Mover, Shaker, Protein Maker

You hear stories every now and then of people like Abbas Mehdi, ’20 BSc — seemingly mythical beings who excel early, work in many fields, conduct meaningful research, cross genres, adapt internationally and volunteer for great causes.

Mehdi is very real, however. Not yet 30, he works for an Edmonton startup and is fast gaining prominence in the biotech sector. He also volunteers with a human rights education charity and is a mentor for one of the world’s most active trainee-led biotech accelerators.

Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Mehdi grew up in Doha, Qatar, started his undergraduate studies in Pittsburgh, Pa., at Carnegie Mellon University, then transferred to the University of Alberta in 2017 to complete his biology degree. He chose U of A partly because of its sterling reputation and partly because it recognized more of his credits than any other university. But until the mid-2010s, he’d never even heard of the place.

“It was a bit of a shock,” says Mehdi, laughing. “I was scheduled to move into HUB Mall, and the day I landed it was 40 below.”

A crucial turning point in his early days at the U of A was the 2019 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. His team garnered $65,000 from donors to the Faculty of Science and various other sources to support its research project and travel to the competition in Boston. He credits the experience for his “connections to the global biotech community that ended up directing [his] career path after graduation.”

During his degree, he began to get a feel for Edmonton’s biotech innovation sector. He was encouraged by the internship opportunities locally and across Canada. An early experience facilitated by the U of A Career Centre with a great mentor “who ticked all the boxes” — Antonio Bruni, ’18 PhD — helped Mehdi establish his path. “Antonio’s mentorship was the initial nudge, providing me with the guidance and tactics to navigate my career and gain experience targeted to biotech startups in Alberta.” Mehdi also understood that there were limited opportunities for biological science work in Qatar, and viewed the political climate in the United States as increasingly uncertain. So, he decided to make Edmonton his home.

“Somehow, it just happened to work out,” says Mehdi. “It’s been so great from a career perspective, too. I ended up with all the right opportunities, talking to the right people, doing my best in whatever I could.”

Just as he learned from a mentor, he also considers providing mentorship an opportunity for both parties. It’s in this capacity he works with Nucleate, a student-led organization representing the world’s largest community of innovators in the biological sciences. Originally a program at Harvard, Nucleate has grown to 41 chapters across 20 countries, operating at least 15 programs to help entrepreneurial biotech students find research and funding partners. Nucleate Canada is now launching across four centres — Alberta (Edmonton and Calgary), Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal — and its first Activator program will culminate in a showcase for finalists in Edmonton on May 21st, 2025.

“It’s rewarding because it’s about all those things that are going to help make students successful in the future,” Mehdi says.

Earlier this year, he worked with Cam Linke, ’07 BCom, ’21 MSc, CEO of Amii (the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute), to help Nucleate Canada host a biotech panel at Upper Bound, an AI conference that helps bridge theory and practice, academia and industry. Thousands of students, academics, business professionals and AI enthusiasts attended.

“Basically, Nucleate is about making sure local students are strategically aligned with the rest of the world,” says Mehdi. “One of the things that people may find surprising is that Edmonton has one of the most supportive biotech ecosystems anywhere. It makes it easy for people here to work with other people.”

Mehdi was a finalist for volunteer of the year at the 2023 YEG Startup Community Awards for co-founding the YEGBio Hangouts and YEG Startup Community Awards. He also finds time for the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights, where he focuses on governance and non-profit relationships as chair of community engagement. “It’s an amazing charity that champions grassroots organizations,” he says. “It has a great impact on advancing human rights education throughout every sector.”

Mehdi’s involvement in the biotech, startup and volunteer communities makes it easy to forget that he also has a day job as a research and development operations associate with Future Fields. The biotech company uses genetically modified fruit flies to produce recombinant proteins, ranging from simple growth factors similar to insulin used in diabetes treatment to complex proteins such as antibodies.

Currently, you might use bacteria, yeast, or animal cells in bioreactors to make such proteins. However, fruit flies are much simpler and use less space and food than cells in bioreactors, which lowers costs and makes companies more competitive in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and agriculture.

Future Fields is about to move into new digs in downtown Edmonton, which Mehdi predicts will ease the worldwide shortage of bioreactors — steel tanks that cultivate recombinant proteins from cells. By helping to get more bioproducts closer to scalability, he hopes Future Fields will contribute to the development of better, more affordable medicines.

Mehdi describes Edmonton as “very collaborative.” It reminds him a bit of Pittsburgh, another city that punches above its weight. A former steel town, Pittsburgh reinvented itself as a high-tech hub. Mehdi says the combination of industry and academics in Edmonton is familiar.

“I always feel good about investing my time and effort into the various initiatives here because you can always see a return,” he says. “Edmonton has all the right ingredients to be an amazing destination for research as well as biotech. There is a lot of optimism and energy here.”