The University of Toronto is set to cement its position as one of the world’s leading centres for the design and manufacture of cells, tissues and organs that can be used to treat degenerative disease, thanks to a $114-million grant from the federal government.
“Our government is investing in research and innovation to create jobs, strengthen the economy and improve the quality of life of Canadians,” said the Honourable Ed Holder, Minister of State (Science and Technology). “This legacy investment in Medicine by Design will harness Canada’s strengths in regenerative medicine to treat and cure serious injuries and diseases that impact every Canadian family while creating new opportunities for Canadian health-related businesses.”
The research grant, the largest in U of T’s history, is the first to be awarded under the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), established by the federal government last year. Spread over seven years, the funding will allow U of T and its partners, which include the Hospital for Sick Children, the University Health Network and Mount Sinai Hospital, to deliver a new program called Medicine by Design.The initiative and the new funding build on years of support for U of T’s regenerative medicine researchers from federal granting councils, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and support from the Canada Research Chairs and Canada Excellence Research Chairs programs.
The mandate of Medicine by Design is to undertake transformative research and clinical translation in regenerative medicine, enhance capability in synthetic biology and computational biology and foster translation, commercialization and clinical impacts.
U of T President Meric Gertler thanked the government for its support of the university’s Medicine by Design initiative, and for its leadership in the advancement of globally competitive Canadian research and innovation. He also thanked and congratulated all those involved in the project at the university and its partner hospitals. “Our brilliant researchers and clinicians are doing cutting-edge work that is making Canada a world leader in regenerative medicine. I applaud them, and all those who helped prepare U of T’s successful application for this historic research award.”
“This program will allow us to take regenerative medicine to the next level,” said Peter Zandstra, a professor in U of T’s Institute for Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME), Canada Research Chair in Stem Cell Engineering and one of the researchers involved with the Medicine by Design project. “We’ll be able to design cells, tissues, and organs from the ground up, hopefully with benefit to patients and benefit to the Canadian economy.
“Stem cells offer avenues to treat — and perhaps cure — devastating and costly illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, blindness, lung disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and diseases of the blood and musculoskeletal system,” he added. “Medicine by Design provides a framework to design the cells, the materials and, ultimately, the clinical strategy needed to reach this goal.”
Medicine by Design will allow Canada to lead the transformation of the global medical industry and become a major international supplier of regenerative medicine technologies — a market that is predicted to grow to $50 billion by 2019. The strategy is expected to generate several new startup companies and to attract established international companies to Canada, eager to take advantage of U of T’s expertise.
The program will have three divisions, Cells by Design (to create cells whose fate and function can be controlled to ensure safer and more effective therapies), Tissues by Design (to create complex tissues for use in research, drug discovery and replacing lost or damaged tissue in humans) and Organs by Design (create and repair organs outside the body and demonstrate how those organs can be successfully transplanted into human patients). The three divisions will be supported by technology platforms such as genomic engineering, immune engineering and a program to manufacture stem cells on demand.
Medicine by Design builds on a rich legacy of U of T contributions to regenerative medicine, beginning with the demonstration of the existence of stem cells by biophysicist James Till and hematologist Ernest McCullochin 1960. As Gertler noted, “Their breakthrough has led to an entirely new field of biomedical research; to the wonders of regenerative medicine; to a global industry responsible for many thousands of high-tech jobs, and ultimately, to better health and new hope for patients and their loved ones, across Canada and around the world.”
Till, who attended the CFERF grant announcement, said he is thrilled by Medicine by Design’s potential. “It’s marvellous that the Canada First Research Excellence Fund has chosen to assign a very high priority to regenerative medicine/stem cells. This announcement means that research on stem cells and on regenerative medicine in Canada will move to another level and it will be the University of Toronto that will provide leadership for that.”
U of T has a very long and impressive history of accomplishments, both in biomedical engineering and in stem cell biology, such as the discovery of cancer stem cells, the development of the first artificial endocrine pancreas, and combining living cells with synthetic polymers to create artificial organs and tissues. From 2009-2013, U of T researchers published more articles than any university in the world except Harvard in top scholarly journals for regenerative medicine and stem cells, biomedical engineering, and cell and tissue engineering.
More than 50 researchers and clinicians from U of T and its hospital partners are involved in the Medicine by Design program, as well as hundreds of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Additional researchers and graduate students will be recruited over the next few years. Medicine by Design’s inaugural international partners include Peking University, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, the UK Regenerative Medicine Program and Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet.
