Sunnybrook Hospital

Biotech company founded by U of T researchers secures US$85 million in financing

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 19:46:53 +0000

Biotech company founded by U of T researchers secures US$85 million in financing

geoff.vendeville Wed, 02/10/2021 - 14:46

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Juan Carlos Zúñiga-Pflücker (left), of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and Peter Zandstra, who is now at UBC, founded Notch Therapeutics at U of T in 2018.

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Breaking Research

Institute of Biomedical Engineering

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Cancer

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

MaRS

Medicine by Design

Sunnybrook Hospital

Notch Therapeutics, a biotechnology company developing renewable, stem-cell derived immunotherapies for cancer, said on Wednesday it had raised US$85 million in venture funding.

Notch was founded in 2018 by two pioneers of cell therapy research, Juan Carlos Zúñiga-Pflücker, chair of the department of immunology at the �ؿ�ζSM's Temerty Faculty of Medicine and a senior scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and Peter Zandstra, who was then at U of T and is now a professor at the University of British Columbia, but continues to collaborate with U of T’s Institute for Biomedical Engineering. The company was supported by MaRS Innovation (now Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners) and the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine.

The funding will enable Notch to triple its staff and expand to Seattle from its current operations in Toronto and Vancouver, the company said.

Christine Allen, U of T’s associate vice-president and vice-provost, strategic initiatives, described Notch and Vancouver’s AbCellera, which set the record for the biggest initial public offering for a Canadian biotech firm by raising US$555 million in December – as “recent Canadian success stories.”

“We need to ensure that these companies and the therapeutics they are developing remain in Canada,” Allen said. “This will only be possible if they are in an ecosystem that provides them with the money and talent they need.”

Notch's proprietary platform mimics the human thymus to generate a large quantity of T cells and other immune cells for therapeutic use. The company is using its platform to develop a pipeline of immune cell therapies, with cancer as its initial target.

“This is a platform that could spawn many products,” Notch president and CEO David Main told the Globe and Mail. “The holy grail for cell therapy is to make it more drug-like – ready to go as soon as it’s prescribed, applicable for anybody, and being able to make it in big enough quantities that you can treat thousands of patients.”

Over the last decade, U of T has been the launching pad for more than 500 research-based startups, generating more than $1.5 billion in investment.

Eight tips to manage your mental health over the holidays

rahul.kalvapalle — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 19:11:50 +0000

Eight tips to manage your mental health over the holidays

rahul.kalvapalle Fri, 12/18/2020 - 14:11

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(photo by Westend61 via Getty Images)

Rahul Kalvapalle

Topic

Our Community

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

The holidays can be a stressful time of year at the best of times. But this year’s festive season is shaping up to be more challenging than usual due to COVID-19.

With many parts of the country returning to lockdown, this year’s festive season will be different for many Canadians – and �ؿ�ζSM students, faculty and staff are no exception.

In most places, large family dinners, gatherings and holiday parties will be ruled out due to public health restrictions that are aimed at promoting physical distancing and curbing the spread of the virus.

Yet, experts from U of T and elsewhere say there are still many things you can do to find balance and care for your mental well-being over the holidays. Here are just a few tips:

Exercise

Physical health and fitness can have a significant impact on your mental health, so don’t wait to make a New Year’s resolution to get started.

There’s a wide variety of workouts that you can do at home with no equipment needed other than just your body’s weight. Dumbbells and workout bands are also great options if you want to introduce some resistance into your work out.

U of T’s Sport & Recreation division has made a series of workout videos, dubbed MoveU Anywhere!, that provides tips on quick, high-intensity workouts and YouTube abounds with hundreds of home workout videos to suit every strength and skill level.

If you’re in the Toronto region, you can look to take advantage of the city’s skating rinks, recreational trails, toboggan hills, snowshoeing loops and parks to get some outdoor exercise.

Get some fresh air

Experts recommend trying to get outside for fresh air at least once a day to avoid feeling cooped up, clear your head and find some mental balance.

To make it easier to maintain physical distancing, try heading out first thing in the morning or late in the evening – or use less busy streets and trails.

Connect with others remotely

While physical distancing continues to be of the utmost importance heading into the holiday season, there are still ways that you can maintain social connections with friends and family who aren’t in your household or bubble.

Zoom or Skype calls, virtual dinners, online games and even old-fashioned phone calls are a great way to stay connected and check in on one another.

In the lead-up to Thanksgiving and reading week, Vivek Goel, a renowned public health expert and a special adviser to U of T’s president and provost who is helping guide the university’s pandemic response, offered tips on how to stay connected with family – tips that still apply over the winter holiday season.

“You don’t have to be in the same room. It's time to be creative. There are family games you can do together online using different technologies. You can still do many of the things you're used to doing,” Goel said. “Of course, it’s not going to be exactly the same, but we need to explore other ways of interacting with each other for everyone’s benefit.”

Set healthy boundaries

The holiday season can sometimes bring unwanted obligations such as having to spend time with friends, family or co-workers who you’d rather avoid.

The pandemic has the potential to add another level of holiday awkwardness, as some people may choose to dismiss health guidelines, which, in turn, could you put you or your loved ones at risk. So, set and clearly communicate boundaries with others that are necessary for you to ensure your physical and mental health. Be polite, but firm – people’s lives depend on it.

Maintain a deliberate self-care routine

Rather than just occasionally take the time to relax or take care of yourself, make self-care a deliberate and consistent part of your daily routine.

Whether it’s doing things like exercise, yoga or meditation, cooking and eating healthy meals, indulging in a creative project or simply doing a hobby that you love, making self-care a part of your day-to-day life is always good advice – but it is particularly important during the pandemic when unfamiliar pressures and stresses abound.

For inspiration, take a look at the #UofTHoliday Checklist. Throughout the holidays, U of T will be sharing tips for interesting activities on Twitter and encouraging members of the community to participate in scavenger hunts, movie watching, mindfulness and more.

Sleep

It’s common knowledge that sleep is vital to both your physical and mental well-being, and this is all the more important during holidays – a time when you want to recharge and relax before going back to school or work in the New Year.

Good sleep hygiene is critical to achieving a good night’s rest. In a recent episode of the video series 3Qs at the U with U of T alumna, neuroscientist and science communicator Samantha Yammine, known as “Science Sam” on social media, sleep expert David Samson from U of T Mississauga unpacked some of the key steps you can take to maintain good sleep hygiene.

“Sleep hygiene means that the environment that you're sleeping in is distraction-free. You don't want any big LCD screens blasting you with blue-wave light because blue-wave light … is going to inhibit melatonin and melatonin is the principal hormone that drives your sleep-awake regulation,” Samson said.

Acknowledge that this year was a year unlike any other

Accept and acknowledge that this has been a unique year, and that this holiday season will be unlike any that came before. But also recognize that this, too, will pass – things will get better.

Openness to and awareness of the reality of life amid a pandemic can be helpful to overcoming it psychologically, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Contextual Behavioural Science.

It’s also helpful to remind yourself that the situation is temporary, and that there’s light at the end of the tunnel as countries around the world, including Canada, begin the process of vaccinating their citizens.

“In the end, there will be some type of solution. We will get some life back, of course,” said Janet Ellis, an assistant professor in U of T’s department of psychiatry in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, in a recent conversation with U of T News. “For young people, perhaps more than older people, this must have seemed endless. And saying, ‘Hang on for another six months’ may seem equally endless. But, of course, we can all hang on and we're going to come through this. It’s going to be part of our shared history.”

Seek help if you need it

If you find yourself struggling and in need of help, talk to a family member or a trusted friend or reach out to a mental health professional to get the help you need.

