Researchers from across the University of Toronto have teamed with BASF to develop an array of new chemical technologies for sectors from agriculture to architecture. 

Several projects have been launched so far under a new framework agreement for collaborative research, the first one BASF has signed with a Canadian university. 

Many of the projects involve self-driving labs, a concept at the centre of U of T’s Acceleration Consortium, a global initiative dedicated to accelerating scientific discovery. Self-driving labs use artificial intelligence and automation to create new materials and molecules for a fraction of the usual time and cost.  

“The question we often need to answer when creating new chemical products is: given these design constraints, how many different possible molecules or formulations could we make?” says Professor Frank Gu (ChemE), one of several U of T researchers involved in the collaboration. 

“A human mind might be able to come up with two, three or maybe ten different possibilities. But using AI, we can generate hundreds, including ones we might never have thought of otherwise.” 

Within these model chemical libraries, AI algorithms can quickly conduct large numbers of virtual tests to screen for the most promising solutions. These can then be synthesized and tested in a physical lab, with the results fed back into the model to improve future iterations. 

For example, Gu and his collaborators are working with a family of naturally occurring biopolymers derived from plants. 

Agricultural researchers have previously tested some of these molecules as biostimulants, meaning that they could help activate the natural defenses of a target crop against pests or disease. But they also have other useful properties. 

“These biopolymers are very hydrophilic materials, which means they are able to absorb and retain water,” says Gu. 

“By taking up water when the soil is too wet, and releasing it when it is too dry, they can help regulate soil moisture. 

“On top of that, they can also be used as delivery vehicles: we can wrap an active ingredient, like a pesticide or fertilizer, in a coating made of these biopolymers. If we design the coating well, it can slowly release the active ingredient next to the plant, where needed, rather than letting it get washed away by rain.” 

Using the biopolymers for targeted delivery can enable farmers to use less of the active ingredient and reduce the pollution problems associated with agricultural runoff, improving both economics and sustainability. 

The challenge is that there are hundreds of potential biopolymer formulations to choose from. By working with the Acceleration Consortium, where Gu co-leads the Formulations self-driving lab, the team is betting that the power of self-driving labs can speed up the search. 

The project is just one of many catalyzed by the new agreement with BASF, which builds on previous collaborations with U of T researchers, including Professors Eugenia Kumacheva and Mitchell Winnik, both from the Department of Chemistry in the Faculty of Arts & Science. 

In addition to agriculture, some of the collaborations are focused on new coatings that can extend the life of architectural materials, while others aim to deliver drugs to targeted areas of the human body. 

“For us, it’s all about molecules,” says Gu. “Whether we are delivering an anti-cancer drug, or a smarter crop application, or a protective coating, it’s all about finding the best potential solution out of the huge number of possibilities.” 

By offering collaboration opportunities in cutting-edge research and leveraging innovative technologies, U of T and BASF researchers are aiming to solve challenges in sustainability, aligning with BASF’s mission in creating chemistry for a sustainable future. 

“Our interactions with faculty members Frank Gu, Christine Allen, Eugenia Kumacheva, and Alan Aspuru-Guzik have been positive and productive,” says Wen Xu, Senior Principal Scientist, Agricultural Solutions, BASF Corporation. 

“The projects in scope are advancing efforts in predictive properties, advanced biomaterials and sustainable delivery of agrochemicals. Overall, our collaboration with the University of Toronto promises significant advancements in sustainable agriculture through innovative research and development.” 

“The University of Toronto has placed a big bet on innovation in the materials domain through our Acceleration Consortium, combining advances in robotics and artificial intelligence with subject matter expertise in chemistry, materials science, pharmaceuticals and chemical engineering,” says Professor David Wolfe, U of T’s Acting Associate Vice-President, International Partnerships. 

“But in order for our research to truly move the needle in this field, we need to work with world-leaders who develop, validate and manufacture materials at scale. BASF, as one of the world’s largest and most innovative chemical companies, is better positioned than anyone to inspire and be inspired by the work we do.” 

The full list of principal investigators at U of T and BASF who have launched new collaborations under the agreement so far includes: 

• Professor Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Arts & Science and Wen Xu, Senior Principal Scientist, Agricultural Solutions, BASF Corporation  

• Professor Christine Allen, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and Wen Xu, Senior Principal Scientist, Agricultural Solutions, BASF Corporation 

• Professor Eugenia Kumacheva, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Arts & Science and Liangliang Echo Qu, Senior Scientist I, Research North America, BASF Corporation 

• Professor Frank Gu, Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and Wen Xu, Senior Principal Scientist, Agricultural Solutions, BASF Corporation 

• Professor Justin Nodwell, Department of Biochemistry, Temerty Faculty of Medicine; Ai-Jiuan Wu, Senior Research Scientist III, Agricultural Solutions, BASF Corporation and Kavita Bitra, Multicrop and Innovation Sourcing Lead, Agricultural Solutions, BASF Corporation 

 

A team of researchers from U of T Engineering has discovered hidden multi-dimensional side channels in existing quantum communication protocols. 