Additional CFREF grants will be announced shortly, noted Ted Hewitt, president, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and chair, Canada First Research Excellence Fund steering committee.
“The Canada First Research Excellence Fund has provided Canadian universities with an unparalleled opportunity to take their leading-edge research and make it the best in the world. This will set them on course to make the ground-breaking discoveries that will enhance prosperity and change the lives of Canadians and millions around the world forever,” Hewitt said.
This story originally appeared on U of T News.
Four U of T engineers have received Ontario Professional Engineers Awards in honour of their outstanding contributions to the engineering profession and their wider community. Awarded by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) and Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), recipients include:
- U of T Engineering Dean Cristina Amon has been chosen to receive the Gold Medal, Ontario’s most prestigious engineering honour, recognizing public service, technical excellence and outstanding professional leadership.
- Alumnus Michael Butt (CivE 6T3) has garnered the Management Medal for innovative management practices that have contributed significantly to the engineering profession.
- Alumna Claire Kennedy (ChemE 8T9) has received the Citizenship Award, recognizing engineers who have made significant contributions to society.
- Alumna Jeanette Southwood (ChemE 8T6, MASc 8T8) garnered an Engineering Excellence Medal, recognizing those who have contributed substantially to advancing the engineering profession.
More about Dean Cristina Amon
Cristina Amon joined the Faculty in 2006 as Dean and Alumni Professor in Bioengineering. As Dean, she has been tireless in her efforts to advance U of T Engineering’s position as Canada’s top engineering school and among the best in the world. She has also dedicated herself to increasing diversity in engineering and ensuring that Canadian engineers are prepared to lead the world in addressing global challenges. Amon’s research pioneered the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics for formulating and solving thermal design problems subject to multidisciplinary competing constraints. She has delivered keynote lectures worldwide and contributed twelve book chapters, one textbook and over 350 refereed articles to the education and research literature. Amon has been inducted into the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Spanish Royal Academy, Royal Society of Canada and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and elected fellow of all the major professional societies in her field, including: AAAS, ASEE, ASME, CSME, EIC and IEEE.
“We are delighted that the Ontario Engineering Association has awarded its highest honour to Cristina Amon,” said U of T President Meric Gertler. “She is not only a pioneer in her own field – she is also leading the way in educating the engineers of tomorrow, as key drivers of innovation and prosperity. The University of Toronto community is immensely proud of her accomplishments.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSn6hjQVgfc]
Learn more about Dean Amon’s research and leadership initiatives in this video from the Ontario Professional Engineers Awards.
More about Michael Butt
Michael Butt has enthusiastically committed over 50 years to the construction engineering industry. Butt started his career immediately after graduation as a site engineer with the Mitchell Construction Company in Toronto. After rising through the ranks at Mitchell, he left in 1979 to found Buttcon Limited, a 100 per cent employee-owned Canadian general contractor. Butt’s leadership and management skills, combined with his entrepreneurial spirit and his love of construction, have allowed him to grow Buttcon into a $150M-per-year company. Buttcon has successfully completed many high profile projects, including Novotel on the Esplanade, the Queen’s Park restoration and Casino Niagara. A leader in the industry, Butt has headed several industry associations and co-founded the Canadian Design Build Institute. He is a fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering and the Canadian Design Build Institute, and was inducted into the Engineering Hall of Distinction in 2011.
More about Claire Kennedy
Claire Kennedy, currently at Bennett Jones LLP in Toronto, is recognized as one of Canada’s leading tax lawyers and transfer pricing advisors. A committed volunteer, she has provided pro bono legal counsel for charities such as Wildlife Preservation Canada and SunFarmer Canada. In 2012 she was appointed as a director of the Bank of Canada; she serves on the Bank’s Audit & Finance and Human Resources & Compensation Committees. Kennedy is a government appointee to U of T’s Governing Council and serves as chair of the Pension Committee. Her many volunteer roles with U of T Engineering include: member of the Dean’s Strategic Development Council and Campaign Cabinet Executive; member and past chair of the ChemE Advisory Board: and member and past president of the Engineering Alumni Association. In 2009 she founded BizSkule™, one of the Faculty’s most successful alumni outreach programs. Her service to U of T has been recognized with an Arbor Award and the Malcolm F. McGrath Alumni Achievement Award.
