The Canada Gairdner Awards celebrate the world’s best biomedical and global health researchers

‍

FOSTER CITY, Calif., April 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Adela is proud to announce that Daniel De Carvalho, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, has been honored with the prestigious Peter Gilgan Canada Gairdner Momentum Award recognizing his outstanding scientific contributions, including early breakthroughs in methylation and the discovery of Adela’s best-in-class technology for blood-based cancer testing. Dr. De Carvalho’s contributions have the potential to transform cancer screening and surveillance by enabling earlier detection of many new and recurrent cancers with a blood test, resulting in more effective treatment.

‍

The Canada Gairdner Awards recognize outstanding researchers whose unique scientific contributions have increased the understanding of human biology and disease. Since 1957, 426 awards have been bestowed on laureates from over 40 countries, and of those awardees, 102 have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes. 

‍

The Gairdner Foundation is recognizing Dr. De Carvalho as a global leader in cancer epigenetics, immunotherapy, and liquid biopsy research for “the ground-breaking discovery of the role of transposable elements in regulating anti-tumour immunity through viral mimicry, which holds transformative potential for cancer therapy, and for pioneering the development of a novel blood-based test for early cancer detection, classification, and therapy monitoring.”

‍

The novel approach to blood-based cancer detection, discovered by Dr. De Carvalho at University Health Network’s Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, overcomes a significant challenge in the field - isolating genomic material for sequencing. Dr. De Carvalho’s approach specifically isolates the information-rich (methylated) regions of the genome through a high-affinity enrichment process, allowing efficient capture of extensive, biologically-relevant genomic information. This advancement allows a single platform to be applied across many use cases in cancer, and also enables greater opportunity to detect cancer signals in the blood compared to other technologies that target a smaller set of genomic regions. Adela is developing the technology for minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring and multi-cancer early detection (MCED).

‍

“We congratulate Daniel on this tremendous honor recognizing his profound contributions to the field of cancer research,” said Lisa Alderson, CEO of Adela. “Daniel’s discoveries have the potential to improve the lives of the millions of people impacted by cancer each year. We are excited to take these breakthrough innovations forward with the development of Adela's genome-wide methylation platform to improve the diagnosis and management of cancer.”