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Health Innovation Roundup
March 4, 2026

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Applied Pharmaceutical Innovation

Pop culture helps The Dementia Collective foster understanding

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We notice blueBell Village is using pop culture to expand the ways people understand what it's like to live with dementia. While the company primarily offers a platform called Connect that helps families coordinate dementia care, it also has a podcast called The Dementia Collective that recently released two bonus episodes of note.

The first is about two Pokémon — Slowpoke and Psyduck — who are labelled "confused" due to their delayed cognitive processing and tendency to become overwhelmed by stimuli. Host Andrew Karesa explains that labelling people with dementia as "confused" leads to misunderstanding. "When we reduce (the complexity of dementia) down to one word, we stop looking deep, trying to understand what's happening under the water," he said. "When we stop looking deeper, we often misinterpret behaviour." The second is about Sarek, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which Karesa says presents an allegory for dementia in relation to societal structure. The episode is about "what happens when a society built on rational supremacy confronts cognitive instability."

Karesa founded blueBell Village after his grandmother, Shirley Bell, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and The Dementia Collective podcast usually features guests with lived experiences of their own. The latest regular episode is a conversation with Anoushka Fernandes of The Soggy Sandwich, a blog about dementia care and grief. She discusses how dementia in South Asian homes is often silenced and stigmatized, and how blueBell Connect helped keep various family members aligned as she cared for her mother.

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Headlines

  • Gene Dub of Five Oaks and Dub Architects has sold the Inglewood Lofts to Strategic Group for $60.5 million, now that an art restoration project is complete. Dub converted the lofts from the Charles Camsell Hospital, where Indigenous patients were treated for tuberculosis and reportedly experienced horrific mistreatment. The restored artwork, a mosaic by the late Austrian-Canadian artist Alexander von Svoboda, is located in a common area for tenants that is named for Jane Ash Poitras, a distinguished Indigenous artist whose mother was a patient at the former hospital.
  • Applied Pharmaceutical Innovation CEO Andrew MacIsaac spoke about the organization's partnership with Vimy Pharma to produce a generic GLP-1 product at the Critical Medicines Production Centre. "It's a total game-changer for us to be involved in this," MacIsaac told CBC's Your World Tonight during a segment that starts around 22 minutes into the show. "When you look at the geopolitical conditions that we're in right now, where we've got a whole bunch of tariffs that are being thrown around … if you don't have access to these medicines, your health systems are going to be in big trouble."
  • The Alberta Deep Dive 2025 from Start Alberta discerned a "pattern of variability" in Edmonton's innovation ecosystem, with investment ranging from a US$6 million in 2016 to a high of US$411 million in 2020. The report noted that a $62-million grant to Entos Pharmaceuticals and a $38-million investment in NanoPrecise were among the top raises in 2025.
  • Aurinia Pharmaceuticals reported $271.3 million in 2025 annual net product sales for LUPKYNIS, its FDA-approved lupus nephritis therapy. That was up 25% from the prior year, with total revenues projected at $315 million to $325 million in 2026 as Aurinia advances aritinercept, a potential treatment for a broad range of autoimmune diseases.
  • An episode of NAIT's Advancing Healthcare Through Simulation series features Mohamed Benfatah, founder of SIM AI Health in Morocco, on integrating AI with simulation to make healthcare training more equitable and impactful in resource-limited settings.
  • Brain Care Technologies has developed Dembot, a headset that uses sensors to detect early signs of dementia and mild cognitive impairment through a simple game. Founder Greg McGillis said he hopes to bring it to market by late 2027.
  • University of Alberta professor Valerie Carson and her team developed PLAYshop in response to U of A research showing that rising screen time is creating a significant public health problem for Canadian children who are getting less physical activity.
  • University of Alberta pharmacy student Raegan Abrey, whose own difficult experience with a rare neurological disorder shaped her commitment to empathetic care, is part of the first cohort of a new PharmD pathway designed to attract more Indigenous and rural students to the profession.
  • Applied Pharmaceutical Innovation is working with Leaders International Executive Search to recruit volunteer board members.

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