More about Jeanette Southwood
Jeanette Southwood is a Principal leading the Canadian Urban Development & Infrastructure Sector and the Global Sustainable Cities teams at Golder Associates, a global, employee-owned engineering and environmental services firm. Over the past 25 years, Southwood has been a leader in her industry, her profession and her community. She has authored many papers, made numerous presentations, taught academic and professional courses, and been recognized with national, provincial and local honours. Through her professional and volunteer efforts, Southwood has sought to build a more sustainable and healthier environment. She has provided distinguished service to many organizations, including Professional Engineers Ontario, the Ontario Environment Industry Association, the Canadian Environmental Defence Fund and the University of Toronto. Southwood is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and Engineers Canada, and a recipient of the Ontario Professional Engineers Young Engineer Award and the Ontario Volunteer Service Award, among many others.
“These awards recognize the exceptional contributions members of our U of T Engineering community are making to our profession and to society,” said Dean Amon. “I am grateful to OSPE and PEO for these honours, and to my fellow award recipients for their commitment to engineering excellence, extraordinary leadership and dedicated service.”
Evolution has altered the human genome over hundreds of thousands of years — and now humans can do it in a matter of months.
Faster than anyone expected, scientists have discovered how to read and write the DNA code in a living body, using hand-held genome sequencers and gene-editing systems. But knowing how to write is different from knowing what to write. To diagnose and treat genetic diseases, scientists must predict the biological consequences of both existing mutations and those they plan to introduce.
Deep Genomics, a startup company spun out of engineering-related research at the University of Toronto is on a mission to predict the consequences of genomic changes by developing new deep learning technologies.
“Our vision is to change the course of genomic medicine,” says Professor Brendan Frey (ECE), the company’s president and CEO, who is also a professor in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. “We’re inventing a new generation of deep learning technologies that can tell us what will happen within a cell when DNA is altered by natural mutations, therapies or even by deliberate gene editing.”
Deep Genomics is the only company to combine more than a decade of world-leading expertise in both deep learning and genome biology. “Companies like Google, Facebook and DeepMind have used deep learning to hugely improve image search, speech recognition and text processing. We’re doing something very different. The mission of Deep Genomics is to save lives and improve health,” says Frey.
Deep Genomics is now releasing its first product, called SPIDEX, which provides information about how hundreds of millions of DNA mutations may alter splicing in the cell, a process that is crucial for normal development. Because errant splicing is behind many diseases and disorders, including cancers and autism spectrum disorder, SPIDEX has immediate and practical importance for genetic testing and pharmaceutical development. The science validating the SPIDEX tool was described in the January 9, 2015 issue of the journal Science.
“The genome contains a catalogue of genetic variation that is our DNA blueprint for health and disease,” says Stephen Scherer, director of The Centre for Applied Genomics at SickKids and the McLaughlin Centre at the University of Toronto, a CIFAR Senior Fellow, and an advisor to Deep Genomics. “Brendan has put together a fantastic team of experts in artificial intelligence and genome biology — if anybody can decode this blueprint and harness it to take us into a new era of genomic medicine, they can.”
Until now, geneticists have spent decades experimentally identifying and examining mutations within specific genes that can be clearly connected to disease, such as the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes for breast cancer. However, the number of mutations that could lead to disease is vast and most have not been observed before, let alone studied.
These mystery mutations pose an enormous challenge for current genomic diagnosis. Labs send the mutations they’ve collected to Deep Genomics, and the company uses their proprietary deep learning system, which includes SPIDEX, to ‘read’ the genome and assess how likely the mutation is to cause a problem. It can also connect the dots between a variant of unknown significance and a variant that has been linked to disease. “Faced with a new mutation that’s never been seen before, our system can determine whether it impacts cellular biochemistry in the same way as some other highly dangerous mutation,” says Frey.
Deep Genomics is committed to supporting publicly funded efforts to improve human health. “Soon after our Science paper was published, medical researchers, diagnosticians and genome biologists asked us to create a database to support academic research,” says Frey. “The first thing we’re doing with the company is releasing this database — that’s very important to us.”
“Soon, you’ll be able to have your genome sequenced cheaply and easily with a device that plugs into your laptop. The technology already exists,” explains Frey. “When genomic data is easily accessible to everyone, the big questions are going to be about interpreting the data and providing people with smart options. That’s where we come in.”
