Groundbreakers

Institute of Biomedical Engineering

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

What is smartphone science? And how are researchers using these devices as mobile laboratories?

In season two, episode five of the Groundbreakers video series, host Ainka Jess speaks with Ayden Malekjahani about how smartphones are being used to explore new avenues in science. A PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Malekjahani is developing a quantum dot smartphone device to diagnose and track COVID-19.

“These devices really are ubiquitous and they are in the hands of everyone,” he said. “So, if we're able to build some tools that are very modular, small devices that you can hook up to someone's smartphone at a local clinic or a local community centre, then we believe that we can drive the cost down of these diagnostics rather than every single person visiting a large hospital or a doctor's office getting an individual test.”

The episode also features Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies (CRAFT) researchers: Milica Radisic, a professor in the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering who works with organ-on-a-chip technologies; and Axel Guenther, a professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering who developed a bio-printer that can treat large burn wounds.

Groundbreakers is a multimedia series that includes articles at U of T News and features research leaders involved with U of T’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives, whose work will transform lives.

Watch S2 Ep. 5 of Groundbreakers

How should we navigate the next pandemic? U of T researchers are finding the answers

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 19:43:23 +0000

How should we navigate the next pandemic? U of T researchers are finding the answers

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 11/15/2022 - 14:43

Cutline

The Institute for Pandemics, based at U of T's Dalla Lana School of Public Health, is dedicated to preventing, addressing and recovering from pandemics – with a public health focus (photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Topic

Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Joint Centre for Bioethics

COVID-19 is the ninth pandemic, or large-scale epidemic, the world has experienced in the past century – and it won’t be the last.

To help the public and policymakers better navigate the next global outbreak, the University of Toronto has created the Institute for Pandemics (IFP) based at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

The institute is dedicated to preventing, preparing for, fighting and recovering from pandemics – with a public health focus. It’s built around three strategic pillars: readiness, recovery and resilience.

Nelson Lee

“We want to recover from this current public health crisis – it’s not over yet,” says Nelson Lee, interim director of the Institute for Pandemics and a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health who is an expert on emerging infectious diseases, pandemics and epidemics. “But we also want to get ready for the next one in order to make better responses and decisions.

“The Institute for Pandemics will take an interdisciplinary approach to better understand transmission, how it's affecting our society and the economy, and how to make better public health decisions by pooling together researchers from social sciences, public health, medicine and pharmacy to engineering, and health economists, computer data scientists and more.”

The IFP is the vision of professor Adalsteinn Brown, dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and co-founder of the Institute. The research areas of the IFP are led by David Fisman, a professor in the school’s epidemiology division; associate professor Jennifer Gibson, director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics, and Geoffrey Anderson, a professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation.

Fisman will lead the Centre for Pandemic Readiness, which is dedicated to research to prevent the next pandemic and limit transmission. Gibson will helm the Centre for Pandemic Resilience, which aims to build equitable health systems that are safeguarded by data-driven, innovative technologies. Anderson will lead the Centre for Pandemic Recovery, which will provide evidence-based understandings of the broader negative socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 to guide better, fairer policies.

A U of T Institutional Strategic Initiative, the IFP will connect researchers across academic disciplines to find accurate, sustainable, and reflective solutions to the multi-layered challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has brought. It will also act as a trusted voice to sort through the information – and misinformation – about how to move ahead.

The inequities exposed by the pandemic were ‘striking’

Arjumand Siddiqi

Arjumand Siddiqi is a professor and division head of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. As a social epidemiologist, Siddiqi studies the impact of economic and social factors – including race and ethnicity – that cause unequal health outcomes.

Siddiqi’s work focuses on Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. She is particularly interested in how wealthy countries use and share their wealth, including the ripple effects of social policy decisions and how the legacies of white-settler colonialism affect diverse societies.

While COVID-19 is an airborne disease that puts everyone at risk, Siddiqi’s work shows that socioeconomic factors make some communities much more vulnerable than others. This includes people who lack the ability to work from home, live in crowded conditions or share a space with an essential service worker.

Social epidemiologists trace the patterns of disparities in a health crisis, including the social determinants of health. Compared to previous outbreaks like SARS, Siddiqi describes COVID-19’s impact on vulnerable communities as striking – yet predictable.

“Your social position is a powerful source in dictating what your life is like and whether you have the resources and autonomy to stay healthy or whether you will be made by society to be vulnerable,” says Siddiqi, a Canada Research Chair in Population Health Equity.

