The development of new precision medicine-focused approaches requires extensive collaboration and the integration of new technologies. The integration of expertise from across disciplines is essential to create new approaches for diagnosis and the identification of novel treatments from a more complete understanding of disease biology. As PRiME enters its second year as an Institutional Strategic Initiative at UofT, it is looking forward to establishing new partnerships worldwide to continue its cross-disciplinary approach. A huge step towards this vision of “Global Perspectives to Advance Precision Medicine” has been a 2020 Connaught Global Challenge Award to PRiME Director, Dr. Shana Kelley, and a team of PRiME members.
Global partnerships will be developed with research institutions in the USA, Europe, Israel and Asia and will leverage the strengths of PRiME in Drug Discovery. With support from the Connaught program, a suite of programs will be developed to forge partnerships with four key international universities: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI), National University of Singapore (NUS), ETH Zürich, and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). These institutions have faculty members that are leaders in their fields and collective areas of research strengths that will complement the expertise that resides within PRiME to help advances occur more rapidly.
The funding will allow PRiME to establish a suite of new programming to benefit its community, primarily its trainees, at various stages of their training. While current COVID-19 restrictions make it a challenging time to be forging new international partnerships, PRiME will manage the first phase of programming virtually and then pursue in-person activities once safe travel is possible and allowed.
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The PRiME Frontiers of Precision Medicine Speaker Series will bring experts from the partner institutions to share their research and expertise with open lectures for the UofT community.
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The PRiME Ph.D. and PDF Exchange Program will provide trainee (graduate students and PDFs) exchange opportunities in specific research labs of partner institutions to allow hands on training in specialized technologies.
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The PRiME Scholars Program for undergraduate students will be a 4-6 week program hosted at the University of Toronto to offer the opportunity for local and international students to gain hands-on experience in the labs of UofT PRiME researchers. Additional programming during the summer through the Scholars Program will include a boot camp focused on entrepreneurship in the life sciences and short modules focused on the frontiers of drug discovery and drug accessibility.
In addition to Dr. Kelley, the program leverages a multidisciplinary team including Stephane Angers and Keith Pardee (Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy), Jason Moffat (Faculty of Medicine), Milica Radisic and Molly Shoichet (Faculty of Engineering), and Robert Batey and Alan Aspuru-Guzik (Faculty of Arts & Science). Additional expertise within the PRiME community will be offered to trainees to support engagement across a wide breadth of research interests. The goal is for partnerships fostered during this program to produce collaborations that will continue to build on UofT’s strengths, foster learning, and accelerate discoveries.