CFI Grants Boost Funding
Support for Groundbreaking Research across UHN's Programs

2006/07 marked a record year for UHN in CFI grant funding earned. A round earned five UHN research teams a collective total of $21.4M in new infrastructure funding and $6.4M in operating funding—a UHN record. Later this year, projects were awarded an additional $21.4M through the Ontario Research Infrastructure program, resulting in a funding total of over $49M for these five projects.

The awards fund a variety of projects across UHN's priority research areas.

Regenerative Medicine Scores Twin Wins
Regenerative medicine is one of UHN's research priority platforms, and one of its flagship programs is the new Regenerative Medicine (REMEDI) Project, recently funded by CFI, which provided $7.2M in funding. This new centre will comprise cutting-edge multi-imaging infrastructure with multi-dimensional visualization. Led by Dr. Richard Weisel, this project drives regenerative medicine research to clinical applications for a variety of diseases.

"REMEDI is an innovative approach to regenerative medicine," Dr. Weisel explains. "It is a multidisciplinary initiative, which will enable innovative and customized research technologies to facilitate investigations intended to provide new regenerative therapies including: labeling, imaging, visualization and guided delivery. The project will unite experts from numerous fields: engineers, computer scientists, molecular biologists and clinicians to find unique new treatments to restore function to diseased organs. Ultimately, the vision of regenerative medicine research will be to provide cutting-edge therapeutic tools to improve the health of Canadians."

Another project within the regenerative medicine platform is Dr. John Dick's new Cancer Stem Cell Centre. This project, which secured over $4M in CFI funding, focuses on developing cancer stem cell therapies. It consists of several core activities including live cell banking, xenotransplanting, flow cytometry, high throughput screening and imaging. As a result, it will enable cancer stem cell scientists to develop improved predictive diagnostic and prognostic tests, as well as pursue new cancer therapies.

Genomics, Systems Biology and Survivorship Research Also Winners
Also receiving CFI funding this year was Dr. Katherine Siminovitch's Disease Genomics: Reduction to Practice. This $4.8M proposal, aligned with UHN research's priority platform in Genes, Proteins and People, builds on UHN's Clinical Genomics Centre, a state-of-the-art genomics and proteomics technology platform. The development of profiling tools and new medications are among the outcomes that ultimately lead to improved patient management.

Dr. Igor Jurisica's Comprehensive Systems Biology Approach to Profiling and Modeling of Cancer received over $4M from CFI. This project, which enables the interdisciplinary, integrated and collaborative profiling and modeling of cancer, is aligned with two of UHN research's priority platforms—Genes, Proteins and People, and Health Informatics. Through this endeavour, researchers aim to understand cancer at a molecular level, which can lead to a number of benefits: improvement in the quality and cost of cancer diagnosis and treatment via intelligent molecular medicine, the identification of novel and more specifically targeted drugs, as well as increased efficiency of current therapies.

The Electronic Living Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Cancer Survivorship Research, an innovative new approach to research in cancer, was awarded $1.2M in CFI funding. Headed by Dr. Pamela Catton, this initiative leverages the intellectual capital of cancer survivors to examine new approaches to predict, prevent and manage long-term adverse effects of cancer and its treatment. Through examining social networks and competency building, distributed models of care, health knowledge transfer and sustainability, innovative research into chronic disease health care delivery—using cancer survivorship as a model—will be performed.