“Those consequences of not having resources or autonomy lead to health [issues] in a lot of different ways – and this time around, it led to increased exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

At a July 2020 Standing Committee on Health session in Canada’s House of Commons, Siddiqi outlined how some neighbourhoods in Toronto were more affected than others by the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, Black neighbourhoods were 40 times more likely to be at risk of contracting COVID-19 than white, upper-class neighbourhoods, she said.

At the time, an interactive map of COVID-19 rates per neighbourhood released by Toronto Public Health reported that the city’s northwest neighbourhoods – home to predominantly working-class Black communities – saw COVID-19 infection rates of 450 per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, neighbourhoods located in central Toronto – and home to higher-income, white residents – had approximately 15 cases per 100,000 people.

How do we move forward to build resilient communities? Siddiqi says that, from an institutional perspective, providing information and access to health care is essential – but ensuring they have the economic power to thrive is crucial.

How did lockdown measures affect our mental health?

From children attending classes on Zoom to the blurring of parents’ work and home lives, COVID-19 lockdown measures had a far-reaching impact on our sense of community and well-being.

John Sina Moin

John Sina Moin, a post-doctoral researcher at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, is exploring the mental health outcomes that COVID-19 measures had on vulnerable populations – primarily mothers, children and youth.

The international study, set for release early next year, compares the socioeconomic challenges and health disparities faced by mothers with young children and young adults living in Toronto and London, England since the pandemic. The study will concentrate on four age-based cohorts: mothers with children who are one to five years old; mothers with children who are six to 12 years old; youth who are 13 to 17 years of age and young adults between the ages of 18 to 24.

“When it comes to children and youth, remote learning largely disrupted their social routine,” Moin says. “Mothers carried a heavier burden of taking care of children while balancing work and single-parent families had even more socioeconomic pressures.

“We think that this had a detrimental impact on their mental health.”

Moin’s research shows that mothers of one to five-year-old and mothers with children who are six to 12 years old experienced more strains on their mental health. Moin says that for the latter cohort, this may be due to increased demands to help children with schooling, which was not a factor for mothers with younger kids. As for challenges faced by mothers with babies, he notes that stressors may include social distancing and not being able to get the same level of support from friends and family before the pandemic started. This cohort may also experience anxiety about the future of their children and the rising cost of living.

Meanwhile, a September 2021 report released by the Survey on COVID-19 and Mental Health (SCMH), found that one in four Canadians who were 18 or older screened positive for symptoms of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). That was up from one in five from the previous year.

In Moin’s study, too, teenagers and young adults experienced increased mental health support needs.

While the shift to remote learning was one of the largest hurdles for all youth cohorts, those between the ages of 18 to 24 lost many rites of passage into adulthood – including experiencing campus life or living on their own for the first time. They also had difficulty landing part-time jobs to supplement their incomes.

Moin is continuing to process the data collected in both Toronto and London and will further explore the mental health experiences and impacts on families based on income and other factors such as deprivation score.

Leveraging technology for accessible, quality care

Virtual doctor visits remain a safe and accessible way to access health care as we recover from the pandemic – and Moin says the practice may be one of the pandemic’s silver linings.

That’s because virtual care makes it easier for people with physical disabilities or who live in remote areas to access a doctor – and doesn’t necessarily require sophisticated technology. Moin, for example, led a study on accessing type 2 diabetes care during the pandemic that found, among other things, that 90 per cent of virtual care was delivered by telephone in Ontario.

Even so, Moin says the province is lagging in its efforts to capitalize on virtual care, including investing in apps or remote technologies to measure blood-sugar levels or high blood pressure, for example.

Moin says it’s critical to learn from our collective experience with COVID-19 – including fully embracing innovative, virtual health-care services that are more accessible and don’t sacrifice patient care – so we’re better prepared for future health threats.

Moin says we must also take the time and effort to understand where we can best leverage technology and where traditional means of delivering care are still most effective. That way, we can improve care for patients by taking advantage of the best means of health care available. This will leave us better prepared for future health threats.

“We need to learn from history and everything that has happened with this pandemic,” he says. “Part of this is being resilient to stop shocks to the system, like future pandemics or other global events.

“There are many lessons to be learned to help us in the future.”

Students push the boundaries of research and innovation: Groundbreakers S2 Ep.4

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 15:04:32 +0000

Students push the boundaries of research and innovation: Groundbreakers S2 Ep.4 Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 11/08/2022 - 10:04

Topic

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Alumni

Graduate Students

Medicine by Design

Robotics

U of T Mississauga

From launching rovers into space to exploring whether green cannabinoids can treat epilepsy in children, students at the University of Toronto are taking research and innovation in bold new directions.

