six stations set up there, funded by the Municipal Climate Change Action Centre (MCCAC)'s rebate program, which is intended to spur EV infrastructure construction.

In the spring, Bon Accord announced it would be installing seven chargers at two locations, also with funding from MCCAC. "It was an easy decision, seven charging stations installed at no cost to our residents," Bon Accord Mayor Brian Holden said in March when the project was approved.

Some keen planners see EV infrastructure as a chance to pull people off the main routes and into their business centres. When Leduc began construction on a new solar carport and EV charging stations in 2021, the city noted that there was only one Level 3 charging station between Edmonton and Red Deer and said the installation would "provide an economic boost for local businesses by bringing more people into downtown." More stations have since sprung up, including one in Nisku.

On Oct. 28, EPCOR announced plans to install 24 EV chargers at eight locations within city limits as part of the Energizing Edmonton project, a 10-year collaboration between Encor by EPCOR and the City of Edmonton. The expanding EV charging network is both a sign of the level of interest and a necessary step to encourage people who are on the fence about switching from gas-powered vehicles, said Laura Ehrkamp, a communications specialist with EPCOR.

"We know that there's an interest in more electrical vehicle charging infrastructure because range anxiety is one of the hurdles to adoption of EVs," said Ehrkamp. "In terms of what's next, we're going to take this data that we gathered from the use of these 24 new chargers, and then that will help us gauge future work in this area."

The number of registered EVs in Alberta jumped from 377 in 2017 to 3,527 in 2021. Although this still makes up only a fraction of the vehicles on Alberta's roads, ENMAX Power predicts that there will be hundreds of thousands of EVs in the province in the next 10 years.

Photo: The addition of 24 new electric vehicle chargers in Edmonton is part of a growing network of EV infrastructure in the region. (Supplied)

On this day in 1979, Edmonton was again debating whether to build a convention centre, which at least one letter writer was very much in favour of.

Whether the city should build a convention centre seemed to be a constant question during the last half of the 20th century. The idea of a centre (combined with an arena or stadium) was nixed by voters in 1963. A similar idea was approved five years later but was shot down again in 1970 after cost estimates increased on the Omniplex proposal.

By the time the question came around again at the end of the '70s, both the Northlands Coliseum and Commonwealth Stadium had been built, so there was no longer a desire for a combined sports/convention centre.

The 1979 plebiscite on the new convention centre was a bit confusing — since the city still had approval from the 1965 vote, the question wasn't whether to build the convention centre, but rather whether to take away the option. The measure to remove the approval failed, about 52,000 to 29,000. Construction began the following year on a site off Jasper Avenue, along the escarpment overlooking the river.

The design of the convention centre was an ambitious one. Built into the side of the hill, about 70% of the facility extends underground and under Jasper Avenue. The exposed section of the building is made up mostly of glass windows, offering an impressive view of the river valley.

In 1998, Shaw bought the naming rights to the centre in a 20-year deal. When the deal expired in 2018, the Shaw Conference Centre became the Edmonton Convention Centre again. It is now managed by Explore Edmonton, which has tried to market it as an ecologically responsible event space in recent years. In 2020, a modernization project saw hundreds of solar cells installed in the windowed atrium. A section of the cells also spells out in Morse code an excerpt of "Gifts of a River", a poem by E.D. Blodgett.

Earlier this year, work began installing hundreds of solar panels on the convention centre's roof, making it the largest rooftop solar array in the country.

This is based on a clipping found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist @revRecluse — follow @VintageEdmonton for daily ephemera via Twitter.