Avani Abraham | Contributor
Featured Image: Dr. Hili’s research focuses on developing artificial antibodies combat disease. | Courtesy of YFile
This year’s Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award was presented to Dr. Ryan Hili, an assistant professor in the chemistry department.
The Petro-Canada Young Innovator Awards program is a collaboration between York and Petro-Canada—now known as SunCor Energy, Inc.—to recognize the outstanding research and academic contributions of a new Science Faculty member. The award consists of a $7,500 research grant to foster and encourage Hili’s research endeavours.
Hili, who was previously an assistant professor at the University of Georgia and a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, joined York’s Faculty of Science last year.
In addition to lecturing in the chemistry department, Hili has established his lab and research team here at York, the Hili Group, which combines research in the fields of biochemistry, molecular biology, and synthetic organic chemistry.
Hili’s research has been published in prominent chemistry journals, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie, and Chemical Science. He has received funds from a number of various agencies, including the U.S.’s National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Using technologies developed by his lab, Hili has evolved aptamers from modified nucleic acid polymers to serve as artificial antibodies. This research has major clinical implications in the field of medicine, as Hili aims to apply these aptamers to advancing the techniques used for the detection of several human diseases. He is working on developing a method to utilize these artificial antibodies to track down biomarkers of disease, such as over-expressed biomolecules on the surface of cells.
In this way, Hili’s objective is to use aptamers to target certain diseases, such as cancer, allowing for early detection and more rapid treatment efforts. The binding of a particular aptamer to a biomarker could be used as an indicator that the patient has cancer, or some other disease.
“There are commercial antibodies on the market now, but less than 50 per cent of them are selective for their target,” Hili states. It is the increased selectivity of the aptamer to its biomarker that Hili hopes to improve. The lack of selectivity in the currently available synthetic antibodies leads to costly false negatives and positives.
Additionally, Hili aims to modify these artificial antibodies to be more chemically diverse and effective than typical antibodies that are often unstable. He also wants to employ DNA-encoded molecules, which are derived from DNA fragments attached to small molecules. They encode the structure of the molecule, and serve as a sort of barcode of identification.
These could facilitate efficient analysis of millions of molecules to identify those with the necessary functional properties, thus having the potential to quicken pharmacy drug development.
“Hili has already achieved much for a researcher so early in his career,” said Faculty of Science Dean Esaias Janse van Rensburg. “He is a true explorer and innovator, and that’s what this award seeks to acknowledge. I’m interested to see where he goes from here.”
