PRiME COVID-19 Task Force convenes second mini-symposium

With the first half of 2020 coming to a close, and the world still struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to rapidly develop novel diagnostics and therapeutics continue both worldwide and locally. On June 23rd, the PRiME COVID-19 Task Force on Advanced Diagnostics and New Therapeutics held a second mini-symposium to share the latest research developments on COVID-19 projects and review new infrastructure that will improve research capacity for the current and future outbreaks.

The online symposium featured five researchers from the University of Toronto (UofT) and its affiliated hospitals who are working to understand the biology of SARS-CoV-2 infection and developing methods for better screening and monitoring of COVID-19 in the population.  Dr. James Rini from the Department of Molecular Genetics (UofT), an expert on the structural biology of coronaviruses, opened the symposium with a primer on the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein which binds human ACE2 receptor in the respiratory tract to cause infection and disease. Studying how the immune system targets this crucial viral entry protein can provide an advantage in vaccine development. Dr. Rini showed work from his laboratory elucidating the 3D structure of the S protein and the conformational change that occurs upon receptor binding with human ACE2. Additionally, he shared how different antibody clones – from both human and camel – can target this process in different ways for neutralization of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Dr. Rini’s group is currently working in collaboration with Drs. Sachdev Sidhu and Alan Cochrane to develop therapeutic antibodies to treat patients with COVID-19.

Continuing the discussion on neutralizing antibodies, Dr. Anne-Claude Gingras from the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) at Mount Sinai Hospital presented her work investigating antibody seropositivity as a means of identifying individuals who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Using blood samples from patients obtained from Dr. Allison McGeer, Dr. Mario Ostrowski, and the Canadian Blood Services, Dr. Gingras’ group has developed three types of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) to detect neutralizing antibodies against the S protein, its receptor-binding domain, and the viral nucleocapsid. They are also profiling saliva samples in collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Gommerman and sampling large “healthy” cohorts, while also working with the National Research Council to develop a “made-in-Canada” research-grade assay for distribution to other research labs across the country.

The ability to perform wide-spread population-scale testing for COVID-19 is absolutely crucial in containing viral spread, especially as many jurisdictions in Canada and around the world are beginning to reopen their economies. However, the current qRT-PCR method of viral screening is low throughput and ill-equipped to deal with a public health crisis of this magnitude. In response to this bottleneck, Dr. Jeff Wrana from LTRI, together with collaborators from UofT, has developed a next-generation sequencing platform for high throughput PCR-based profiling of respiratory pathogens. His group has completed a proof-of-concept study and is now at the stage of optimizing the system and developing algorithms to distinguish positive from negative signals.

The final speakers of the mini-symposium were Dr. Leah Cowen and Dr. Scott Gray-Owen from the Department of Molecular Genetics at UofT. The two shared an exciting overview of new Combined Containment Level 3 (C-CL3) facilities for the University and its affiliated hospitals that will support critical research, facilitate coordination of sample collection and sharing, enhance research capacity, and expand training in infectious disease work. The expansion involves the creation of a Virology Core Facility and an Integrated Biobank in the existing C-CL3 unit on the UofT campus. These facilities will allow researchers to have a safe environment to work with highly infectious viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, and gain access to different organismal models and systems for studying cell biology, virology, and drug efficacy. UofT’s C-CL3 facility is on its way to becoming “Canada’s facility” during this pandemic with many ongoing COVID-19 projects from both within the University and its network, as well as externally for investigators across the country.

These impressive advancements are just some of many ongoing COVID-19 projects from the Toronto research community. As we move forward into the next stage of this pandemic, we expect to see many innovations and technologies being developed in our community emerging as solutions to resolve this global crisis.

Start-ups founded by PRiME members attract major pharmaceutical interest

Start-up companies co-founded by PRiME faculty members, Sachdev Sidhu and Jason Moffat, have garnered the attention of major pharmaceutical partners, with several  acquisitions transpiring over the last month.

Earlier this week, Gilead Sciences purchased a stake in Pionyr Immunotherapeutics for $275M to access its Myeloid TuningTM approach to cancer immunotherapies. The technology, which is based on reprogramming of the tumour microenvironment to fine-tune natural immune responses in the body, was a collaboration involving Dr. Sachdev Sidhu (Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto) and Dr. Max Krummel (University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine) when the company was founded in 2015. Pionyr currently has two pre-clinical drugs expected to be filed for IND in the fall before beginning clinical trials. They are first-in-class antibodies that, in combination with checkpoint inhibitors, have shown significant reduction in tumour growth in mouse models.