U of T offers an array of mental health services and supports, many of which can be delivered remotely. If you’re not sure of who to reach out to, a great place to start is the Student Mental Health Resource.

From astrophysics to literature: 29 researchers at U of T awarded Canada Research Chairs

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 17:15:54 +0000

From astrophysics to literature: 29 researchers at U of T awarded Canada Research Chairs

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 12/16/2020 - 12:15

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Twenty-nine U of T researchers are among 259 in Canada to receive new or renewed Canada Research Chairs, which support exceptional work across a wide variety of fields (U of T file photo)

Alison Kenzie

Topic

Our Community

Institute of Biomedical Engineering

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Pediatrics

Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research

Cell and Systems Biology

Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Canada Research Chairs

Chemical Engineering

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Electrical & Computer Engineering

English

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Faculty of Arts & Science

St. Michael's Hospital

Sunnybrook Hospital

Ted Sargent

U of T Mississauga

University Health Network

Vasanti Malik’s research into the dietary and lifestyle risk factors for chronic diseases has far-reaching implications – for both individuals and the world.

By considering risk factors for type 2 diabetes across the lifespan – including in utero exposures, maternal health and childhood obesity – the assistant professor of nutritional sciences in the �ؿ�ζSM’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine intends to develop a “dietary environmental index.”

The index would allow health practitioners and the public to understand how food and lifestyle choices can affect their own health as well as the health of the planet.

“What we eat has an impact on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use and so on,” says Malik, adding that she can envision a smartphone app that helps underscore such connections for Canadians.

Soon, she will also be working with pregnant women in Chennai, India to study how reducing refined carbohydrate intake (for instance, substituting brown rice for white rice) can prevent gestational diabetes. This data could not only improve maternal health, but also potentially reduce childhood obesity, a risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes later in life.

Malik is one of 29 researchers at U of T – and among 259 nationwide – to receive new or renewed Canada Research Chairs, which support exceptional work across a wide variety of fields. (See the full list below.)

“I would like to congratulate all the �ؿ�ζSM researchers who received a new chair or had their chair renewed in this round,” says University Professor Ted Sargent, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.

“This important federal support and recognition will enable our leading researchers to pursue critical research across a number of fields, helping generate new knowledge and innovative ideas that could ultimately change the way we live here in Canada and around the world.”

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Canada Research Chairs program, established by the federal government to attract and retain top Canadian researchers working in a variety of disciplines – from engineering, the natural sciences and health sciences to the humanities and social sciences. The investment is significant: up to $295 million each year.

With 315 chairs total, U of T receives more than $46 million annually in funding from the Canada Research Chairs program.

At the same time, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) – in collaboration with the CRC program – announced support for two U of T researchers through its John R. Evans Leaders Fund (JELF), which helps universities pay for cutting edge laboratories and equipment. The two U of T researchers are Kieran Campbell and Hartland Jackson, both of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in the Sinai Health System.

As for Malik, her tier two Chair in Nutrition and Chronic Disease Prevention brings with it five years of funding (renewable once) and the chance to pursue an ambitious three-part research project that will span Canada and India and involve collaboration with experts from nutritional science, environmental science and economics.

She says the award seemed “unattainable” during her many years of graduate and post-doctoral training, which she began at U of T and completed at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Malik adds that being situated within the Temerty Faculty of Medicine is an asset, allowing her to collaborate with clinicians working in partner hospitals and giving her a front row seat to how her research might impact clinical care guidelines.

“My ultimate goal is to create evidence for policy – evidence that links diet and lifestyle choices to chronic disease prevention,” Malik says.

Malik says she is looking forward to the opportunity to collaborate with economists and other researchers at U of T and beyond. She has many questions: Would a plant-based diet be feasible for low-income Canadian households? Would brown rice be easily accessible to Indian families living in poverty? Can governments here and abroad afford not to invest in chronic disease prevention, given the high costs of an unhealthy population?

While COVID-19 has put her travel plans on pause, Malik is excited to prepare for teaching her first class at U of T, a fourth-year international and community nutrition course that aligns with her research interests. As she strategizes how to make the course as interactive as possible, Malik looks forward to the energy generated by her students as they learn and discuss new ideas.

“We’re all figuring this out together,” she says.

Here are the new and renewed Canada Research Chairs at U of T:

New Canada Research Chairs

Jennifer Adese of the department of sociology at U of T Mississauga, tier two in Métis women, politics, and identity
Gillian Booth of the department of medicine in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto, tier one in policy solutions for diabetes prevention and management
Kieran Campbell of the department of molecular genetics in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health System, tier two in machine learning for translational biomedicine
Angela Colantonio of the department of occupational science and occupational therapy in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, tier one in traumatic brain injury in underserved populations
Herbert Gaisano of the department of medicine in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, and the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, tier one in diseases of endocrine and exocrine pancreas
Jennifer Gommerman of the department of immunology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, tier one in tissue-specific immunity
Ali Hooshyar of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. department of electrical and computer engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, tier two in electric power systems
Timothy Hughes of the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, tier one in decoding gene regulation
Hartland Jackson of the department of molecular genetics in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health System, tier two in systems pathology
Hae-Young Kee of the department of physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science, tier one in theory of quantum materials
David Lie of the department of electrical and computer engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, tier one in secure and reliable systems
Radhakrishnan Mahadevan of the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, tier one in metabolic systems engineering
Vasanti Malik of the department of nutritional sciences in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, tier two in nutrition and chronic disease prevention
Stephen Matthews of the department of physiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, tier one in early development and health
Nick Reed of the department of occupational science and occupational therapy in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, tier two in pediatric concussion
Lisa Robinson of the department of paediatrics in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and the Hospital for Sick Children, tier one in vascular inflammation and kidney injury
John Rogers of the department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Science, tier one in early modern literature and culture
Shoshanna Saxe of the department of civil and mineral engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, tier two in sustainable infrastructure
Greg Stanisz of the department of medical biophysics in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and Sunnybrook Research Institute, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, tier one in cancer imaging
Harindra Wijeysundera of the department of medicine in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and Sunnybrook Research Institute, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, tier two in structural heart disease policy and outcomes
Hannah Wunsch of the department of anesthesiology and pain medicine in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and Sunnybrook Research Institute, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, tier two in critical care organization and outcomes
Azadeh Yadollahi of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and University Health Network, tier two in cardiorespiratory engineering

Renewed Canada Research Chairs

Jo Bovy of the David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science, tier two in galactic astrophysics
Birsen Donmez of the department of mechanical and industrial engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, tier two in human factors and transportation
Lisa Forman of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, tier two in human rights and global health equity
Alan Moses of the department of cell and systems biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science, tier two in computational biology
Anthony Niblett of the Faculty of Law, tier two in law, economics and innovation
Laura Rosella of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, tier two in population health analytics
Arjumand Siddiqi of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, tier two in population health equity

Structure, hobbies, exercise and check-ins: U of T expert on taking care of yourself during COVID-19

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 21:01:58 +0000

Structure, hobbies, exercise and check-ins: U of T expert on taking care of yourself during COVID-19

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 11/30/2020 - 16:01

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Make time for an "authentic connection with someone at least once every day, if not more than once a day," recommends Janet Ellis, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook and U of T assistant professor (photo by recep-bg via Getty Images)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Our Community

Coronavirus

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Mental Health

Psychiatry

Sunnybrook Hospital

After a lull in new COVID-19 cases over the summer, Canada and many other parts of the world are now experiencing a second wave of the virus – and it comes at a time that can be stressful for many under ordinary circumstances.

In Ontario, the latest surge – along with the restrictions to counter it – coincides with the transition from fall to winter, with its shorter days, longer nights, and the holiday season fast approaching.