In Ep. 4 of the Groundbreakers video series, host Ainka Jess goes behind the scenes with student researchers from the Robotics Institute and Medicine by Design strategic initiatives, as well as the Black Founders Network.

Some of their work is literally out of this world.

“I think as humans we are very curious creatures and I see planetary robots as a way to extend our reach in the solar system, so I’m actually really excited about what these rovers can do in the future,” says Olivier Lamarre, a PhD candidate in planetary robotics at U of T’s STARS Laboratory.

The episode also features Kareem Abdur-Rashid and Kamaluddin Abdur-Rashid – both alumni of U of T and co-founders and co-directors of Kare Chemical Technologies – and Justine Bajohr, a PhD candidate in the lab of Maryam Faiz, an assistant professor in the department of surgery in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

Watch S2 Ep.4 of Groundbreakers

Who owns your face? Scholars at U of T's Schwartz Reisman Institute explore tech's thorniest questions

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 13:30:46 +0000

Who owns your face? Scholars at U of T's Schwartz Reisman Institute explore tech's thorniest questions

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 11/03/2022 - 09:30

Cutline

Who owns the data generated by facial recognition tools? Can AI help cities budget more fairly? These are the types of questions being tackled by experts at U of T's Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (photo by Weiquan Lin/Getty Images)

Topic

Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus

Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

Artificial Intelligence

Computer Science

Faculty of Law

Political Science

There are no easy answers when it comes to protecting people’s rights in the digital domain.

Take, for example, your face. Clearly, it belongs to you. But that’s not necessarily the case when you use it to unlock your smartphone or post an image of it on social media – in both instances your likeness is transformed by a third party into a stream of data.

Wendy Wong

“Right now, we really don’t have a lot of agency over our data, even though it stems from really mundane activities,” says Wendy H. Wong, a professor of political science in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science and a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

“It is generated about you, but you don’t actually create that data yourself.”

The Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Civil Society, Wong is working to bridge the divide between rapid technological innovation and society’s capacity to develop rules and regulations to govern it.

She is exploring how challenges in governing data and artificial intelligence are forcing us to re-examine our perspective on human rights. Called “Human Rights in the Digital Era,” Wong’s project – one of the major research projects underway at the Institute – looks at how the proliferation of data has fundamentally changed what it means to be human, how we relate to one another, and what it means to have rights in the digital era.

An Institutional Strategic Initiative (ISI) that launched in 2019, the Schwartz Reisman Institute’s mission is to ask critical questions and generate deep knowledge about the increasingly important – and potentially fraught – relationship between technologies and societies by fostering research-based collaborations between computer scientists, social scientists and humanists. It’s supported by a historic $100 million donation to U of T from Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman – a gift that is also underpinning construction of Canada’s largest university-based innovation hub: the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus.

“Toronto is home to some of the key innovations that have powered the explosion of AI over the last decade,” says Gillian Hadfield, the institute’s director and a professor in the Faculty of Law who is the Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society and was recently named a CIFAR AI Chair. “This generates the capacity for expertise and collaborations for people interested in solving problems.”

“The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society can play a great role in helping grow the vibrancy of the community and the potential for Canada to grow such technology.”

Who owns your face?

In the case of facial recognition tools, Wong says the rapid growth and adoption of the technology by everyone from smartphone-makers to police departments is raising important questions about ownership and privacy, and how personal aspects of our lives – such as our faces – can be taken from us as data, without our knowledge.

Gillian Hadfield

For example, Canada’s privacy commissioner said in 2021 that the RCMP had violated the Privacy Act by using the services of Clearview AI, a U.S.-based facial recognition company. In an earlier decision, it also found Clearview in violation of privacy laws after it collected three billion pictures of Canadians, without their consent, from websites for criminal justice purposes.

Writing about the decision in the Globe and Mail last year, Wong noted that there is no definite answer as to who owns the data generated by our faces, making international human rights frameworks a vital touchstone in guiding the future of this space.

Can we ever properly consent to having our faces made into data? In the best of times, consent is a challenge to define,” Wong wrote. “In the age of datafication, it has become almost impossible to take someone’s ‘consent’ as meaningful.”

As technologies push against questions about human rights, there is still a lot to learn in understanding what it means to be human in the digital era.

Part of this includes challenging what we used to take as fact – like ownership of our faces – especially when it is impossible to opt-out of using anything digital, Wong says.

Human rights on social media – who makes them?

Another thorny issue, says Wong, is how freedom of expression is being regulated by the
Big Tech companies that encourage users to scroll through countless hours of social media on their platforms.