On the same day, Empirica Therapeutics, was acquired by Bayer-backed Century Therapeutics.  Empirica was co-founded by Dr. Jason Moffat (Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto) and Dr. Sheila Singh (McMaster University) to develop new therapies for glioblastoma (GBM). The unique, patient-derived pre-clinical models of recurrent GBM that Empirica has used to validate novel brain cancer targets will be combined with Century Therapeutics’ induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived allogeneic cell therapy platform to advance new treatments. Empirica will now become Century Therapeutics Canada, a subsidiary company that will remain based in Hamilton, Ontario.

In May 2020, Northern Biologics Inc. - another Toronto-based company co-founded by Drs. Sidhu and Moffat together with collaborators from UHN - was acquired by Boehringer Ingelheim.  Versant Ventures was the founding investor that established Northern Biologics to discover and develop novel cancer antibody therapeutics.  The company’s lead asset is a first-in-class antibody targeting leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) currently in Phase I clinical trials.  Northern has two additional programs in preclinical development that will add to Boehringer Ingelheim’s cancer immunology portfolio. Further details about the transaction can be found here.

These successful ventures exemplify the innovative and ground-breaking research being conducted by investigators of the PRiME team that are making their way to having real impacts for patients. Recent events provide increasing momentum for the emerging Toronto and Canadian biotech ecosystem - also bolstered by the recent IPO of Repare Therapeutics and the impending IPO of Fusion Pharmaceuticals.  The level of recent activity in the local biotech sector is a testament to the strength of the research community in this area and the potential for future growth.

Join PRiME in the 40th Anniversary of Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope

In celebration of the extraordinary life of Terry Fox and the 40th anniversary of his Marathon of Hope, the PRiME team will be participating in the virtual 2020 Terry Fox Run: One Day, Your Way on Sunday, September 20th, to raise much needed funds for cancer research.

PRiME faculty members bring a diverse range of expertise and many approaches to cancer research. Our researchers are working hard to better understand the molecular pathways involved in different cancer types in order to identify novel targets, many are making advances in technology that will allow tailored treatment for patients of specific disease subtype and stage, and others are developing novel diagnostics in order to be able to identify the disease at an earlier stage. These projects, like many others across the country, need continuous support and funding in order to make progress in conquering cancer. The Terry Fox Foundation is one that has always tirelessly championed this cause.

On April 12, 1980, Terry Fox dipped his right leg in the Atlantic Ocean and started his cross-country Marathon of Hope. This is an iconic image now: a young man with one prosthetic leg, dressed in a white t-shirt with the Canadian flag across his chest, running alone with thousands of kilometres ahead to raise money for cancer research. His resilience and perseverance sadly saw an end after 143 days and 5,373 km when the bone cancer that had plagued him spread to his lungs and, shortly after, took his life. By then, he had raised $1.7 million, with more donations flooding in and reaching $23 million by the following April.

Forty years later, Terry Fox’s legacy lives on in the annual Terry Fox Run, the world’s largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research. While the ongoing COVID-19 crisis may change how we come together, the fight against cancer cannot take a break during the pandemic. This cross-Canada virtual event encourages everyone to run, walk, or bike from wherever they are – be it around the neighbourhood, in the backyard, down the street, or around the block.

“Even if I don't finish, we need others to continue. It's got to keep going.” – Terry Fox

Join the PRiME@UofT Team in fundraising or participating in this year’s run and helping to realize Terry’s vision of a world without cancer.

PRiME COVID-19 Task Force holds its first mini-symposium

Following its launch at the end of March, members of the PRiME COVID-19 Task Force on Advanced Diagnostics and New Therapeutics have been actively working on projects for novel diagnostics and therapeutics to help combat the pandemic here in Canada. While we couldn’t provide an in-person forum to hear about the progress being made, we decided to do so online with a virtual mini-symposium for the PRiME community on May 12th.