Janet Ellis is an assistant professor in the �ؿ�ζSM’s department of psychiatry and psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. She says it’s important to acknowledge students will likely be feeling added pressure and stress from COVID-19 – not just because of exams or assignments but because they are at a stage of life when they would normally be attending classes in person, socializing and involving themselves in new activities on campus, which are all more difficult to do amid the pandemic.

First-year residents will likely have been looking forward to this once-in-a lifetime opportunity to participate in university life, while final year students may feel as though something has been taken away from them, Ellis adds.

But Ellis says there are ways to cope. They include developing a routine, setting boundaries around work, being kind to yourself and others and limiting what’s come to be known as “doomscrolling” on social media and news media.

Ellis recently spoke to U of T News writer Geoffrey Vendeville about the many challenges of living with COVID-19 and what you can do to take care of yourself.

Why is this such a difficult time for everyone?

People are struggling with the fact that the whole world has changed. It's a shock. That said, the ability to adapt is one of humans' greatest attributes.

I think we've adapted but, in the course of adapting, there have been quite a few losses. There's been the loss of all sorts of rituals, especially for students. Some didn't have a high school graduation, or, if they did, it was virtual. No celebrations, no travel. They have also lost the ability to fully spread their wings and meet all sorts of different people, separate and individuate, at university. This is the time for strong peer connection, a sense of freedom and growth. Instead, they are expected to transition to online classes and have the discipline to maintain a solitary routine without the usual array of social activities or unrestricted access to exercise, sports or restaurants and friends.

If people are vulnerable, they're more likely to suffer from the loss of a lifestyle that would perhaps have provided more opportunity for growth and support. Instead, they're having to draw on inner resources to cope with isolation.

And, in general, even though we're all highly dependent on social media and the internet for connection, we also know from research that depression and anxiety go up the more time you spend on social media. So, it's a mixed blessing that we have it and we should be wary of it being our main connection with the outside world.

What is your advice for coping with the added pressure and stress of living through COVID-19?

In terms of COVID-19 stress, there may be an increase in financial stress, including loss of jobs for students, as well as family members, the threat of illness or being a vector of illness for a vulnerable family member.

My advice, in general, is in some ways quite prosaic and won't surprise you at all, because it involves trying to have a routine and to increase deliberate self-care. For students, this means trying to develop a routine around their online courses. Any of us who has done an online course will understand the challenge and self-discipline required. You're less accountable, you're not actually visible in the class necessarily. The goal is to try and establish a routine that, at the end of the day, gives you a sense of progression and satisfaction of having learned something.

It’s important to include healthy eating and daily connection into the daily routine – although many things are shut down right now – and find a way to exercise and find a change of scenery.

I've heard from many people that they're struggling to set boundaries between their personal and work lives.

Yes. There’s a New Yorker cartoon I love that says: “I can’t remember – do I work at home or do I live at work?”

Most students will have some of their routine determined by lectures. To start with, I would say it's very important to attend those lectures as if you're in person, if you can. It will give you a structure.

Like much of the advice in terms of work-home balance, especially with the blurring of boundaries with COVID-19, it’s important to ensure that you characterize and plan your day in terms of “work time” and your own “me time”.

Students may not necessarily have a nine-to-five schedule. Some people will no doubt have classes in the evening, but they can determine which part of each day is their own time. Maybe they can colour-code their calendar and they can schedule in their exercise and time to get out each day, as well as time for social connection.

I believe that it is important to have authentic connection with someone at least once every day, if not more than once a day, instead of aimlessly scrolling through social media, which can induce feeling as if in some way you’re missing out.

When you’re stuck at home, you can feel isolated, lonely, disconnected and perhaps even a bit of a loser in comparison to what you see on social media – because we all put our best face forward there.

Another piece of advice is not to spend hours scrolling through negative news. At the moment, we can all develop quite a compulsion looking for COVID-19 news and numbers. But I think our brains could all use a certain number of hours a day focusing on positive and more resilience-based things. Initially, there was a COVID-19 movement to take up a musical instrument, learn how to bake soda bread, a new language and so on. I am not suggesting that people should feel pressured, rather they should try to find an hour or two a day of enjoyable distraction that is also healthy or creative. People do not need to become multi-talented, but I think it would be helpful to have something that they genuinely enjoy, whether it’s cooking or some type of hobby.

This is also a time when students are preparing for exams, a stressful period at the best of times. What advice can you offer?

I would really acknowledge that we're asking a lot of our students at the moment. They have faced maybe proportionally more loss in terms of freedom and restrictions, considering their phase of life when they should be able to mix with their peers, and have all sorts of programming and experiences available.

I would suggest that students could come to understand that they’re part of this generation experiencing this historic time together and should try to help one other through it. Maybe form study groups, share notes or engage in other resilience-based activities such as taking turns in leading virtual exercise classes or music or sharing humour.

For example, at Sunnybrook, some of the non-psychiatry teams have had the most innovative ideas about keeping up morale. In the department of pathology, they made a cookbook out of everyone’s favorite recipes, in order to have a team activity that took people's minds off the negative.

I would add that during exams it’s more important than ever for students to be kind to themselves and to try to keep things in proportion. This too shall pass.

And if they are using a substance or struggling with mental health – seek help. It is important to keep an eye out for others who may be using more substance, isolating too much or visibly struggling with depression or anxiety. Encourage each other to get help, ask your peers how they are doing, try to include anyone who seems to be struggling in a virtual social group or distanced walk and talk.

Maybe one of the silver linings of COVID-19 will be that it has highlighted people’s stress and mental health so much that it will de-stigmatize checking in with one another. Maybe it will also help with setting limits and maybe not putting such high expectations and punishing yourself if you feel you haven’t done well enough. Maybe it will give all of us a sense of proportion and learn how important a skill it is to learn how to self-care.

How would recommend helping people who are struggling if you're in a position to help?

Ask the question – the genuine question: How are you really doing? Because of course we all have the social niceties of saying, “How are you? Fine.” It’s necessary to break through that and say this is a real check-in and that it is ok to answer honestly.

We know that, across the board, people are struggling more with mental health. It’s important to acknowledge that everyone is more vulnerable at the moment. Depression, anxiety and substance abuse are up across the board. This is no fun. Isolation is distressing and people are more bored.

We know that it is impacting youth disproportionately. I think partly it’s because of all the losses I’ve described and partly because of concerns about future impact on employment and the economy.

What has to come out of this somehow is an acceptance of that – and innovative ways of people finding resilience and drawing together to cope.

It’s essential to check in and recognize when people are distressed by COVID-19-related losses and, at the same time, really encourage ways of connecting and finding meaningful activities. Don’t lose your routine because “who cares what time you go to bed, because you can do work anytime” – or because of spending a vast amount of time on social media.

You need the reverse of that. You need to increase connection with friends and family, and have a routine, delineate your work time from me time. Every person may have a different way of truly connecting with people. Maybe it will be talking about yourselves or maybe it will be sharing an interest or going for a walk or doing an online workout session together, or studying together, plus the check in. Perhaps you could deliberately have a buddy to have a daily check-in and be honest about how you’re feeling and agree together on what you would do if one of you were to slip. Finding a sense of meaning in life – friends, family, a pet, schoolwork, helping others – and feeling connected and in a community are very protective. We cannot get through this pandemic solo. We need to get through it together.

Do you think it's useful to remind ourselves that this is temporary and that there is light at the end of the tunnel?

Absolutely. Because in the end, there will be some type of solution. We will get some life back, of course. For young people, perhaps more than older people, this must have seemed endless. And saying, “Hang on for another six months” may seem equally endless. But, of course, we can all hang on and we're going to come through this. It’s going to be part of our shared history.