The new side channels arise in quantum sources, which are the devices that generate the quantum particles — typically photons — used to send secure messages. The finding could have important implications for quantum security. 

“What makes quantum communication more secure than classical communication is that it makes use of a property of quantum mechanics known as conjugate states,” says ECE PhD student Amita Gnanapandithan, lead author on a paper published in Physical Review Letters. 

“For example, position and momentum are conjugate variables: when you measure one, you disturb the other. If both variables are randomly chosen for encoding, anyone trying to listen in on the message will automatically introduce disturbances that can be detected by the parties that are trying to communicate. 

“Furthermore, due to the quantum no-cloning theorem, the eavesdropper cannot produce copies of the message to listen in on.” 

Yet despite its inherent security, there are still some ways that quantum communication can be compromised due to the imperfections in the devices used for practical implementations. 

Between 2000 and 2012, researchers showed that side channels can arise because of the way that quantum detectors work. These side channels act as loopholes, enabling someone to listen in on the signal without introducing a detectable disturbance. 

To address this, in 2012 Professor Hoi-Kwong Lo (ECE) and his collaborators developed a new protocol known as measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD). The protocol effectively short-circuits all side channels associated with quantum particle detectors. 

With the detector taken care of, Gnanapandithan, who is co-supervised by Lo and Professor Li Qian (ECE), turned to looking for potential side channels associated with the other end of the communication: the source devices. 

“Let’s say you want to encode information based on how the light coming from the source is polarized, which we call optical polarization,” says Gnanapandithan. 

“You would use two conjugate polarization bases to perform encoding and ideally, you’d want to keep your encoding within the polarization degree of freedom. You also don’t want that polarization to be correlated with any other degree of freedom, because if it is, then the eavesdropper can measure that second one to get information on polarization.” 

The idea that the encoding degree of freedom is uncorrelated with other degrees of freedom in optical quantum sources is known as the dimensional assumption. Violating this assumption means that the message might not be secure. 

In practice, today’s quantum sources can often introduce such a violation due to, for example, correlations between adjacent signals. This is called the pattern effect, and results in information about earlier signals leaking into later signals. 

But in the most recent study, Gnanapandithan used both theoretical models and physical quantum sources to demonstrate a new source of the violation that hadn’t been considered before. 

“We knew that the modulation process can be a little bit distorted, but what we found was that the modulation process can also be time varying, even within the same signal optical pulse,” says Gnanapandithan. 

“Specifically, we made the very subtle realization that this flaw is actually a violation of the dimensional assumption. Hence, we call this type of flaw ‘hidden multi-dimensional modulation,’ of which time-varying encoding is only one example.” 

How big a problem these side channels are depends on the type of equipment being used. 

“If your equipment has a higher bandwidth, you can apply a modulation signal to your optical pulse that should get it closer to what it ideally should be,” she says. 

“But if your equipment is severely bandwidth limited, then the modulation pulse might be severely distorted, and that would worsen the issue. 

“There is also a new type of quantum key distribution (QKD) source that’s been introduced in the literature, called a passive QKD source. Passive QKD sources don’t even use modulators, so these bandwidth issues wouldn’t apply.” 

Lo says that future work from his team will focus on possible ways to mitigate the newly discovered side channels.  

“We can get creative, and perhaps find ways around these problems,” he says. 

“But as we’ve learned in the past, it’s also possible that our new method might give rise to its own problems.  You never know how many layers there are going to be, but I think the all-important first step is to simply identify the issues you have to deal with, and that’s what we’ve done here.” 

Professor Milica Radisic (ChemE, BME) has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. This honour recognizes Radisic’s “distinguished contributions to the field of organ-on-a-chip engineering, particularly for innovation in human cell-based platforms to study the physiological effects of chemicals on human tissues and organs.”

Radisic is the Canada Research Chair in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering and a senior scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute. She is internationally acclaimed for spearheading the field of organ-on-a-chip engineering, which provides human cell-based platforms for developing and studying human tissues and organs. These lab-grown platforms provide a cutting-edge tool for studying a wide range of diseases. They can also be used to test new drugs for effectiveness and potential side effects, reducing the need for animal models.

While culturing human cells in petri dishes isn’t new, these cells often do not look or behave like those in the human body. Radisic and her team use innovative, biocompatible polymer materials and unique microfabrication techniques to design scaffolds that enable these cells to grow in a more realistic environment.