The symposium featured 10 faculty members from PRiME who presented brief highlights of their projects that were recently awarded funding from the Toronto COVID-19 Action Initiative. These included platform resources like the Chemistry COVID-19 Core Facility (CCCF), led by Rob Batey, which leverages expertise in UofT’s Faculty of Arts & Science to provide support for the small scale synthesis of small molecules for testing as therapeutics, the design and generation of chemical analogs of molecules identified through screening and other approaches, and synthesis of reagents that are needed for community efforts where commercial supplies may be lacking. Similarly, the UofT centres, BioZone and the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), received TCAI funding to apply their expertise to provide high purity SARS-CoV-2 proteins through the Toronto Open Access COVID-19 Protein Manufacturing Centre, led by Al Edwards. Of the 25 proteins encoded by the SARS-CoV-2 genome, the group will have more than half available for Canadian researchers before the end of the month. Additionally, they will be working on solving the structures for those proteins where the structure is unsolved and they will be making these publicly available.

Increased diagnostic testing is of primary importance, and many of the Task Force members received funding for projects to identify novel diagnostic tools.  PRiME’s Director, Shana Kelley, is developing a point of care diagnostic capable of directly detecting viral particle or viral proteins in the saliva, eliminating the need for nasopharyngeal swabs and RNA extraction.  In the Faculty of Engineering, Leo Chou is using structural nucleic-acid nanotechnology to create a one-pot, enzyme-free detection assay and Xinyu Liu is designing a paper-based microfluidic biosensor with a colorimetric signal readout.  The handheld, automated design would eliminate the need for expensive equipment and cut down the exposure of those conducting the tests. Keith Pardee and his team in Pharmacy are developing a portable, affordable diagnostic based on technology previously used successfully for detection of other viral diseases, including Zika.

In the Faculty of Medicine, efforts from PRiME researchers include both novel diagnostic and therapeutic development.  Igor Stagljar is focusing on a novel serological assay for the detection of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies based on protein-protein interactions in living cells. This method would allow very small sample volumes to be tested in high-throughput with a turnaround time of roughly 1 hour.  Alan Cochrane and Walid Houry are both screening existing small molecules to identify inhibitors targeting RNA processing mechanisms or molecular chaperones critical to viral biogenesis. Jason Moffat is leading a team of researchers within UofT and at collaborating institutions to identify essential host dependency factors for COVID-19 infection and replication suing CRISPR screens. The information obtain through this work would accelerate drug repurposing efforts.

As the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve around us, it was encouraging to hear about the exciting progress being made by our local researchers.  In an effort to get the Toronto-based community interested in COVID-19 life sciences research together on a regular basis to share progress and identify common resources, PRiME is organizing monthly mini-symposia. We look forward to next month.

PRiME announces a COVID-19 Task Force on Advanced Diagnostics and New Therapeutics

As the global community responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, PRiME is convening its leading researchers to form a COVID-19 Task Force on Advanced Diagnostics and New Therapeutics to develop an arsenal of breakthroughs to fight COVID-19 and future pandemics.

UofT researchers who are leading experts in disease biology, medicinal chemistry, device engineering, pharmaceutical sciences, and biomolecular analysis are included on the team to provide all of the needed skill sets for the development of new advances that will enable us to combat SARS-CoV-2.  The Task Force members, together with collaborators and partners, aim to carry out critical projects with the potential to quickly impact the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 and will be working over the coming weeks to resource and scale this effort.

In addition, a set of shared resources is under development that includes antibodies, recombinant samples of viral proteins, viral RNA and viral particles, patient samples, assays, and sample preparation workflow protocols.  These centralized resources will accelerate the timeline of the projects undertaken by the COVID-19 Task Force and the broader community.

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating rapidly and the lack of reagents and throughput in clinical laboratories is limiting testing volumes and crippling our ability to contain local outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2.  The first objective of this effort is to develop and validate a suite of new technologies that circumvent issues with sample preparation and reagent availability.  Common sample preparation workflows will be developed that eliminate bottlenecks.  The main deliverable of each effort will be prototype test kits and devices that can be tested and utilized by clinical laboratories.

It remains unknown at this time whether an effective vaccine can be made for SARS-CoV-2, requiring an intensive effort to identify therapeutic agents that could be effective against the virus.  The PRiME Task Force will spearhead a number of projects that will focus on screening libraries of existing therapeutics that exhibit activity against a number of novel targets.  These agents could be repurposed quickly to combat COVID-19.   The Task Force will also advance several antibody-based agents that are ready to be scaled and advanced towards clinical trials.