Low-carbon health care: U of T, local hospitals launch Sustainable Health System Community of Practice

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:41:06 +0000

Low-carbon health care: U of T, local hospitals launch Sustainable Health System Community of Practice

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 09/28/2020 - 11:41

Cutline

Toronto's Michael Garron Hospital is one of several hospital members of the Sustainable Health System Community of Practice, which aims to help reduce carbon emissions of the health-care system (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Topic

Our Community

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Faculty of Dentistry

Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education

Hospital for Sick Children

Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Mount Sinai Hospital

St. Michael's Hospital

Sunnybrook Hospital

Sustainability

University Health Network

Women's College Hospital

Recognizing the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to health care, leaders from the 12 hospital systems that comprise the Toronto Academic Health Science Network (TAHSN) and the seven health science faculties that make up the �ؿ�ζSM’s Council of Health Sciences have formed the Sustainable Health System Community of Practice.

The group, which held its first meeting on Sept. 25, will provide evidence, ideas, leadership and advocacy to reduce carbon emissions through co-ordinated action, research and education.

The initiative is co-chaired by Adalsteinn (Steini) Brown, dean of the �ؿ�ζSM’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and Joshua Tepper, CEO of North York General Hospital and a professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME).

“This project represents an opportunity for TAHSN, along with the Council of Health Sciences, to lead locally and beyond in building a more environmentally sustainable health system,” says Tepper. “The enthusiasm with which the initiative has been met across the leadership of our hospitals demonstrates an understanding of the importance of this issue and an appetite for real change.

“This is the kind of collaboration we need to see if we’re going to meaningfully address climate change.”

Hazards related to climate change have significant implications for human health and health systems. Rising atmospheric and oceanic temperatures, for instance, are linked to more frequent and severe storms, floods, wildfires, heat waves and infectious diseases that damage infrastructure and reduce access to resources. Weakened hospital infrastructure and interrupted supply chains in turn endanger health-care providers, users and their caregivers. Moreover, poor air quality worsens the condition of people with respiratory illnesses, putting further pressure on our already strained health system. Despite their mission to support well-being, health systems contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the climate crisis.

“It’s imperative that every sector take responsibility for its contributions to climate change, and health care is no exception,” says Brown. “Part of how we do that is by engaging health-care executives to properly support and scale up existing and new efforts to reduce the environmental impact of care.

“The success of these efforts also depends on engaging the entire health sciences community to support the development of evidence, identify implementation pathways and build capacity for change by providing educational opportunities for students, trainees and practising health professionals. The Community of Practice will do both.”

One of the mandates of the Community of Practice is to share knowledge about low-carbon care to drive sustainable quality improvement. Examples include the use of anesthetic gases and asthma inhalers that are better for the environment, as well as expanding sustainable practices like virtual care.

Health care is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. There is no other public sector entity that is as carbon-intensive as health care, says Fiona Miller, a professor at IHPME and founding director of the Centre for Sustainable Health Systems, which is serving as the secretariat for the Community of Practice. The centre pursues research, innovation, training and networking to support high-quality, low-carbon care.

Members of TAHSN already have environmental sustainability offices or teams that have been working – in some cases for decades – to reduce their organization’s carbon footprint. In joining the Community of Practice, senior leaders at TAHSN hospitals recognize the strategic importance of sustainable care and the opportunity to make advances by leveraging collective expertise, according to Miller.

“There is tremendous potential to do more together,” she says. “The Community of Practice is about evaluating what we’re doing, being able to build and share knowledge and understand better the impacts of these initiatives when they are scaled up or spread.”

Why does health care have such a big carbon footprint?

“It’s because we use a lot of carbon-intensive products. We’re tucked into global supply chains that involve a lot of resource-intensive materials and a lot of transportation and energy production are necessary to make the goods and services that we use in health care,” Miller says.

The Community of Practice is comprised of Baycrest Health Sciences, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, Michael Garron Hospital, North York General Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, Sinai Health, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Trillium Health Partners, Unity Health Toronto, University Health Network and Women’s College Hospital.

The Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the following health sciences faculties at U of T also comprise the Community of Practice: the Faculty of Dentistry, the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education, the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.

The Centre for Sustainable Health Systems will support the Community of Practice, co-ordinating evidence-based actions and initiatives that move health systems toward high quality, low-carbon care.

'We knew what was coming': U of T pharmacist on working in the ICU during COVID-19

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 13:52:40 +0000

'We knew what was coming': U of T pharmacist on working in the ICU during COVID-19

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 09/18/2020 - 09:52

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Lisa Burry, an assistant professor at U of T’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, says there were significant drug requirements for COVID-19 patients who were put on ventilators for an extended period (photo courtesy of Faculty of Medicine)

Topic

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Mount Sinai Hospital

Sunnybrook Hospital

Health-care professionals working in the intensive care unit (ICU) are familiar with unpredictable and stressful situations, and complex patient loads. But a highly contagious viral pandemic and global shortages of critically important drugs created new challenges, even for seasoned professionals.

Lisa Burry, an assistant professor at the �ؿ�ζSM’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, is an experienced ICU pharmacist at Mount Sinai Hospital. Burry worked in the ICU during the SARS outbreak in 2003, giving her and her colleagues a sense of what was to come as COVID-19 intensified.

“Some of the fear and anxiety that we dealt with through SARS probably helped us cope better with COVID-19. We had some insight as to the potential impact,” she says. “However, we were also fearful because we knew what was coming.”

That included familiarity with the discomfort associated with wearing personal protective equipment all day long, the stress of being exposed to highly contagious patients for full shifts and demanding case loads. It also meant preparing for a surge of ICU patients and potential drug shortages.

As a member of the Society of Critical Care Medicine’s Fundamental Disaster Management Working Group and the American College of Chest Physicians’ Task Force for Mass Critical Care and Disaster Management Steering Committee, Burry had important insight and access to resources, which she says was key to helping the ICU prepare for COVID-19.

The hospital prepared for the height of the pandemic when ICU capacity threatened to be overwhelmed by creating temporary ICUs in areas of the hospital that were no longer being used such as post-op recovery rooms.

Burry’s research expertise – sedation and delirium in the ICU – put her in high demand to lead and support various research projects. Current practice for many conditions recommends that patients on ventilators receive pain medication to be calm and comfortable, but as alert and interactive as possible. However, this wasn’t possible with patients with COVID-19 who were put on ventilators, as they needed to be deeply sedated.

“Patients with COVID-19 in the ICU were ventilated for very long periods of time and had huge drug requirements for pain, agitation and delirium just to make their ventilation safe,” Burry says.

Hospitals across the country all experienced the same scenario and tried to access the same sedatives, causing supplies to run low. Now, on top of dealing with high numbers of patients and complex cases, pharmacists were facing shortages of criticial drugs.

“In the beginning, those of us in critical care were trying to solve these problems in isolation and not recognizing that another site was dealing with the same thing,” says Burry. “That led to a group of us working together to deal with the issue on a provincial level and ultimately led to research to test new strategies to manage it.”

Challenges in patient care leads to new clinical trials

At a time when Burry’s clinical work was busier than ever, research opportunities were also growing rapidly. She worked closely with multi-disciplinary teams to develop research proposals to study potential solutions to the drug shortages they were facing in the ICU – two of which were successful. As a co-investigator, Burry brings a valuable pharmacy perspective to research examining alternatives to traditionally used intravenous sedatives for patients on ventilators.

One trial, led by Angela Jerath and Brian Cuthbertson from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and U of T’s Faculty of Medicine, as well as Claudio Martin and Marat Slessarev from London Health Sciences Centre, will compare inhaled gases typically used in the operating room to intravenous sedatives for COVID-19 patients on ventilators. Inhaled sedatives are not used outside of operating rooms in North America, but are cheap, widely available and reduce lung inflammation and improve oxygen levels.