Deep Genomics envisions a future where computers are trusted to predict the outcome of experiments and treatments, long before anyone picks up a test tube. To realize that vision, the company plans to grow its team of data scientists and computational biologists. Deep Genomics will continue to invent new deep learning technologies and work with diagnosticians and biologists to understand the many complex ways that cells interpret DNA, from transcription and splicing to polyadenylation and translation. Building a thorough understanding of these processes has massive implications for genetic testing, pharmaceutical research and development, personalized medicine and improving human longevity.
Paper or plastic? This seemingly mundane question captures one of our biggest sustainability challenges: although paper is renewable and biodegradable, for many uses non-degradable plastic still wins out due to its resilience and versatility. Now, thanks to a new grant from the European Research Council, Professor Emma Master (ChemE) is searching for ways to get the best of both worlds.
This week, Master was awarded €1.98 million ($2.8 million CAD) for a project known as BHIVE: Bio-derived High Value polymers through novel Enzyme function. Involving collaborators at Aalto University in Finland, the project aims to search for natural enzymes that could transform plant material — including forestry or agricultural waste — into a greener alternatives to non-degradable plastics.
“Nature creates many highly functional and valuable polymers, but so far we have done a relatively poor job at harnessing them,” says Master. “I think we can do much more once we understand how to fine-tune the chemistries of natural polymers for our purposes.”
In order to do this, she is examining the genes of organisms that break down wood for a living. That includes fungi that survive on rotting tree logs, but it also includes bacteria that live in the guts of moose and beaver, two animals that are well-known for their ability to at least partly digest woody fibres.
Master’s previous work used genomic screening to find out what proteins or enzymes those organisms use to break apart wood’s tough chemical structure. The idea was to use these enzymes to reduce wood to its basic chemical building blocks, then to use other methods to reconstruct these elements into useful materials, including plastics. With this new project, Master and her team are doing something more subtle.
“We’re actually quite interested in synthetic reactions, not only degradative reactions,” says Master. In other words, they’re no longer trying to break wood down entirely, but rather they’re looking for ways they might tweak the chemical structure of plant fibres to give them new properties.
For example, imagine if the team could identify an enzyme from a fungus that ‘opens up’ the chemical structure of cellulose, a natural polymer found in wood. This material might be more amenable to chemical treatment that could transform it into something that doesn’t fall apart when it gets wet, or that can be used to make an air-tight seal. Both of these are things that paper currently can’t do, but non-degradable plastics can.
“The motivation of all of this is to create a more comprehensive toolkit that allows us to sustainably produce high-value chemicals and polymers from plant sources,” says Master.
“Ensuring a sustainable future is a major focus of the world-class research we produce,” said Professor Ted Sargent (ECE), U of T Engineering’s vice-dean, research. “Professor Master’s work on the development of greener materials is a great example of how we collaborate with partners around the globe to solve the biggest engineering challenges of our time.”
It’s snack time: you have a plain oatmeal cookie, and a pile of chocolate chips. Both are delicious on their own, but if you can find a way to combine them smoothly, you get the best of both worlds.
Researchers in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering used this insight to invent something totally new: they’ve combined two promising solar cell materials together for the first time, creating a new platform for LED technology.
The team designed a way to embed strongly luminescent nanoparticles called colloidal quantum dots (the chocolate chips) into perovskite (the oatmeal cookie). Perovskites are a family of materials that can be easily manufactured from solution, and that allow electrons to move swiftly through them with minimal loss or capture by defects.
The work is published today in the international journal Nature.
“It’s a pretty novel idea to blend together these two optoelectronic materials, both of which are gaining a lot of traction,” says Xiwen Gong (ECE), one of the study’s lead authors and a PhD candidate working with Professor Ted Sargent (ECE). “We wanted to take advantage of the benefits of both by combining them seamlessly in a solid-state matrix.”
The result is a black crystal that relies on the perovskite matrix to ‘funnel’ electrons into the quantum dots, which are extremely efficient at converting electricity to light. Hyper-efficient LED technologies could enable applications from the visible-light LED bulbs in every home, to new displays, to gesture recognition using near-infrared wavelengths.
“When you try to jam two different crystals together, they often form separate phases without blending smoothly into each other,” says Dr. Riccardo Comin, a post-doctoral fellow in the Sargent Group. “We had to design a new strategy to convince these two components to forget about their differences and to rather intermix into forming a unique crystalline entity.”