While the short-term focus to combat COVID-19 is focused on improving diagnostic testing capabilities and the development of therapeutic agents, in order to eradicate this viral pathogen a more in-depth understanding of the mechanism of pathogenesis will be required.  Several long term projects to be undertaken by the Task Force will collect critical information that will enable us to mount a sustained and effective response to COVID-19.

PRiME Director Shana Kelley commented, “Our researchers recognize the COVID-19 pandemic as a tremendous challenge that needs new tools, technologies and therapeutics.  The Task Force will bring a number of cutting-edge approaches to the fight against COVID-19 that we hope will make an impact now and as future pandemics emerge.  Accelerated scientific research and the breakthroughs that will ensue are our most powerful defences against viral outbreaks of this magnitude.”  

This newly formed group will work closely with Toronto clinicians and local clinic labs to ensure maximal translational outcomes.

PRiME Faculty Awarded Research Funding to Address COVID-19

PRiME faculty members Dev Sidhu and Keith Pardee are among the select researchers awarded federal grant funding to address the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak.  The two projects highlight the novel treatments and diagnostics being developed by researchers within the PRiME community.

In an emergency call for applications, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), in partnership with other federal agencies, awarded 47 grants to research teams providing $26.7 million over two years.  As noted by a statement from the CIHR, “the diversity of research ideas and quality of science was impressive”. This is especially true when one considers that researchers were given only a nine-day window to submit their research responses. “When fast-breaking challenges strike, every moment counts, and it is at times like these that we see the altruistic spirit of our Canadian researchers. We have often witnessed the community’s passion for science and dedication in addressing such global and national crises, and those qualities were once again on full display during this public health emergency”.  

The funded projects span two main research areas: medical countermeasures and social and policy countermeasures.  The awards to Drs. Sidhu and Pardee fall into the former category which focuses on determining transmission, development of diagnostics for detection and surveillance, and the development and validation of potential vaccines.

Dr. Dev Sidhu’s lab in the Donnelly Centre focuses on the development of synthetic antibodies as novel therapeutics for many diseases including cancer. In recent years, he and his team have used custom protein engineering to develop novel anti-viral therapies for SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (middle East Respiratory Syndrome), similar epidemic-causing viruses. Dr. Wei Zhang, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Sidhu lab and currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph, will collaborate with Sidhu along with Drs. Roman Melnyk (Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto), Brian Mark (University of Manitoba), and Marjolein Kikkert (Leiden University, the Netherlands). The team, which has been awarded $886,090, aims to have novel lead candidate drugs within the two years of the project. Read more about Dr. Sidhu’s COVID-19 work, as featured in the Toronto Star, here. 

Dr. Keith Pardee’s lab is based in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and uses synthetic biology to develop portable, affordable diagnostics for healthcare. He developed and tested this type of diagnostic technology on the Zika virus and it has been used in patient trials in high risk countries including Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia. Dr. Pardee will be developing the COVID-19 diagnostic with clinical collaborators from Vietnam and Brazil, who will focus on patient validation of the portable kit. The team, which has been awarded $1,000,000, will focus on creating deployable diagnostics for the virus, including 1) a lab-in-a-box for surge capacity testing, 2) a “pop-up capacity” to manufacture the test on-site, and 3) a point-of-need test for rapid screening at airports or cruise ships.  Read more about Dr. Pardee’s work, featured on Global News, here.

PRiME's First Trainee Collaboration Event

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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

PRiME Featured at the Globe and Mail Biotech Innovation Summit

On November 14th, the Globe and Mail hosted the Biomedical Innovation Summit, sponsored by Novo Nordisk.  The half-day event focused on how to grow Canada’s strengths in the biomedical sector and included keynote presentations from Jason Field, President & CEO of Life Sciences Ontario (LSO) and Michael Hyatt, a technology investor and entrepreneur.

PRiME’s Director, Shana Kelley, presented during the discussion on “Leveraging Canadian Strengths: Taking Stock of Our Biomedical Assets”.  With her vast experience in the U.S. and Canada, and in both academia and the start-up space, Dr. Kelley made several key points regarding critical areas for focus.  These included highlighting the disparity between the volume of high-impact Canadian research in the life sciences versus the limited number of commercialization success stories.  As a solution, she suggested that a sharpening of the focus on translating Canadian research, with PRiME being one example of how to foster collaboration and create a translational environment in academia.