Traditionally, human rights – including freedom of expression – govern relationships between states and people. As a result, Wong says existing human rights frameworks are insufficient to oversee tech giants and their platforms, which straddle both the private and public spheres.

Wong notes, however, that corporations such as Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, employ their own community standards and have made attempts to self-regulate. Meta’s Oversight Board, for one, is an independent body that evaluates decisions made by the company to remove or keep problematic content and profiles on Instagram and Facebook.

The Global Network Initiative, a non-governmental organization spearheaded by technology companies and academics, is another effort grappling with questions about how corporations should protect values like freedom of expression and privacy.

Wong says she plans to further explore the global impact of these and other bodies – both through her work at the institute and in her forthcoming book with MIT Press.

Empowering communities through algorithmic fairness

While technological advancement has created many new questions, it also promises to provide answers to many longstanding problems.

Nisarg Shah

Nisarg Shah, an assistant professor in the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science, is designing new approaches for balloting, fairness considerations and allocation rules to explore how AI technologies can be used for participatory budgeting – a democratic process that empowers residents to control how public funds should be used in their communities.

“When people talk about algorithmic fairness, they think about technology making decisions for people,” says Shah, who is one of four U of T faculty members, awarded with an inaugural Schwartz Reisman Fellowship.

“Sometimes, algorithms make mistakes, and the question is whether they might impact some communities more than others.”

A participatory budget model starts with community consultations, followed by various rounds of discussing community proposals on how much of the public budget should be allocated to each project. Finally, residents vote for their choice, which is then aggregated into a final budget.

Shah designed approaches centered around identifying avenues to elicit people’s preferences and ensure a fair allocation of the budget with respect to their needs. This included participatory budget models based on happiness derived from a project or based on the cost of implementation.

Consider a hypothetical example outlined in Participatory Budgeting: Models and Approaches. 3,000 residents vote on allocating a $7 million budget to four projects: A and B (each cost $3 million), C (cost of $2 million) and D (cost of $2 million). Two thousand residents like only projects A and B, 500 like only C, and the remaining 500 like only D. In this example, projects A and B could be implemented, which would make 2,000 residents “very happy” but the rest “very unhappy.” Or, one of projects A and B could get the green light together with both projects C and D. This would make 2,000 residents “partially happy” and 1,000 residents “very happy.” What would be the fair choice?

Toronto piloted participatory budgeting from 2015 to 2017 in Scarborough and North York. Overall, the pilot study found that residents wanted more input on infrastructure projects and more opportunities to consult city staff on various issues. However, it found participatory budgeting was also resource-intensive and could result in divisions in communities.

As Shah continues to develop fair approaches to participatory budgeting, he’ll also explore how proportional representation, which ensures each neighborhood gets an adequate amount of representation – be it monetary or political – commensurate with the people living there, can help curb another issue known as political gerrymandering – when boundaries of electoral districts are altered for political advantage, giving some communities more voting rights than others.

Investing in the future

As researchers at the Schwartz Reisman Institute navigate the promise and pitfalls of existing technologies for society, Hadfield says SRI is simultaneously investing in initiatives that aim to influence the direction of future technological development.

In an effort to promote responsible, ethics-based AI technologies, SRI partnered with the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) at the Rotman School of Management last summer to provide mentorship and support to startups in the incubator’s AI stream. This includes Private AI, which protects privacy by developing AI software that erases personal data from text, images and video, and Armilla AI, an AI governance platform enabling algorithmic accountability.

The Schwartz Reisman Institute also ran a one-day workshop with the Business Development Corporation of Canada (BDC), which provides business loans to small and medium Canadian enterprises, and hosted panels with government regulators, regulatory technology providers and SRI researchers to connect about establishing a fair, responsible Canadian AI industry.

With regulatory transformation a strategic goal at SRI – and a focus of Hadfield’s current research – SRI will partner with governments, civil society organizations and other institutions to offer new ideas about regulatory frameworks to guide digital transformation.

Tackling heart failure with a dose of technology: Groundbreakers S2 Ep.3

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 20:16:59 +0000

Tackling heart failure with a dose of technology: Groundbreakers S2 Ep.3 Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 10/27/2022 - 16:16

Topic

Institute of Biomedical Engineering

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Graduate Students

Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research

University Health Network

Researchers at the University of Toronto and its partner hospitals are on a mission to bring equitable health care to Canadians – and it’s all powered by technology.

In Ep. 3 of the Groundbreakers video series, host Ainka Jess explores how researchers with Transform HF, an institutional strategic initiative formed through a partnership between U of T and the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research, are helping to save lives by getting critical heart failure tools in the hands of patients across the country, including Indigenous communities in the North.

