Professor Freeman Lan Awarded Federal NFRF Grant to Advance Rapid Infection Diagnostics

Professor Freeman Lan has been awarded a $250,000 grant through the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) to support a project aimed at transforming how infectious diseases are diagnosed and treated. 

The funding, announced today as part of a broader federal investment in Canada’s research ecosystem, will support Prof. Lan’s project, “Harnessing Microdroplets to Revolutionize Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing.” The initiative seeks to dramatically reduce the time required to determine which antibiotics are effective against bacterial infections, a critical challenge in modern healthcare. 

Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is a cornerstone of clinical diagnostics, guiding physicians in selecting appropriate antibiotic treatments. However, conventional testing methods typically take 16 to 24 hours to yield results, often forcing clinicians to prescribe antibiotics without definitive evidence of effectiveness. While faster alternatives exist, they tend to be complex and costly, limiting their adoption in clinical settings. 

Prof. Lan’s research aims to overcome these limitations by developing a rapid, accessible diagnostic workflow capable of delivering results within just one to two hours, up to ten times faster than current gold-standard methods. 

Preliminary work in Prof. Lan’s laboratory has demonstrated that bacterial resistance phenotypes can be detected within one to two hours using this technique. The NFRF-supported project will expand on these findings in two key ways: by developing a multiplexed system capable of testing against 10 clinically relevant antibiotics, and by validating the approach using a wide range of real-world clinical samples.

Following the federal announcement, Karim Bardeesy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry, visited Prof. Lan’s laboratory at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering on behalf of the Honourable Mélanie Joly. During the visit, he toured the lab’s facilities and met with team members working on the project. 

“Professor Lan’s research represents the cutting edge of biomedical engineering and exemplifies the translational impact that BME strives to achieve,” said Milos Popovic, Director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering. “We congratulate him on this well-deserved recognition and look forward to the impact of his work.”