Radisic’s lab was the first in the world to use electrical stimulation to mature human heart cells, a longstanding challenge in tissue engineering. She developed a micro-tissue cultivation platform, called Biowire, which is now accepted as the gold standard for cardiac cell maturation.

Radisic is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering, two of Canada’s three scholarly academies. She is also a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicine International Society, and the U.S. National Academy of Inventors. She has held an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship and a Killam Research Fellowship, two of Canada’s most prestigious research fellowships. In 2024, she received the NSERC John C. Polanyi Award, for a recent outstanding scientific advance.

“Professor Milica Radisic’s development of groundbreaking methods for developing and maturing cells and tissues has made her a leader in the field of organ-on-a-chip engineering, and opened up new possibilities for addressing critical health challenges,” says U of T Engineering Dean Christopher Yip. “On behalf of the entire faculty, my heartfelt congratulations on this richly deserved recognition.”

A U of T Engineering team has collaborated with researchers in the Wilfred and Joyce Posluns Centre for Image Guided Innovation and Therapeutic Intervention at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) to create a set of tiny robotic tools that could enable ‘keyhole surgery’ in the brain. 

In a paper published in Science Robotics, the team demonstrated the ability of these tools — only about 3 millimetres in diameter — to grip, pull and cut tissue. 

Their extremely small size is made possible by the fact that they are powered not by motors but by external magnetic fields. 

“In the past couple of decades, there has been this huge explosion of robotic tools that enable minimally invasive surgery, which can improve recovery times and outcomes for patients,” says Professor Eric Diller (MIE). 

“We can now replicate the wrist and hand movements of a surgeon on a centimetre scale, and these tools are widely used in surgeries that take place in the torso. But when it comes to neurosurgery, we are working with an even more restrictive space.” 

Current robotic surgical tools are typically driven by cables connected to electric motors, in much the same way that human fingers are manipulated by tendons in the hand that are connected to muscles in the wrist. 

But Diller says that at smaller length scales, the cable-based approach starts to break down. 

“The smaller you get, the harder you have to pull on the cables,” he says. “And at a certain point, you start to get problems with friction that lead to less reliable operation.” 

Diller and his collaborators have been working for several years on an alternative approach. Instead of cables and pulleys, their robotic tools contain magnetically active materials that respond to external electromagnetic fields controlled by the surgical team. 

The system consists of two parts. The first is the tiny tools themselves: a gripper, a scalpel and a set of forceps. The second part is what the team calls a coil table, which is a surgical table with several electromagnetic coils embedded inside.

In this design, the patient would be positioned with their head on top of the embedded coils, and the robotic tools would be inserted into the brain by means of a small incision. 

By altering the amount of electricity flowing into the coils, the team can manipulate the magnetic fields, causing the tools to grip, pull or cut tissue as desired. 

To test the tools, Diller and his team partnered with physicians and researchers at SickKids, including Doctors James Drake and Thomas Looi. Together, they designed and built a phantom brain — a life-sized model made of silicone rubber that simulates the geometry of a real brain. 

The team then used small pieces of tofu and bits of raspberries to simulate the mechanical properties of the brain tissue they would need to work with. 

“The tofu is best for simulating cuts with the scalpel, because it has a consistency very similar to that of the corpus collosum, which is the part of the brain we were targeting,” says Changyan He, a former postdoctoral fellow co-supervised by both Drake and Diller, now an assistant professor at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia. 

“The raspberries were used for the gripping tasks, to see if we could remove them in the way that a surgeon would remove diseased tissue.” 

The performance of these magnetically-actuated tools was compared with that of standard tools handled by trained physicians.  

In the paper, the team reports that the cuts made with the magnetic scalpel were consistent and narrow, with an average width of 0.3 to 0.4 millimetres. 

That was even more precise than those from the traditional hand tools, which ranged from 0.6 to 2.1 millimetres. 

As for the grippers, they were able to successfully pick up the target 76% of the time.  

The team also tested the operation of the tools in animal models, where they found that they performed similarly well.  

“I think we were all a bit surprised at just how well they performed,” says He. 

“Our previous work was in very controlled environments, so we thought it might take a year or more of experimentation to get them to the point where they were comparable to human-operated tools.” 

Despite the team’s success so far, Diller cautions that it may still be a long time before these tools see the inside of an operating room. 

“The technology development timeline for medical devices — especially surgical robots — can be years to decades,” he says. 

“There’s a lot we still need to figure out. We want to make sure we can fit our field generation system comfortably into the operating room, and make it compatible with imaging systems like fluoroscopy, which makes use of X-rays.” 

Still, the team is excited about the potential of the technology.

“This really is a wild idea,” says Diller. 

“It’s a radically different approach to how to how to make and drive these kinds of tools, but it’s also one that can lead to capabilities that are far beyond what we can do today.”  