“We know there are incredible inequities in care and there are many drivers of those inequities – things related to the digital divide, access to technology, access to broadband, digital health literacy and skin tone, which can impact the function of various wearables,” says Transform HF Co-Director Heather Ross, who is scientific lead at the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research, the head of cardiology at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, University Health Network, and a professor of medicine in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

“We have to elevate the care for everybody. It should not matter where you live in Canada. Everybody should have the right to access high quality care.”

In the episode, Ross is joined by Transform HF researchers Amika Shah, a PhD candidate in health services research, and Daniel Franklin, an assistant professor in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering.

Groundbreakers is a multimedia series that includes articles at U of T News and features research leaders involved with U of T’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives, whose work will transform lives.

Watch S2 Ep.3 of Groundbreakers

Researchers shrink brain tumours with gold nanoparticles, develop ‘mini brains’ to study psychiatric disorders

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 14:03:07 +0000

Researchers shrink brain tumours with gold nanoparticles, develop ‘mini brains’ to study psychiatric disorders

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 10/18/2022 - 10:03

Cutline

(Photo by Aja Koska/Getty Images)

Topic

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

PRiME

Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research

Chemistry

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Graduate Students

Medicine by Design

Researchers at the University of Toronto are inching closer to realizing a life-saving brain cancer treatment by using gold nanoparticles to make radiation therapy more effective and less toxic for patients.

In their battle against glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a rare, fast-growing cancer that begins in the brain, the multidisciplinary team has discovered that the nanoparticles can keep radiation tightly focused on the tumour, shrinking its size and preventing damage elsewhere in the body.

Only a handful of researchers around the world are focused on radiolabeled nanoparticle research for brain tumours.

Raymond Reilly

“There is a small group of scientists working on radiation nanomedicines globally – and an even smaller group studying the therapeutic use of radiolabeled gold nanoparticles,” says Raymond Reilly, a renowned specialist in radiopharmaceuticals and professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy who is supervising the team.

“To my knowledge, we're one of the few groups in the world that have studied local infusion of radiolabeled gold nanoparticles for treatment of brain tumours.”

Anchoring radioisotopes in the brain

In animal studies, the use of gold nanoparticles in radiation resulted in tumours that were no longer detectable by MRI four weeks after the treatment. The researchers also found evidence of prolonged survival – and a potential cure – following the 150-day trial.

Constantine Georgiou

“We use gold nanoparticles to hold the radiation, or radioisotope, where we inject it into the brain,” says Constantine Georgiou, a graduate student in the department of pharmaceutical studies who works with Reilly.

“Without the gold nanoparticle, the radiation leaves the brain tumour, making it non-effective.”

The radiation also effectively erased tumour cells without causing any apparent damage to the brain or other tissues in the body – travelling no more than two millimetres from the site of injection. In other words, there appears to be no toxicity associated with the treatment.

To evaluate the effectiveness of the therapy, Georgiou used innovative imaging techniques such as single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging, a type of nuclear medicine imaging that allows researchers to visualize where the gold nanoparticles are located in the brain, and bioluminescence and MRI imaging to track the growth of the tumour.

The project was first developed under Noor Al-saden, one of 10 trainees at U of T who took part in the inaugural 2019 PRiME Fellowship Awards – a program to propel high-risk, high-reward, multidisciplinary research in precision medicine. PRiME is an Institutional Strategic Initiative (ISI) at U of T that connects scientists, engineers and other innovators across different disciplines to accelerate drug discovery, diagnostics and understanding of disease biology.

Preliminary results from Al-saden’s PRiME research and a seed grant from the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada helped Reilly’s group secure a $200,000 Canadian Cancer Society Innovation Grant.

The development of radiation nanomedicine requires a multidisciplinary approach.

At U of T, the research would not have been possible without the expertise of world-renowned polymer chemist Mitch Winnik, a professor in the department of chemistry in Faculty of Arts & Science. That’s because the radioisotope – in this case, Lutetium-177 – is attached to gold nanoparticles by a polymer synthesised by Winnik’s group, a substance made of large molecules with various metal-binding sites.

The team’s next research phase will take place in a new space at U of T: the Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) facility in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. Made possible by a $1.3 million grant awarded to Reilly from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and Ontario Research Fund, the facility was launched earlier this year to create radiopharmaceuticals for clinical trials.

Georgiou and Reilly are currently studying radiation nanomedicine combined with immunotherapy to provide a more durable tumour response to treat GBM. The group also plans to study the effectiveness of other radioisotopes attached to the gold nanoparticles, which may achieve even more precision in erasing cancer cells.