“We know the way in which we sedate people, the drug we select, how we do it and how long we do it can all impact how long they spend with us and their overall recovery,” says Burry.

The trial is receiving more than $2 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) COVID-19 Rapid Response Competition.

“While the trial may be COVID-centric, it addresses issues we can apply far beyond this pandemic. This is valuable work because it has the ability to improve patient care, but also deal with drug shortages and issues without compromising patient care,” says Burry.

The second clinical trial, funded through a McMaster Medicine Associates Innovation Grant, is led by Alison Fox-Robichaud at Hamilton Health Sciences and James Downar at the Ottawa Hospital. It is examining whether adding the old beta-blocker propranolol to standard sedation regimens reduces the amount of primary sedative required, another approach to decrease the consumption of essential sedatives.

As Burry reflects on the challenges of the last several months, she says she is proud of the work that she has done serving both her patients and her profession through participating in the new research projects and the professional working groups.

“Access to drugs is an important part of disaster management and I’m proud to have contributed to guidelines and protocols that have helped in this pandemic,” she says. “I’ve been given some good opportunities to be part of championing work that we’ve published about supply shortages.

“Despite all the challenges of COVID, I’ve made new connections, built new research networks and learned to do things more quickly and efficiently. The research we are doing may improve treatment for COVID-19 and should lead to shorter ICU stays and improved outcomes. Some positive things have come out of the last few months.”

U of T experts receive $9.5 million in funding for research infrastructure

rahul.kalvapalle — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 16:52:29 +0000

U of T experts receive $9.5 million in funding for research infrastructure

rahul.kalvapalle Wed, 08/26/2020 - 12:52

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(photo by Ken Jones)

Rahul Kalvapalle

Topic

Our Community

Institute of Biomedical Engineering

Ecology & Environmental Biology

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Dentistry

Faculty of Information

Faculty of Medicine

Hospital for Sick Children

Immunology

Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Mechanical & Industrial Engineering

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Physics

Psychology

St. Michael's Hospital

University Health Network

UTIAS

Thirty-three research projects at the �ؿ�ζSM, spanning fields from artificial intelligence and smart manufacturing to cancer detection and neurodegeneration, are set to benefit from more than $9.5 million in federal funding that will support research infrastructure needs and expenses.

The grants, which range in amount from more than $76,000 to $800,000, are being awarded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund. Named for the late U of T President Emeritus John R. Evans, the fund aims to empower researchers with the equipment and technology they need to move their projects forward and maximize their impact.

The funding also helps universities remain competitive in global research and technology development by helping to attract top researchers in their fields.

“The crucial support provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation underpins the important research that takes places every day across our three campuses,” said Ted Sargent, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.

“Researchers at U of T are addressing some of the most complex and interesting challenges of our time, in fields ranging from the humanities and social sciences to medicine and engineering, and they depend on facilities, equipment and technology to help realize their discoveries.”

The largest award destined for U of T – $800,000 – goes to an active learning research lab project being led by James Slotta, professor and President's Chair in Knowledge Technologies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Goldie Nejat, professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, will receive $440,474 for her work on robotics infrastructure for smart manufacturing.

Bianca Schroeder, an associate professor in U of T Scarborough’s department of computer and mathematical sciences, will use her $120,000 award for her work in the area of computer systems support for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Other funded projects at U of T include the Sleep and Human Evolution Lab led by Assistant Professor David Samson of the department of anthropology at U of T Mississauga, which will receive $151,714 in support.

In total, CFI awarded more than $96 million in funding to 377 research infrastructure projects at 55 institutions across Canada. That includes more than $22 million under CFI’s Infrastructure Operating Fund, which helps pay for the incremental operating and maintenance costs of new infrastructure.

“Support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation ensures researchers are equipped for success at every stage of their career,” Roseann O’Reilly Runte, president and CEO of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, said in a statement.

“The John R. Evans Leaders Fund helps Canadian universities, institutes and research hospitals create the conditions necessary for their talented researchers to excel.”

The following 33 U of T researchers and projects received funding through the John R. Evans Leaders Fund:

Christine Allen, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy: Next generation polymeric microparticles for the treatment of osteoarthritis

Alán Aspuru-Guzik, departments of chemistry and computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science: Chemspeed automated chemical synthesis system

Michael Best, department of psychology at U of T Scarborough: Psychosis research lab – assessment of biological, psychological, and behavioural factors associated with psychosis

Matthew Buechler, department of immunology in the Faculty of Medicine: A research program to study the role of fibroblasts in the pathogenesis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, department of mathematical and computational sciences at the U of T Mississauga: Immersive interaction and morphological control for continuum robot systems

Jean Chen, department of medical biophysics in the Faculty of Medicine and Baycrest Centre: Linking neural and vascular aging in the brain: from biophysics to cognition

Leo Chou, Institute of Biomedical Engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering: DNA nanotechnology for spatially programmed immune receptor activation

Xu Chu, department of Earth sciences in the Faculty of Arts & Science: Mass transport in Earth’s lithosphere revealed by in-situ LA-ICP-MS micro-analyses

Miriam Diamond, department of physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science: Detector prototype units for long-lived particle searches

Peter Dirks, department of surgery in the Faculty of Medicine and the Hospital for Sick Children: A non-invasive approach to visualizing tumour growth in vivo through space and time

Claudia dos Santos, department of medicine in the Faculty of Medicine and Unity Health: A shift in paradigm – a novel stratification system for critical illness

Siew-Ging Gong, Faculty of Dentistry: Infrastructure for Canadian National Caries Network

Björn Herrmann, department of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science and Baycrest Centre: Sensory-cognitive listening assessment to transform hearing loss outcomes

Jane Howe, department of materials science and engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering: Advanced scanning electron microscope for in situ and liquid-phase electron microscopy studies

Nikolina Ilic, department of physics in the Faculty of Arts and Science: Readout the answers

Rutsuko Ito, department of psychology at U of T Scarborough: Neural circuit changes in decision-making across the lifespan – relevance to mental health disorders

Gabor Kovacs, department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Faculty of Medicine and University Health Network: Tracking down neurodegeneration in the human brain – from functional systems to the subcellular level

Cara Krmpotich, Faculty of Information: Recovery and recuperation – mobilizing the next generation of GRASAC

Hon Sing Leong, department of medical biophysics in the Faculty of Medicine and Sunnybrook Research Institute: Extracellular vesicle and patient avatar technology cores for translational and clinical research

Goldie Nejat, department of mechanical and industrial engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering: Robotics infrastructure for smart manufacturing (RISM)

Nicolas Papernot, department of electrical and computer engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering: Trustworthy machine learning

Tomas Paus, department of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science and Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital: Charting diversity in brain maturation

Trevor Pugh, department of medical biophysics in the Faculty of Medicine and University Health Network: Defining cancer and immune landscapes in multiple myeloma using single cell transcriptomics and ultra-deep DNA sequencing

Chelsea Rochman, department of ecology and evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science: Microplastic sources, fate and effects research laboratory

David Samson, department of anthropology at U of T Mississauga: Sleep and Human Evolution Lab (SHEL) – testing evolutionary hypotheses in a clinical, controlled space

Bianca Schroeder, department of computer and mathematical sciences at U of T Scarborough: Computer systems support for machine learning and artificial intelligence

Florian Shkurti, department of mathematics in the Faculty of Arts & Science: Autonomous mobile manipulation in human environments – learning algorithms and robot systems

