Diane Botelho, the Department Head of Air Quality Services at the New Brunswick Research and Productivity Council and adjunct professor at the University of New Brunswick, has won the New Brunswick Bioscience Achievement Award.

She accepted the award at last Thursday's Innovation at the Market, an annual industry event hosted by BioNB. Over 100 members of the province's business and research community attended the event. 

The Bioscience Achievement Award is presented each year to an individual, company or research team, in recognition of their contributions to the growth and promotion of the New Brunswick biotech sector.

Botelho, who has been overseeing the Air Quality Department at the RPC for over seven years, was recognized for her leadership in air quality and air testing in the country’s growing cannabis sector.

The other three finalists for the award were:

Bethany Deshpande -- Deshpande founded the dairy technology company SomaDetect in 2016 around a sensor technology that was originally developed for medical diagnostics. This innovation, which scans cow's milk for potential diseases and measures the overall health of the animal, is poised to transform the dairy industry with its real-time data for farmers. The SomaDetect sensor system is being validated by dairy farmers across North America.

SomaDetect received $1 million in investment by winning the international 43North competition held in Buffalo, NY, last October. Last year, SomaDetect was also accepted into the Sprint Accelerator in Kansas City and the virtual accelerator NVIDIA Inception program.

Natasha Dhayagude - Dhayagude is the CEO of Chinova Bioworks, which manufactures a natural preservative for the food and beverage industry.

Since its inception, Chinova has moved towards commercialization at a rapid pace. Dhayagude has participated in several high profile competitions and investor forums including Fierce Founders in Canada, the Future Food Tech Summit in San Francisco and IndieBio in Ireland. Chinova Bioworks recently announced the completion of a $2.6 million seed financing round from several VC firms including Dutch life science investor, DSM Venturing.

Paul Gunn - As President and CEO of Soricimed Biopharma, Gunn leads a drug and diagnostic development company that was founded in 2005. The company was formed to pursue the medicinal properties of a naturally occurring molecule found in shrew saliva. The substance, called soricidin, can reduce cancer cell viability, kill cancer cells and reduce tumour volume while minimizing the side-effects of cancer treatments.  If the substance can be proven to be safe and effective, it will represent a new, game-changing class of cancer drugs. This work has been ongoing for several years and clinical trial results thus far have been promising.