A deeper understanding of energy metabolism in brain disorders by making ‘mini brains’

Reilly and Georgiou’s research isn’t the only innovative, brain-focused project that’s being supported by PRiME.

Angela Duong

Research by Angela Duong, a U of T alumna and a 2019 PRiME fellow, developed 2D and 3D brain models from patients to gain insights into the role that mitochondrial function plays in neuronal activity – specifically in patients with bipolar disorder.

Working alongside Ana Cristina Andreazza – a professor in the departments of pharmacology and toxicology and psychiatry in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, with a cross appointment at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health – Duong built 3D in vitro cultures of brain cells, also known as cerebral organoids, to identify biological targets that can be used to guide the development of therapeutics. In doing so, Duong overcame longstanding hurdles in understanding the biology of patients with psychiatric disorders since researchers previously relied on two limited avenues for investigation: post-mortem brain samples, which are scarce, and brain imaging technologies which are expensive and may require radioactive exposure.

Duong describes her cerebral organoids as “mini brains” that retain patient genetic background, allowing researchers to study human-specific processes that might be related to the clinical diagnosis of the patients. She says this tool is useful for disease modelling compared to brain samples from animals which do not carry the complex human genes that cause psychiatric disorders.

“In the brain, 20 per cent of our body’s total energy budget is used to support neurotransmission. This is a very energy-demanding process that allows brain cells to communicate with each other, Duong says. “So, if there is metabolic dysfunction in the brain, the process of neurotransmission is also affected, which we think is related to the symptoms and mood changes that we commonly see in patients with psychiatric disorders.”

“By developing 'mini brains' to function as disease models, we can learn what metabolic changes are going on in the brain of actual patients with brain diseases without invasive brain biopsies or studying the brains of mice or rats."

To do this, Duong collected blood samples from patients with and without bipolar disorder and isolated their white blood cells. The cells were then reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), a stem cell that can be generated directly from a somatic cell, any cell of a living organism other than reproductive ones. Using these iPSCs, Duong later created 2D and 3D brain cells, or organoids.

Duong’s project was among the first to fully characterize the brain’s mitochondrial health, from white blood cells to iPSCs to cerebral organoids. That, in turn, offered validation about whether mitochondria stay healthy throughout the reprogramming and differentiation process. This study provides important groundwork for creating more sophisticated patient 2D and 3D brain cells for disease modelling and the study of mitochondrial dysfunction across a wide range of brain diseases.

The achievement required the multidisciplinary collaboration of three different U of T labs.

Liliana Attisano

In addition to Andreazza’s lab, the PRiME project brought in expertise from two professors at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine to work on the 3D engineered organoids: Liliana Attisano, a professor of biochemistry in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, and Martin Beaulieu, an associate professor in the department of pharmacology and toxicology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

Building self-developing brain cells

Organoid production relies on the cell’s self-organizing properties to develop required cell types.

The goal of Attisano’s lab was to develop protocols to produce cerebral organoids that were all the same size and shape to decrease variability, making it easier for researchers to find the answers to their questions. To accomplish this, researchers added growth factors or inhibitors that moved the cells into a neural lineage. After that, the cells divided and developed for about a month – just as they would in a human brain. The lineage can also be modified to make organoids for other body parts, such as the liver.

Beaulieu’s lab, meanwhile, provided equipment and resources to characterize the electroactivity of the neurons within the organoids.

Duong’s technological model is now being used by Andreazza to further develop cerebral organoids to further investigate a range of psychiatric conditions.

Meanwhile, Attisano is making cerebral organoids available for researchers across Toronto with an organoid production platform called Applied Organoid Core (ApOC), funded by the Brain Canada Foundation’s 2019 Platform Support Grant, and U of T’s Medicine by Design strategic initiative. The ApOC is a $1,425,000 grant. Through this project, Attisano is collaborating with other researchers who want to use cerebral organoids to map human brain development and disorders such as epilepsy.

“When it comes down to it, brain disorders are simply a kind of alteration in molecular components that result in altered behaviour. It’s no different from a mutation that makes you susceptible to cancer. But we never had the capacity to study this,” Attisano says.

“Cerebral organoids give us that potential.”

Behind the scenes with the Black Research Network: Groundbreakers S2 Ep.2

mattimar — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 16:06:30 +0000

Behind the scenes with the Black Research Network: Groundbreakers S2 Ep.2 mattimar Wed, 10/12/2022 - 12:06

Topic

Anti-Black Racism

Black Research Network

Faculty of Information

New College

U of T Mississauga

U of T Scarborough

Women and Gender Studies

How is the University of Toronto promoting Black research excellence and enhancing the research capacity of Black scholars across its tri-campus community?