John Sled, department of medical biophysics in the Faculty of Medicine and the Hospital for Sick Children: Advanced imaging of mouse development – early adversity and brain health

James Slotta, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education: Active learning research labs

Hoon-Ki Sung, department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Faculty of Medicine and the Hospital for Sick Children: In-depth 2D and whole tissue 3D detection of tissue fibro-inflammation in metabolic diseases

Jacqueline Sztepanacz, department of ecology and evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science: Mapping genotypes to phenotypes and phenotypes to fitness

Sara Vasconcelos, department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Faculty of Medicine and University Health Network: Cardiac regeneration and in vitro disease modeling

Steven Waslander, U of T Institute for Aerospace Studies in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering: Autonomous docking and active perception for unmanned aerial vehicles

From Canada to Uganda and beyond: U of T researchers receive funding for COVID-19 projects

lanthierj — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 16:22:13 +0000

From Canada to Uganda and beyond: U of T researchers receive funding for COVID-19 projects

lanthierj Tue, 07/21/2020 - 12:22

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Congolese asylum-seekers line up to undergo security and health screening in Zombo, near the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (photo by Rocco Nuri/UNHCR)

Paul Fraumeni

Topic

Breaking Research

Coronavirus

Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation

Anaesthesiology

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Faculty of Medicine

Hospital for Sick Children

Immunology

Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Molecular Genetics

Mount Sinai Hospital

Psychiatry

Research & Innovation

St. Michael's Hospital

Sunnybrook Hospital

U of T Mississauga

University Health Network

Since early June, more than 7,000 refugees and displaced persons have arrived in the African nation of Uganda, most fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“Even in the midst of a pandemic, we see people being displaced,” says the �ؿ�ζSM’s Carmen Logie, an associate professor in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.

Logie’s usual research focus is on understanding and developing interventions to address stigma and other social factors associated with HIV and sexually transmitted infections. She has long placed a special emphasis on refugees and displaced persons in countries like Haiti and Uganda.

Now, Logie is turning her attention to how COVID-19 is affecting adolescents and young people who are refugees in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. She’s using social media to help these young people receive information about preventing COVID-19 – and to express their feelings and concerns.

“We already have a study in Kampala on urban refugees but we had to put it on hold when COVID-19 forced everyone into lockdown,” says Logie, who is Canada Research Chair in Global Health Equity and Social Justice With Marginalized Populations. “Our community partners in Kampala identified a lack of information tailored to preventing COVID-19 for young people in their languages. We think using social media tools will be an innovative and effective way to hear about their experiences and knowledge of the virus and to get them the information they need.”

Logie’s research team is one of 139 across Canada that are sharing more than $109 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), awarded through its second rapid research funding competition. Included are eight teams from U of T and 18 at the university’s partner hospitals. All are focused on COVID-19 research.

“The �ؿ�ζSM is grateful to the CIHR for this important investment, one that will enable our scholars to contribute to the global effort to understand COVID-19,” says University Professor Ted Sargent, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives. “It’s especially notable that this funding focuses on projects, such as Professor Logie’s, in which there will be collaboration with researchers in lower and middle income countries.”

Logie is working with Richard Lester, a professor at the University of British Columbia, and Gabrielle Serafini, who have developed WelTel, a text-messaging app that assists health professionals in communicating with patients.

There are approximately 1.4 million refugees in Uganda, the largest refugee-hosting nation in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 80,000 living in Kampala.

Logie notes that adolescents and youth comprise nearly half of the world’s refugee and displaced person population.

“In humanitarian settings, the needs of people are often not understood or met,” she says. “This is also true in pandemics and, especially, with young people and adolescents. For example, we found that hand hygiene studies in Uganda did not include adolescents. They were aimed at adults and children.

“We know that adolescents have their own lived experiences and challenges, so we need to understand that and enable them to express themselves.”

With that in mind, Logie, her collaborators at UBC and refugee agencies on the ground in Kampala will adapt the WelTel technology to engage young people and adolescents who are refugees. The goal, Logie says, is to help them “talk about how COVID-19 is impacting their lives. We will develop a group chat app to send information out and enable young people to apply that information to their lives.”

While the pandemic has exacerbated problems such as isolation and poverty around the world, its impact on the people Logie studies in Uganda has been particularly harsh.

“In the refugee settlements in northern Uganda, for example, the only places they had to interact with others and to stay busy in the face of widespread unemployment were places like churches, community centres and shops,” she says. “But now that COVID-19 has forced people to stay at home or in refugee camps, they are really struggling with isolation.”

Equally troubling is the incidence of food insecurity.

“For the refugee youth in Kampala, before COVID-19, we found that 70 per cent didn’t have enough to eat. Now, our agency partners are saying it’s even worse with the lockdown not enabling people to work,” says Logie.

“This is true around the world, but among refugees in Kampala they need to make money every day just to survive that day. So the impact of the lockdown is extraordinary – it is putting people into another dimension of poverty. “

The following researchers at U of T and its partner hospitals have received CIHR funding for COVID-19-related projects:

Philip Awadalla, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research; department of molecular genetics in the Faculty of Medicine; Surveilling Prospective Population Cohorts for COVID19 Prevalence and Outcomes in Canada (SUPPORT-Canada)

Angela Cheung, University Health Network; Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME) in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Canadian COVID-19 Prospective Cohort Study (CanCOV)

Vladimir Dzavik, University Health Network; department of medicine in the Faculty of Medicine; Semaglutide to Reduce Myocardia Injury in Patients with COVID-19 (SEMPATICO): An Exploratory Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial

Andrea Gershon, Sunnybrook Research Institute; IHPME in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; CovidFree@Home: Development and Validation of a Multivariable Prediction Model of deterioration in Patients Diagnosed with COVID-19 Who Are Managing at Home

Daniel Grace, Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Engage-COVID-19: A Mixed Methods Study of Biomedical, Behavioural, and Psychosocial Aspects of the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Gay, Bisexual and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men in Canada

Astrid Guttmann, Hospital for Sick Children; IHPME in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Deferred Care Outcomes in Canadian Children and Youth: Measuring and Mitigating Risk During COVID-19

Joanna Henderson, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health; department of psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine; Youth Mental Health and Substance Use in the Context of COVID-19: A Rapid Response Multi-component Program of Youth-engaged Research and Action

Angela Jerath, Sunnybrook Research Institute; department of anesthesiology and pain medicine in the Faculty of Medicine; Sedating With Volatile Anesthetic Agents in Critically Ill COVID-19 Patients in ICU: Effects on Ventilatory Parameters and Survival (the SAVE-ICU trial)

Kevin Kain, University Health Network; department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Faculty of Medicine; A Randomized Trial to Determine the Effect of Vitamin D and Zinc Supplementation for Improving Treatment Outcomes Among COVID-19 Patients in Mumbai, India

Murray Krahn, University Health Network; IHPME in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; The Response of Provincial Health Systems to COVID-19: Service Provision and Costs Across Health Sectors, First Nations and Other Populations

Douglas Lee, University Health Network; IHPME in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Improving Canadian Outcomes Research on the Novel SARS-CoV-2 Using Analytics: The Corona Consortium

Jordan Lerner-Ellis, Sinai Health System; department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Faculty of Medicine; Implementation of Serological and Molecular Tools to Inform COVID-19 Patient Management

Christoph Licht, Hospital for Sick Children; department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Faculty of Medicine; A Central Role for the Vascular Endothelium in COVID-19 Pathogenesis

Jun Liu, department of molecular genetics in the Faculty of Medicine; Development of Safe and Effective Vaccines Against COVID-19

Carmen Logie, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work; Kukaa Salama (Staying Safe): A Pre-post Trial of a WhatsApp Social Group for Increasing COVID-19 Prevention Practices with Urban Refugee and Displaced Youth in Kampala, Uganda