Along with the other presenters, which included Andrew Casey, President of BIOTECanada, Kelley highlighted the lack of government funding for Canadian startups as a key roadblock limiting company creation in biotech.  She highlighted one funding program that works well in the U.S., the NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.  With successful examples of companies with SBIR funding (eg. Illumina) and commercialization programs such as I-Corp that can provide advice to benefit early stage companies, there are many aspects of the model that could prove useful to Canadian researchers.

With speakers from Novo Nordisk Canada, Bloom Burton & Co., Zymeworks, and Lumira Ventures, the second panel discussion, entitled “Commercialization in Focus: Building blocks of a thriving ecosystem” continued to build on the themes of collaboration and investment required to grow our biotech ecosystem.  Other models discussed included venture philanthropy and tax incentives for Canadian citizens who have built their expertise in the biotech area to return home and pass on their knowledge here.

With a diverse audience of over 300 including representatives from the government, investors, entrepreneurs and researchers, the Biomedical Innovation Summit provided much food for thought. A few major issues facing Canadian researchers were universally identified by the community to which the speakers provided some insightful approaches to solving.

PRiME's first Research Retreat

As one can imagine, with over 50 faculty members and close to 100 trainees in our community, getting everyone together is not easy.  However, on November 5th, we had an impressive turnout at our first internal research retreat. It was encouraging to see this engagement from our community, especially with several scientific conferences, upcoming grant deadlines, and fall convocation competing for our researchers’ time.

Even though PRiME launched in the spring, this was the first organized opportunity for our members to come together and learn more about the diverse research taking place within our community. The agenda allowed for lightning talks from more than 40 different labs to peak the interest from the audience and to begin to identify areas of possible collaboration.  A poster session during lunch and coffee breaks allowed some deeper discussions, which we hope will continue in the coming months.

PRiME Faculty members granted Team Project Award from Medicine by Design

A team of PRiME faculty members have been awarded $3.6M by the University of Toronto’s Medicine by Design initiative which supports a portfolio of multi-disciplinary team projects focused on accelerating the field of regenerative medicine. The Team Project Award will fund research aimed at targeting bottlenecks in mesoderm differentiation for regenerative therapies. Led by PRiME Director, Shana Kelley, the 8 team members span the Faculties of Pharmacy, Medicine, Arts & Science, and Applied Science & Engineering and have a diverse range of expertise. The collaboration exemplifies the cross-disciplinary approach that PRiME hopes to foster amongst its members in order to tackle big challenges in precision medicine.

The effort will expand the possibilities of using human pluripotent stem cells for therapeutic stem cell production and the mobilization of endogenous stem cells to promote tissue repair by developing approaches to control self-renewal, differentiation and proliferation with a high level of specificity.  Included in the project is the development of a new on-cell screening approach for the isolation of novel antibodies, and synthetic biology approaches for engineering therapeutic proteins. The overall goal is to identify and target a comprehensive set of proteins that modulate key signal transduction pathways active during mesoderm differentiation.

“This project has significant potential for transformative outcomes. It is the first regenerative medicine-focused effort to link iterative, high-throughput functional genomics with the development of biologic reagents with therapeutic potential, “ said Dr. Kelley. “The outputs of this effort will include high-impact basic research of significant interest to the stem cell biology community, and a series of technologies and therapeutic leads with commercial potential across a variety of disease areas.”

Led by Dr. Kelley, an expert in nanobiomedicine, the project relies on a highly multidisciplinary team with additional expertise in genomics & splicing (Ben Blencowe – Donnelly Centre), tissue architecture and microenvironment (Alison McGuigan – Chemical Engineering), signal transduction (Stephane Angers – Pharmacy), antibody development (Dev Sidhu – Donnelly Centre), microfluidics (Aaron Wheeler –Chemistry), functional genomics (Jason Moffat – Donnelly Centre), and synthetic biology (Keith Pardee –Pharmacy). Together this group will develop unique approaches and generate new solutions for the production of therapeutic stem cells and approaches to endogenous repair.

Read the full Medicine by Design announcement here.