Those are just some of the questions explored in season two, episode two of the Groundbreakers video series as host Ainka Jess goes behind the scenes with the founders of U of T’s Black Research Network.

“To push forward requires taking the risk and having enough people who are willing to listen and put resources behind the risk,” says Rhonda McEwen, president and vice-chancellor of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. “And that’s what universities are good at, aren’t we? This is what we do. We find those cracks and those fissures and we take things forward.

“So, here’s just another way we’re doing that.”

McEwen is joined in the episode by Maydianne Andrade, an evolutionary ecologist and University Professor in U of T Scarborough’s department of biological sciences who is founder and co-chair of the Toronto Initiative for Diversity and Excellence, Alissa Trotz, a professor of Caribbean studies at New College and the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and Beth Coleman, director of the Black Research Network and associate professor of data and cities at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and the Faculty of Information.

Together, the group discusses the origins of the Black Research Network, which Trotz traces to a long history of exclusion and resistance at the university, including a student group called the Black Liberation Collective that formed in 2015. They also discuss opportunities for collaboration and policy change – and their hopes for the future.

Watch S2 Ep.2 of Groundbreakers

From mapping stars to helping youth escape poverty, student researchers break new ground

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 20:26:54 +0000

From mapping stars to helping youth escape poverty, student researchers break new ground

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 10/04/2022 - 16:26

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(Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Topic

Black Research Network

Data Sciences Institute

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

School of Cities

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Grace Yu remembers marvelling at the night sky as a child. Today, that childhood memory lives on as she studies the stars that make up the Milky Way.

Grace Yu

Working with Ting Li and Joshua Speagle, assistant professors in the University of Toronto’s David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science, Yu is working on a new project, titled “Mapping the Milky Way a Million Light Years.”

The team will characterize and track blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars, which, because of their brightness, can be detected when they are located at the periphery of our own galaxy to measure the density profile of the Milky Way – especially at its periphery.

“The end goal is to detect BHB stars, all the way down to 300 kiloparsecs, roughly a million light-years away, and characterize their density to distance,” Yu says. “Then we will use these BHB to understand more about the Milky Way.”

Yu is one of 36 undergraduate students from across Canada to be selected for the 2022 SUDS Scholars program at U of T’s Data Science Institute’s (DSI). The program pairs students interested in a data science career with DSI researchers to conduct interdisciplinary, hands-on research. It is one of several opportunities that the DSI hosts to foster data science innovation and collaboration.

At present, little is known about the galaxy beyond 100 kiloparsecs, a measure of distance in astronomy, where 1 kiloparsec equals 3.6 light-years, a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year.

Although BHB stars are ideal tracers for mapping our own Milky Way, there is another type of star, the so-called “blue straggler” (BS) stars, which lie in a similar colour space as the BHB stars. But BS stars are generally closer to Earth and cannot travel as far as BHB stars do, making BHB stars ideal to study the periphery of the Milky Way. A goal of this research project is to develop a tool to separate the distant BHB stars from nearby BS stars.

Using publicly available data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) – one of the largest astronomical cameras that has surveyed the dark sky – the team found a clear indicator of separate patterns between BHB and BS stars thanks to the unprecedentedly high precision data from DES that measures the brightness and colours of the stars better than 0.5 per cent.

In particular, using a machine learning method called the support-vector machine, a supervised learning model associated with learning algorithms that analyze data for classification, Yu has made great progress in identifying clear, separable boundaries between the stars. Yu is also planning to continue this research under the supervision of Li and Speagle.

With first-hand experience blending statistics, machine learning and astronomy for research thanks to the DSI, Yu hopes to explore how computer science is shaping other fields in the future.

Using poetry to elevate the voices of African, Caribbean and Black women with HIV

Yu’s work is just one of several student-led projects supported by U of T’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISI) portfolio, which facilitates tri-campus interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers at U of T and partner institutions.

Lori Chambers

Lori Chambers, a former post-doctoral researcher at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, is using poetry, prose and spoken word performance to offer safe spaces for women to share their experiences living with HIV.

Launched in 2018, the Because She Cares project amplifies the voices of African, Caribbean and Black (ACB) women with HIV who describe the challenges they encounter working for the Canadian AIDS service and allied organizations. The project aims to develop, promote and design approaches that honour community-based, knowledge-sharing methods – and to decolonize Western ideologies in academia.

Chambers is one of nine researchers supported by the Black Research Network (BRN), an ISI that seeks to promote Black research excellence at the university through mentorship, collaboration, investment and community.