David McMillen, department of chemical and physical sciences, U of T Mississauga; Development of a Yeast-Based Immunoassay for SARS-CoV-2 Serologic Testing Amenable to Inexpensive Local Production

Sharmistha Mishra, St. Michael’s Hospital; IHPME in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Evaluating the Differential Impact of What We Have Done As We Prioritize What to Do Next: A Multi-Provincial Intervention Modeling Study Using Population-Based Data

Peter Newman, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work; An International Multi-site, Randomized Controlled Trial of a Brief eHealth Intervention to Increase COVID-19 Knowledge and Protective Behaviors, and Reduce Pandemic Stress Among Diverse LGBT+ People

Deborah O'Connor, Sinai Health System; department of nutritional sciences in the Faculty of Medicine; Can COVID-19 and Maternal Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 be Transmitted Through Human Milk? Implications for Breastfeeding and Human Milk Banking

Keith Pardee, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy; Portable, Low-cost Hardware for De-centralized COVID-19 Diagnostics for Canada, Colombia and Ecuador

Robert Rottapel, University Health Network; department of immunology in the Faculty of Medicine; Development of a Predictive Serologic Test for Cytopathogenic Auto-antibodies in COVID-19 Patients

Darrel Tan, Unity Health Toronto; IHPME in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; COVID-19 Ring-based Prevention trial with Lopinavir/ritonavir (CORIPREV-LR)

Amol Verma, Unity Health Toronto; IHPME in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; The COVID-19 Hospital Analytics Laboratory: Improving the Clinical, Organizational, and System Response to COVID-19

Tania Watts, department of immunology in the Faculty of Medicine; Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Adaptive Immunity to SARS-CoV-2

Daniel Werb, Unity Health Toronto; IHPME in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Rapidly Assessing theImpact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Response on Clinical and Social Outcomes, Service Utilization, and the Unregulated Drug Supply Experienced by People Who Use Drugs in Toronto

Jia Xue, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work: An Increased Risk of Family Violence During COVID-19 Quarantine in Canada: Strengthening Social Media-based Collaborations Between Non-profit Agencies to Save Lives

How AI is enabling COVID-19 research

lanthierj — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 19:08:25 +0000

How AI is enabling COVID-19 research

lanthierj Fri, 07/17/2020 - 15:08

Cutline

“Pathogens and their ability to invade is an important theme,” says Associate Professor Jean-Philippe Julien. “The job now is to develop anti-viral drugs that can block that invasion.”

Paul Fraumeni

Topic

Breaking Research

Coronavirus

Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research

Alumni

Artificial Intelligence

CIFAR

Computer Science

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Medicine

Hospital for Sick Children

machine learning

Molecular Genetics

St. Michael's Hospital

Sunnybrook Hospital

Vector Institute

In an age of COVID-19, the phrase “business as usual” has nearly lost all meaning for Canadians who have seen their lives disrupted in myriad ways.

That includes researchers Jean-Philippe Julien and Costin Antonescu as they work to find antiviral drugs that can fight the disease that is paralyzing countries around the world.

“Speed is the key,” says Julien, an associate professor in U of T’s departments of biochemistry and immunology and a senior scientist in molecular medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children who focuses his work on developing a vaccine for HIV and malaria. “That’s what is making research into COVID-19 different. We normally take a linear approach, going step by step, selecting a few candidate drugs or therapies and slowly moving them forward with testing over several years.

“But now, with COVID, we all understand that this approach is not possible. Everyone accepts that we have to move much faster.”

In an effort to speed the process, the pair are focused on determining whether existing drugs used to treat other diseases can be used to treat COVID-19 – and they are using artificial intelligence, or AI, to boost their work.

In particular, the pair is using a type of AI called machine learning, which relies on neural networks, modelled on the networks of neurons in the human brain, to learn and make decisions. The approach is being applied to everything from self-driving cars to new drug treatments – even which films and TV shows Netflix suggests you might like to watch.

Working through a local biotech company and drug development firm, Julien and Antonescu, a former U of T PhD student who is now an associate professor at Ryerson University, have used AI to identify existing drugs that may be effective against COVID-19. In particular, they have found molecules that may interrupt the virus’s ability to gain entry into cells and others that may limit respiratory distress.

The project is one of 14 being funded by CIFAR, a collaborative research organization that supported early work by U of T University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, pioneer of deep-learning – a branch of machine learning that attempts to replicate how the human brain learns.

“COVID-19 has raised that possibility that our health-care system could potentially become overburdened, and that actions we have taken in response to this risk have brought about enormous economic, societal, and broader public health costs,” says University Professor Ted Sargent, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives. “This funding by CIFAR, which has a long history supporting AI research, will be key in helping researchers at U of T and other universities across Canada contribute to developing treatments.”

Elissa Strome, the associate vice president, research and executive director of the CIFAR Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, noted that interdisciplinary collaborations are critical to defeat the coronavirus and that CIFAR provides both the space and freedom for researchers to explore high-risk, high-reward ideas.

“The CIFAR AI and COVID-19 Catalyst Grants Program is mobilizing new ideas, products and services that have the potential to save lives around the world,” Strome says.

Julien and Antonescu first met while earning their PhDs in biochemistry at U of T in the early 2000s and then worked at the same research institute again while doing post-doctoral work at Scripps Research near San Diego.

They eventually returned to Toronto, with Antonescu landing at Ryerson, where he is an associate professor in the department of chemistry and biology and an affiliate scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital.

Antonescu normally focusses his work on breast cancer. A few years ago, he began working with Cyclica, a Toronto-based biotechnology company that specializes in using AI to develop drugs.

“So the work JP and I are doing now in using AI on COVID-19 began when my lab started working with Cyclica. We were using the results of Cyclica’s machine learning tools to develop and identify molecules that are predicted to have drug-like behaviour and to develop new cancer therapies.”

When COVID-19 began its assault on the world, Antonescu and Cyclica applied the same approach they were using for cancer to the novel coronavirus. They are now also working with an AI-powered drug-development company called Phoenox Pharma, a U of T-linked startup.

“That’s when the collaboration with JP and his lab became invaluable,” says Antonescu. “He’s developing a number of assays to measure the virus and treat it. We all saw a prime opportunity to get together and use the AI expertise from Cyclica and JP’s scientific knowledge that he has amassed through his work on HIV and malaria.”

Julien, who is also Canada Research Chair in Structural Immunology, agrees that the team’s existing work enabled them to tackle COVID-19 quickly and effectively.

“We had all those years together,” he says. “That collegiality allowed us to come together rapidly. Costin reached out to me on a Wednesday and then the grant proposal to CIFAR went in on a Friday. There’s trust and respect for each other that’s there and that allows you to build fast.”

Both Julien and Antonescu have a wealth of experience in understanding how pathogens – bacteria, fungi, parasites and viruses that cause disease – invade our cells.

“Cells would love to put up an impenetrable wall and not let any invaders in, but then they would face the problem of not being able to take up nutrients and communicate with one another, which prevents hormones from working,” says Antonescu. “So the surface of a cell has to walk a fine line between communication and protection. Viruses wind up being able to hijack some of the normal mechanisms that cells use to interact with their environment.”

“Pathogens and their ability to invade is an important theme,” adds Julien. “In my field, a virus like HIV targets immune cells and depletes your immune system. Bacteria through toxins they secrete can hijack cell receptors in the lungs or other tissues. And that’s what SARS COV-2 is doing – invading cells – and that results in this new disease called COVID-19. The job now is to develop anti-viral drugs that can block that invasion.”

