Prince George, B.C.- Researchers at UNBC in Prince George have  landed a major  funding  boost to help in their  research on  wild mushrooms.

A team of UNBC researchers has received $389,908  from the Federal  Government’s  John R. Evans Leaders Fund to buy  the equipment they need to further their research into  mushrooms as a potential cancer and diabetes prevention or treatment.

a federal grant of nearly $400,000 to further their study of local mushrooms as a potential cancer and diabetes prevention or treatment.

Dr. Chow Lee is the lead investigator in this research.  He says while the money is ear marked for  equipment,  it will  mean  they can  expand their work “It will allow us to do a lot  of experiments that we couldn’t do. It will also  increase the pace of  our current experiments.  So the  infrastructure equipment  will be for performing chemical extraction from mushrooms,  equipment for purifying  different compounds and equipment for  to help us  identify the responsible  bio-active compounds, and most importantly it allows us to detect and analyze biological activities that comes from these mushroom fractions that are relevant to cancer and diabetes.”

But  this funding   is only  a piece of the research puzzle.  “To make full use of the  equipment,  we will need money to hire people” says Dr. Lee.   While some of the work can be done ‘in kind’ he says  there will also need to be funding for  things like chemicals, tubes,  and flasks .

It was  July of 2015 when Dr. Lee  and  a team of researchers from UNBC received $52 thousand  dollars from Genome BC Strategic Opportunities Fund,   the University matched those dollars to  bring the total  to just over $104 thousand.

The idea to study B.C.’s wild mushrooms came to him while on a trip to Hong Kong.  He noticed  finding medicinal compounds from natural products, including mushrooms was  “fairly common”  but  he says  the Chinese were using mushrooms from a grocery store “So,  the first  thing that came to my mind is we are in  northern B.C.  near the forest and  there are lots of wild mushrooms,  these are the good stuff.  So I collaborated with two mushroom  experts on campus  and we decided to go for it.”

The team has gathered  over a 100  wild mushroom species  from across Northern B.C.  and they have been doing chemical screening on those that have been collected.  “We are finding our which mushrooms are exciting  and if they have  interesting  bio-activity  and the ability to stimulate immune cells and some of these mushrooms are fairly potent in stimulating immune cells.”