With $7,000 in seed funding through the BRN’s IGNITE grant, Chambers and five spoken word artists travelled to Quebec for the International AIDS Conference, one of the largest AIDS conferences in the world, to perform stories from the Because She Cares project.

Listen to a segment of an interview with Lori Chambers.

Chambers explains that while plays and spoken word performances are commonly used in west and south Africa for knowledge mobilization, it is an emerging space in Canada.

“Using arts-based approaches like spoken word, which is grounded in Black performance, in a Canadian space is still very new,” Chambers says.

"Storytelling is an approach that we all know, so why not bring it to the space of academia? We should develop ways of knowing that are concurrent in the communities we work with.”

Last winter, Chambers launched Because She Cares' first spoken word film series. The collection of 12 short films outlined the challenges that African and Caribbean immigrant women who live with HIV face while working in Canadian AIDS service and allied organizations.

One of the films, HIV Stays at Home, explored the ethics around disclosing HIV status in the workplace, a prominent challenge for people who wish to leave the HIV sector. Another, Living This Kind of Life, navigates working poverty and its effect on family dynamics. Other films addressed setting boundaries between the professional and personal – something that can be especially difficult for women who have been hired to work in the HIV services space because of their lived experience with the condition. Chambers says that professional boundaries have the potential to separate HIV-positive health and social work professionals from their own support systems, often within the HIV community.

With interest from other AIDS organizations, Chambers hopes to share the films as an educational tool and develop strategic partnerships with AIDS organizations in Ontario and across Canada.

Would free, unlimited transit provide youth experiencing homelessness with more opportunities?

Emma Blewett

Noah Kelly, a U of T graduate, and Emma Blewett, a third-year civil engineering student, are researching how free, unlimited transit access can improve the quality of life for Toronto youth who are experiencing homelessness.

TAP (Transit Access Project) for Youth is a student-led transit equity research project that seeks to reduce barriers to transit access. It was founded by five undergraduate students as part of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) at U of T, the largest student chapter of the Canadian non-governmental organization that takes strategic action to tackle global poverty in local communities.

Working with two Toronto-based homeless shelters and one transitional youth home, the team gave free PRESTO cards to 36 participants between the ages of 16 to 24 earlier this year. Each one came pre-loaded with a monthly pass. From there, the TAP team documented participants’ experiences with transit before and after receiving the card. This included interactions with transit authorities and riders, safety and social inclusion.

“Transit equity ensures the right to mobility,” says Kelly, co-founder of TAP. “Public transit access in Toronto is vital in exiting the cycle of homelessness because it enables youth to have job opportunities in the urban landscape, which would otherwise be limited to walkable areas.”

With $2,000 support from the Small Grants Program awarded by the School of Cities – an ISI which brings interdisciplinary urban-focused researchers, students, institutions and the public together to build equitable and sustainable cities – the group was able to hire a social worker to attend the interviews to inform youth of any programs or supports to help with their needs.

Guided by Steven Farber, an associate professor in the department of human geography at U of T Scarborough, and Stephanie Begun, an assistant professor in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, TAP is funded in partnership with Metrolinx, the City of Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Office and the Toronto Shelter Network, along with other stakeholders.

With a final report set to be published early next year, TAP’s data aims to fill a gap in scholarship and inform City of Toronto and TTC policy frameworks on conversations surrounding transit equity.

The project is a replication of a similar initiative that brought free transit to all people experiencing homelessness in Edmonton, Alta, in 2013. While transit discount programs do exist in Toronto, several hurdles make them insufficient, the group says.

In Toronto, the Fair Pass Transit Discount Program offers a 21 per cent discount on an adult monthly pass, which costs approximately $123 instead of the regular price of $156. To be eligible, applicants must be 20 years old or more and prove enrollment in Ontario Works, the Ontario Disability Support Program, a Child Care Fee Subsidy (through Toronto Children’s Services) or the Rent-Geared-to-Income Subsidy – programs that researchers say aren’t by themselves enough to help youth experiencing homelessness access job opportunities.

“We have to think about setting youth up for success after they enter a shelter or transitional home,” says Blewett, financial lead at TAP for Youth. “What keeps me going in this project is being a part of research that will help young people live their lives as they should be.”

Season 2 of Groundbreakers series: ‘Diverse research communities solving the world’s grand challenges’

rahul.kalvapalle — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 16:18:56 +0000

Season 2 of Groundbreakers series: ‘Diverse research communities solving the world’s grand challenges’ rahul.kalvapalle Tue, 09/27/2022 - 12:18

Topic

Climate Positive Energy

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Climate Change

David Sinton

Political Science