Julien and Antonescu will feed new information they discover from their experiments back to their AI collaborators at Cyclica and Phoenox who will predict more molecules worth testing. Within four months, the team hopes to identify candidate drugs that work to stop “pseudoviruses” in cells and that can move forward to the next stages of testing: live viruses and animal models.

“The benefit of the AI is that it can do so much more than we can do in our labs,” says Antonescu. “In a normal assay, you can screen 100,000 compounds. With more funding, we could go up to 500,000. But AI companies like Cyclica and Phoenox can sample 10 million compounds with their technology. They won’t come up with a guaranteed silver bullet, but they will be able to narrow it down to a couple hundred. That is really helpful. And then JP and I will come back in and do the biological assays, testing and rapid progression into something you hope can be used to treat patients.”

The powerful benefit of AI to researchers such as Julien, Antonescu and the other CIFAR recipients is part of a wave of AI that is boosting Canada in many ways.

A new report, prepared by U of T with data compiled by Ottawa’s Global Advantage Consulting Group, found that Canada’s unique combination of public investment, private capital, research capacity and talent has generated over 50,000 jobs and attracted nearly $3 billion in investment since 2010.

The report, entitled Canada’s AI Ecosystem: Government Investment Propels Private Sector Growth, notes that the number of active AI start-up companies in Canada has doubled to more than 670 since 2015, with U of T alone producing 81 active startups. In total, AI-powered startups have raised $183 million in funding and created more than 600 jobs in the past five years.

How does the body fight COVID-19? U of T researcher's work could aid vaccine development

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 14:24:49 +0000

How does the body fight COVID-19? U of T researcher's work could aid vaccine development

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 06/18/2020 - 10:24

Cutline

U of T immunologist Jen Gommerman is leading an interdisciplinary team that's investigating the immune system's response to the coronavirus, including why some people seem more susceptible to it than others (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Paul Fraumeni

Topic

Our Community

Coronavirus

Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation

Biochemistry

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty of Medicine

Graduate Students

Hospital for Sick Children

Immunology

Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology

Molecular Genetics

Mount Sinai Hospital

St. Michael's Hospital

Sunnybrook Hospital

Jen Gommerman, an immunologist at the �ؿ�ζSM, wants everyone to know one important point about the COVID-19 pandemic: The human immune system is working to fight off this novel coronavirus.

Many thousands of people have died from the virus. But many more thousands have contracted it and survived. That is because when the virus first enters your body, usually through your nose or mouth, it triggers the immune system to send antibodies in response. Antibodies are proteins in your blood that your body uses to fight infection. In diseases such as chicken pox, the antibodies usually prevent you from getting the illness again. The formal term for the generation of antibodies is a “humoral immune response.”

But COVID-19 – the illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus – is puzzling scientists with some challenging questions: If a person recovers from COVID-19, will the antibodies keep that person from being infected again? Why don’t some people show symptoms? What happens as soon as the virus enters the body?

Gommerman, a professor in the department of immunology in the Faculty of Medicine, has received support from the Ontario COVID-19 Rapid Research Fund to conduct research in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of scientists to answer these and other questions.

She emphasizes that the greatest challenge in understanding anything to do with COVID-19 is the fact that it is new.

“Understanding how SARS –CoV-2 induces a humoral immune response is vital to scientists eventually developing a vaccine,” she says. “But the world has only known about this virus since December or January. It is brand new. The science community doesn’t fully understand yet how the immune system responds to the virus.

“So my team’s work will shed some light on that, which, in turn, could help with the development of a vaccine.”

The province’s rapid research fund is also supporting the work of Jean-Philippe Julien, senior scientist in molecular medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children and an assistant professor in biochemistry and immunology at U of T. His project will use molecular technology to develop a “potent and broad” antiviral treatment.

As for Gommerman, she will be developing an assay (the scientific term for a test or experiment) to identify antibodies in saliva in the hopes of better understanding the early immune response when the virus enters the oropharyngeal tract (a part of the throat behind the mouth and nasal cavity).

Like so much of the COVID-19 research being conducted now, the work being spearheaded by Gommerman is a collaboration with a number of other scientists at U of T and the university’s partner hospitals.

Gommerman’s research into saliva, for example, will be compared with assays being done by Anne-Claude Gingras, a senior investigator at Sinai Health’s Tanenbaum Lunenfeld Research Institute and a professor of molecular genetics at U of T.

Gingras has led the development of a blood test that can detect antibodies in the immune system of infected patients. The test has the potential to enable hospitals and other institutions to screen up to 10,000 samples at once. This type of analysis is called “serosurveillance” – the study of blood serum, especially as it relates to the work of the immune system response to pathogens entering the body.

“Serosurveillance is an important weapon in our fight against COVID-19,” Gommerman says. “It has the power to tell us what is the true scope of the pandemic. This is what the blood experiments at Mount Sinai get us.

“For the saliva experiments, we will learn more about what is happening early in the immune response in asymptomatic patients in the oropharyngeal tract where the virus is first introduced. This has the potential to reveal what aspects of the immune response might confer protection to those people who never show symptoms or only show mild symptoms.”

Key to understanding the early immune response is a collaboration with Darrell Tan, an infectious diseases physician and clinician-scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital. Tan, who is also an assistant professor in U of T’s Faculty of Medicine and at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, is enrolling 1,000 subjects, via contact tracing, who have been linked to patients infected with COVID-19. Tan and his team will test the saliva of these people regularly over a number of weeks.

The contacts are called a “ring of associates.”

“Because the people in that ring have a higher chance of contracting COVID-19 than the general public, we will presumably have people who are just getting infected,” says Gommerman. “This will allow us to learn why some people don’t show symptoms but still have the illness and how the early immune response actually works.”

Both Gommerman and Gingras are using proteins produced by U of T’s James Rini, professor in the departments of molecular genetics and biochemistry. The proteins are highly purified pieces of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that are used as bait to catch antibodies in the saliva or in the blood so that the researchers can measure them.

“Without Jim’s work on these proteins, we wouldn’t be able to go further in our research,” says Gommerman. “He’s been studying coronavirus proteins since SARS first hit North America in 2003. The science community doesn’t know nearly as much about coronaviruses as we do, for example, influenza.

“We owe a lot to researchers like Jim who have been building up a knowledge base about coronaviruses. We’re relying on them now.”

Further to the collaborative nature of the research, Gommerman’s team is using saliva samples from patients who have had the virus, and who have recovered. The samples were collected by: Mario Ostrowski, a professor in the departments of medicine, immunology and laboratory medicine and pathobiology at U of T; Allison McGeer, director of the Infectious Diseases Research Unit at Mount Sinai Hospital and a U of T professor in the departments of medicine and laboratory medicine and pathobiology (LMP), as well as at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; and Samira Mubareka an assistant professor in the department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology who is at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

The multidisciplinary nature of the research is what enabled Gommerman to pivot from her usual work on autoimmune diseases, especially multiple sclerosis, and gut immunology. The ability to draw on the skills and experiences of members of her team was also key.

“Our research associate, Dr. Olga Rojas, had worked on saliva antibodies to a disease called rotavirus when she was studying in Colombia, South America.”

Also key to the pivot were three first-year doctoral students – Baweleta Isho, Annie Pu and Michelle Zuo.

“I didn’t want to pull more senior students from their doctoral work, so I asked these first-year students to help with the work,” Gommerman says. “They’ve been amazing, as well as our project manager, Dr.Gary Chao, who organized all the samples and made sure we were compliant from a biosafety and ethics perspective. This was urgent work and they all rose to the occasion under a lot of pressure.”

with files from Amanda Ferguson

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How does the body fight COVID-19? U of T researcher's work could aid vaccine development