PRiME’s Director, Shana Kelley, often gets asked by students how ideas behind her many collaborations started and believes that informal brainstorming with people from other fields is key. While PRiME’s cross-disciplinary membership brings together an ideal community for these types of conversations, we wanted to give our trainees a focused opportunity to brainstorm by hosting our first Trainee Collaboration Event.
Science Speed Dating
The first step was to get the conversations started, and we did so with a “speed dating” social night at the PreNup Pub on February 5th. Although the setting was casual, the evening had structure with the trainees being assigned to tables planned to have one researcher from each of the four Faculties that PRiME has within its membership (Pharmacy, Arts & Science, Medicine, and Engineering). One of the PRiME Fellows, Margot Karlikow (Pardee Lab, Faculty of Pharmacy) said about the experience, “It was really helpful to be paired with people outside of my department that I normally wouldn’t have approached. It gave me the opportunity to find new areas of expertise, sources of research advice, and make new contacts”.
Individuals were given 15 minutes at each table to concisely describe their research project and lab expertise and provide thoughts on how a collaborator could help their project, before moving to a new table with a different set of trainees. After several rounds of switching tables and meeting new people, the group was left with food and drinks to continue talking through potential ideas and getting to know others they may not have met during the course of the evening.
The Collaborative Process
Over the next couple of weeks, the trainees were then left to continue networking on their own. Our hope was that their continued conversation and brainstorming would lead to new ideas for projects between lab groups within PRiME, but as with the actual dating world, not everyone connects and rides off into the sunset – results vary. In the end, we had 4 teams that came together with ideas to pitch at our competition.
The Pitch Competition
On the afternoon of February 25th, each of the teams gave a 10 minute pitch to our panel of judges and PRiME audience members. It was incredibly impressive to see creative, impactful ideas that came together over such a short period of time and reinforced the concept that the cross-divisional expertise available within PRiME is fertile ground for novel approaches to precision diagnostics and therapeutics. The teams – composed of trainees from a variety of fields across the biological & physical sciences as well as engineering - presented their ideas for projects that focused on new therapies for difficult to treat cancers, ways to enhance our ability to produce therapeutic stem cells, and diagnostics for chronic kidney disease. Their pitches were compelling and creative, leaving the judges with the very difficult job of deciding on a winner.
And the Winner Is….
Rony Chidiac and Shraddha Pai won the competition with their idea to more efficiently target stem cell differentiation with epigenetic analysis. After the event, Shraddha said, “This was a great experience. I went to the Networking Night with an open mind but without much expectation that I would be pitching at the competition, let alone with a new collaborator! The evening turned out to be a wonderful opportunity to meet people with diverse expertise. I wouldn’t have known that Rony’s research in the Faculty of Pharmacy would complement my research in the Faculty of Medicine so well. The collaboration came together very naturally, and coming up with a project was a lot easier than I expected”.
The winners of the Audience Choice Award, determined by ballot, were Serena Singh, Ryan Woloschuk, and Michael Saikali (or Team PaTRIC) who pitched Photoactivated T-cell Recruitment in Cancer as a novel diagnostic and therapeutic approach for triple negative breast cancer. Michael, who was on two different teams said, “One of the key takeaways of the experience for me was that idea generation isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. And the process of starting with nothing and developing the concept of a whole project in no time at all, was amazing. Although it took a couple of iterations to iron out the details, the process was easy with our different backgrounds”.
Given the quality of all the ideas presented at the pitch competition, PRiME will be providing seed funding to the winners to carry out preliminary experiments for their proposed project and will help submit grant applications for projects from the other teams (listed in full below). As Dr. Kelley opened the Pitch Competition, she quoted John Steinbeck who said, “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen”. We are looking forward to the dozens of ideas still to come from our PRiME trainees in our future collaboration events.
Team 1:
Rony Chidiac (Angers Lab, Faculty of Pharmacy) & Shraddha Pai (Bader Lab, Faculty of Medicine)
Project Title: Towards efficient cardiac tissue regeneration with epigenetics
Team 2:
Marim Barghash, Mark Mabanglo (Houry Lab, Faculty of Medicine) & Ryan Woloschuk (Woolley Lab, Faculty of Arts & Science)
Project Title: XRays & LEDs for a Brighter World
Team 3:
Serena Singh (Sidhu Lab, Faculty of Medicine), Ryan Woloschuk (Woolley Lab, Faculty of Arts & Science) & Michael Saikali (Cummins Lab, Faculty of Pharmacy)
Project Title: Developing new diagnostics and therapeutics for triple negative breast cancer
Team 4:
Anastasia Korolj (Radisic Lab, Faculty of Engineering), Michael Saikali (Cummins Lab, Faculty of Pharmacy) & Jessica Lacoste (Taipale Lab, Faculty of Medicine)
Project Title: Precision medicine-based approach to identifying novel therapeutic targets for kidney disease