The main challenge was making the orientation of the two crystal structures line up, called heteroexpitaxy. To achieve heteroepitaxy, Gong, Comin and their team engineered a way to connect the atomic ‘ends’ of the two crystalline structures so that they aligned smoothly, without defects forming at the seams. “We started by building a nano-scale scaffolding ‘shell’ around the quantum dots in solution, then grew the perovskite crystal around that shell so the two faces aligned,” explained coauthor Dr. Zhijun Ning, who contributed to the work while a post-doctoral fellow at UofT and is now a faculty member at ShanghaiTech.
The resulting heterogeneous material is the basis for a new family of highly energy-efficient near-infrared LEDs. Infrared LEDs can be harnessed for improved night-vision technology, to better biomedical imaging, to high-speed telecommunications.
Combining the two materials in this way also solves the problem of self-absorption, which occurs when a substance partly re-absorbs the same spectrum of energy that it emits, with a net efficiency loss. “These dots in perovskite don’t suffer reabsorption, because the emission of the dots doesn’t overlap with the absorption spectrum of the perovskite,” explains Comin.
Gong, Comin and the team deliberately designed their material to be compatible with solution-processing, so it could be readily integrated with the most inexpensive and commercially practical ways of manufacturing solar film and devices. Their next step is to build and test the hardware to capitalize on the concept they have proven with this work.
“We’re going to build the LED device and try to beat the record power efficiency reported in the literature,” says Gong.
This work was supported by the Ontario Research Fund Research Excellence Program, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST).
If you live in Toronto, you may have noticed that your commute is worse since the HOV lanes opened ahead of Toronto’s Pan Am Games. Or is it all in your head?
The smart traffic monitoring platform Connected Vehicles and Smart Transportation (CVST) has the answer to that question, and many more that haven’t been asked yet.
Connected ‘smart’ cities are the future — robust real-time data delivered by a host of distributed sensors will help ease congestion, improve personal safety, increase energy efficiency and reduce waste across our utilities, transportation infrastructure and more.
CVST currently includes data from highway cameras, road incident alerts, road closures, transit systems, bike-sharing networks, border crossings — and experimentation with live feeds from a drone stationed at Downsview in Toronto. In this next year, Leon-Garcia has plans to integrate air-quality sensors that measure CO2 and humidity, data from weather stations, and data streams on pollution emissions.
“I think it’s clear that smart cities pose a very interesting area in terms of opportunities and challenges,” said Professor Alberto Leon-Garcia (ECE), scientific director of the SAVI research team. “The aim is to improve livability and sustainability, but when you look at those there are multiple dimensions — we need to take a layered view of smart cities.”
CVST is one of the applications built on the Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructures (SAVI) Network testbed, a next-generation internet platform that investigates the convergence of cloud computing and software defined networking. SAVI’s chief architect, Hadi Bannazadeh (ECE) led the development of a national application platform testbed, and for the past two years researchers across the country have been building and testing applications to run on it.
SAVI, a national NSERC Strategic Network, includes researchers from 10 universities and over 100 graduate students. The group held its annual general meeting at the University of Toronto on Tuesday, July 7, preceded by a testbed workshop to share developments and areas of exploration and experimentation.
The topics of smart cities and big data analytics were top of mind at the meeting. Dragan Narandzic, chief technology officer at Ericsson Canada, delivered a keynote address about Ericsson’s approach to integrating ICT into infrastructure, and the investments necessary to do so.
“We believe that there are three categories that need to be addressed: city attractiveness, city competitiveness, and city sustainability,” said Narandzic. “We, as part of the ICT industry, have an obligation to find a way to make cities run more efficiently.”
Industry partners from TELUS, Ciena, Fortinet Inc., BTI Systems Inc. and many others were on hand. Between sessions, attendees heard poster presentations and demonstrations by more than two dozen graduate students from across Canada.
With the SAVI Network slated to wrap in August 2016, Leon-Garcia has both immediate goals and a broader vision for the future of the platform. “What I didn’t build into SAVI was a third tier, and those are the sensors,” he said. “That was not even part of the original plan, but it’s within reach so we’re doing it.”
In the SAVI-enabled future, you get answers before you even ask questions. And yes, your commute really is worse post-HOV lanes. The data proves it.