Estelle Oliva-Fisher, Managing Director of the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering, is one of three recipients of the University of Toronto’s 2025 Chancellor’s Emerging Leader Award. 

Part of U of T’s Pinnacle Awards Program, this honour recognizes an individual who demonstrates outstanding leadership and significantly advances the University’s mission to foster an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish. 

Oliva-Fisher first joined the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering  in 2010 as a Leadership Education Specialist with the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering, providing support for student and staff learning and development. Currently, she serves within the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP), where she leads and develops student co-curricular initiatives and industry partnerships.  

During her time at the faculty, Oliva-Fisher has led multiple innovative initiatives, identifying and addressing gaps, developing impactful strategies, and then implementing plans to ensure the solutions continue beyond her immediate oversight.  

Some of her notable accomplishments include the creation of the Engagement & Development Network for U of T Engineering staff, her leadership of the Decanal Task Force on Mental Health and implementation of its recommendations, the development of the Professional Experience Year Co-op Preparatory Program, and being an original member of the team that expanded the Leaders of Tomorrow program faculty wide, 

“Estelle consistently builds strong partnerships with her colleagues, students and alumni across U of T Engineering, creating an inclusive environment where all can thrive,” says Professor Greg Evans, Director of ISTEP.  

“Her investment in the success of our faculty across so many initiatives has been a tremendous benefit to our students’ experience, and we are thrilled that her leadership has been recognized with this award.”

A new study from U of T Engineering researchers points to practical strategies to prevent deaths from opioid poisoning by optimizing the distribution of naloxone kits. 

In a paper published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Professor Timothy Chan (MIE) and his team showed that placing naloxone kits in transit stations could help ensure that these potentially life-saving tools are present where they are most needed. 

“The opioid epidemic is a profound public health crisis, and it may not be obvious at first how engineering researchers can help,” says Chan. 

“In collaboration with doctors and other medical professionals, we can apply techniques from our field — operations research and mathematical optimization — to develop new solutions.” 

Chan and his team have previously collaborated with medical researchers to look at the distribution of automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, in urban areas. 

Using computer models, they were able to analyze spatial data on past cardiac arrests. They could then optimize AED placement to maximize the number that would be accessible from those locations. 

“Naloxone kits are somewhat analogous to AEDs in that they can reverse the effects of an opioid poisoning event, but only if they are available quickly, which means they need to be in the right locations,” says Chan.  

In their latest work, Chan and his team collaborated with emergency physicians and researchers, including Dr. Brian Grunau and Dr. Jim Christenson at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, B.C. 

They began by analyzing data from more than 14,000 opioid poisoning incidents that were recorded by BC Emergency Health Services between December 2014 and August 2020 in Metro Vancouver. 

They then built a computer model that could simulate how many of those incidents would have taken place within a 3-minute walk from a naloxone kit, based on several distribution strategies. 

“The first strategy was to look at locations that already have free naloxone distribution programs, such as pharmacies and health clinics,” says Ben Leung (IndE 1T6 + PEY, MIE MASc 1T9, PhD 2T4), lead author on the paper. 

Leung built the model while working as a PhD student in Chan’s lab; he is now a research fellow at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, N.C. 

“Our second strategy was to look at chain restaurants or similar businesses. And our third strategy was to look at transit, including both SkyTrain stations and bus stops.” 

Leung’s analysis showed that more than a third of past opioid poisonings took place within about 150 metres of locations where naloxone is being distributed. 

Switching to a strategy focusing on chain restaurants and similar businesses did not noticeably improve coverage: depending on how many different chains were included and how many kits distributed, coverage only reached a maximum of about 20%. 

But the third strategy of leveraging transit stops was the most promising. 

“Right now, there are about 650 locations with take-home naloxone distribution programs,” says Leung. 

“What we found was that if we used transit stops instead, we could get the same amount of coverage with only about 60 kits. If we increase the number of kits to 1000, we could cover more than half of the opioid poisonings that we analyzed.” 

Leung points out that different strategies can be used in combination to further improve coverage. He hopes that the insights that have been generated by the new study will help public health officials make better strategic decisions in the future. 

“There have been a few small pilot programs putting naloxone kits in public locations, but to our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has analyzed what large-scale distribution would look like using mathematical optimization techniques,” he says. 

“By presenting these results, I think we can make a strong case for doing that.” 

Chan hopes that these kinds of studies can seed broader changes as well. 

“For example, in Japan, AEDs are widely available at vending machines,” he says. 

“That has led to an association: if someone is having a cardiac arrest, you automatically know to go to the nearest vending machine for an AED. 

“If we can do something similar for naloxone, it could help bystanders feel more empowered to step in when they are needed to save lives.”