A team of researchers from the University of Toronto, U of T-affiliated hospitals, and the National Research Council of Canada has been awarded a $17.5M grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and partners to build a Diagnostic Horizons Lab (DHL) in Toronto.
The project, whose leads include the Department of Chemistry’s Professor Aaron Wheeler, could help address healthcare inequalities in Canada and all over the world. Other leads on the project include Unity Health Toronto’s Dr. Claudia dos Santos, Dr. Heather Ross of the University Health Network (UHN), and NRC’s Dr. Teodor Veres.
The DHL will accelerate the development and promotion of a new generation of ‘distributed’ medical diagnostic tests designed to be deployed directly to patients — even those living in remote communities — and deliver results to them and their healthcare team more efficiently and quickly than a centralized laboratory.
“The diagnostic test is a cornerstone of modern medicine, serving to identify each patient's condition and to assist in prescribing the appropriate treatment. The vast majority of diagnostic tests are run by highly trained personnel in centralized laboratories, making them less accessible — even inaccessible — to many Canadians. The DHL will help address this urgent problem,” says Wheeler.
The U of T Department of Chemistry’s Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories Building will be the primary site for the DHL. Most of the funding from the grant will be used to equip the lab with state-of-the-art instruments for the design, prototyping, and manufacture of new diagnostic tools. The site will be administered by the Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies (CRAFT), a joint venture that unites leaders in the microfluidics and biosensor communities from academia and the NRC in solving important Canadian healthcare problems.
CRAFT’s infrastructure and expertise are mainly located at U of T’s downtown campus and the NRC’s campus in Boucherville, Quebec, but the DHL will also include satellite hospital sites at Unity Health Toronto and UHN. The hospitals’ focus will be on testing, validation, and staging in advance of clinical trials.
The DHL will bring critical new functionality that is not currently available at CRAFT or other facilities across Canada. It will increase capacity for production and finishing of portable diagnostic devices as well as implantable sensor manufacture and characterization--devices that are inserted under the skin to monitor physiological metrics and biomarkers of disease. CRAFT’s existing stand-alone device manufacture and characterization will increase, with increased device-to-device welding and flexible substrate processing. Once deployed to communities and hospitals, these innovative portable tests could improve the well-being of Canadians with limited access to healthcare and even save lives.
“In partnership with TRANSFORM HF and other organizations, the DHL will create a pipeline designed to translate diagnostics into settings where they can usefully improve patient access, including regional and community hospitals, mobile health units, and remote Indigenous communities in Northern Ontario that are historically under-served and under-resourced for medical care,” says Dr. Ross, the head of Cardiology at UHN.
The first tests developed in the DHL will target septic shock, a medical emergency that can rapidly progress to multiorgan failure; and heart failure, a chronic disease that if left unchecked, will inevitably lead to a downward cycle of poor quality of life, hospitalization, and death.
“This is a crucial investment in new infrastructure that will not only accelerate the development of new diagnostic devices through CRAFT,” according to Dr. Teodore Veres, underlining the urgent need for faster delivery of crucial diagnostics of this type. A Research and Development Director at the NRC’s Medical Devices Research Centre in Boucherville as well as co-Director, Veres notes that the grant will help CRAFT grow and strengthen its partnerships with stakeholders who are necessary for overcoming the barriers impeding the creation, domestic manufacture and deployment of made-in-Canada microfluidic-enabled medical devices.
Dr. dos Santos, a Critical Care Physician at Unity Health, and another co-lead of the DHL proposal, agrees that the team is taking an important step forward. "Because test development is just the first part of the story, we have recruited partners from community and healthcare organizations, hospitals, federal and provincial governments, and industry to bring the DHL to life.”
“Ultimately, the DHL will inspire the community to develop myriad diagnostic innovations to address other urgent healthcare needs.”