Automate to Market

Scientists-turned-entrepreneurs give their tips on creating an automated lab tool
January 2010

Automation is an area where life scientists often see opportunities for innovation; doing the same technique day in and day out unsurprisingly brings to mind ways to ease and speed the process. If you’ve invented an automated tool, colleagues in other labs could very likely benefit from your ingenuity. But if you’ve ever dreamt of seeing your invention in a product catalog, you’d best keep in mind that taking your tool to market is rarely simple.

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Promising Inventor

February 16, 2009

Necessity, creativity and collaboration — these are the elements that fuel innovation and shape ideas into powerful realities. For Sudanese brothers Ameer and Ahmed Taha, and their partner Lahav Gil, an Israeli immigrant, it led to the development of a revolutionary device that took the top honours at this year’s prestigious Next Great Canadian Idea competition by innovation consulting firm Nytric.

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Two brothers stand to revolutionize laboratory extraction processes

January 14, 2009

The notion that time is of the essence is particularly meaningful to Ameer and Ahmed Taha. The Toronto-based brothers have come up with a device that could revolutionize the time and money spent by the pharmaceutical, environmental and food industries on extracting samples from drugs, foods and contaminated soils.

Dubbed Certo-Ex, their simple concept streamlines sampling in these billion-dollar industries, bringing a process that can take 4 to 24 hours for a single sample down to a mere 30 minutes for multiple samples. The brothers have combined Ameer’s scientific expertise and Ahmed’s business savvy and also hope one day to broaden their work to include helping other young and promising inventors.

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Ontario agency backs inventors with $100,000

Supports lab-extraction system, noise reduction for choppers, windmills
November 10, 2008

Taha's Certo-Ex is an automated instrument that allows users to simply, quickly and cheaply take lab samples and break them down.

"By allowing scientists to work with multiple samples at once, in a fraction of the time now required, it's estimated the Certo-Ex could reduce lab costs by as much as 90 per cent," OCE said in a news release.

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The Next Great Canadian Idea

Find out why an extraction system topped our second annual search for brilliant inventions.
September 29, 2008

The second Annual Great Canadian Invention Competition is officially over - but not for our winners. Ameer and Amhed Taha. They'll have to figure out how to use $50,000 in engineering services from Mississauga, Ont.-based Nytric Ltd. and $10,000 in cash from Bereskin & Parr, a law firm specializing in Canadian intellectual property laws. The Tahas also received a $10,000 feasibility study by Nytric.

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With a little help from some lab rats; U of T students' work gets reward Win entrepreneur prize for invention

After countless lab hours spent tediously extracting fats from rat livers for research, Ameer Taha found himself thinking There has to be a better way.
May 06, 2006

So the PhD pharmacology student, with the help of his brother and two friends, set about inventing a machine that automates the extraction process, using "a couple of cheap motors from Radio Shack," reclaimed wood and steel, and about a year's worth of spare time tinkering in the basement of their University of Toronto dorm.

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