Tyler Irving

3D-printed soil? U of T startup expands sustainable urban farming footprint in Toronto

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 15:07:18 +0000

3D-printed soil? U of T startup expands sustainable urban farming footprint in Toronto

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 09/11/2024 - 11:07

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Leo Hua and Adnan Sharif show off fresh basil that was grown with Lyrata’s sustainable farming system at Toronto’s Casa Loma (photo by Liz Intac)

Tyler Irving

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Our Community

Alumni

Cities

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship Hatchery

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Startups

Sustainability

U of T Scarborough

Subheadline

With new installations at Casa Loma and U of T Scarborough, Lyrata is supplying freshly grown produce to local caterers and restaurants

A startup co-founded by a ��߲ݴ�ý graduate student has its roots in an experience that is all too common for many of us.

He kept forgetting to water his plants.

“I was working in a plant immunity biology lab, so if I didn’t water them, I’d have no plants to do experiments with,” says Adnan Sharif, who is pursuing a master’s degree in the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

He says his solution was inspired by his father.

“My dad is a mechanical engineering professor at a university in Japan, and he knows a lot about manufacturing materials with porous, three-dimensional structures,” he says. “That’s how I got the idea to make my own 3D-printed soil construct, which could retain water for a week or more.

“That way, I wouldn’t have to go into the lab and water the plants so often.”

The innovation – which Sharif came up as an undergraduate working in the lab of Keiko Yoshioka, a professor in the department of cell and systems biology in U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science – is one of several that now underpins Lyrata, a startup that grows fresh produce for caterers and high-end restaurants across the Greater Toronto Area.

The company, which got its start in a greenhouse on U of T’s St. George campus, has recently expanded with operations at U of T Scarborough and Casa Loma, a museum, event space and historic site in midtown Toronto.

Growing plants without soil, known as hydroponics, is a technique commonly used in greenhouses worldwide. But Sharif and his team see an opportunity to make the industry more sustainable, starting with the soil replacement that the plants grow in.

“The product that almost everyone uses today is basically the same as house insulation,” Sharif says. “It’s made from rocks that are mined in remote places and shipped hundreds of kilometres to a production facility, where they are heated to thousands of degrees in a giant furnace to make a porous, chemically inert material. This material then needs to be shipped again to where it’s needed, and when you’re finished, you throw it in the garbage.”

By contrast, Lyrata’s SmartSoil is 3D-printed using biopolymers such as polylactic acid, which is derived from corn. These materials can be locally sourced and require much lower temperatures to melt and form into porous structures.

When the growing cycle is complete, the product goes through a low-heat proprietary cleaning process and can be used again. Sharif says that SmartSoil has a total lifespan of about two years, after which it can be composted along with crop residue. Together, these changes greatly lower the carbon footprint of indoor farming.

In 2020, Sharif and his co-founders brought his idea to The Entrepreneurship Hatchery, U of T Engineering’s startup incubator and one of several entrepreneurship hubs across U of T’s three campuses. Through the Hatchery’s Nest process, they were connected with business mentors, including alumnus Xavier Tang, a consultant and venture capitalist who still advises the company today.

Over the next few years, the team evolved, with some original members leaving and others joining. They include Leo Hua, who has been pivotal to speeding the development of 3D printable soil. The concept evolved, too, as the team realized that producing food was a better business for Lyrata than rather than selling their growth medium to other farmers.

The Hatchery team – in particular, Executive Director Joseph Orozco, Go-To-Market Lead Erika J. Murray and a team of work-study students, mentors and legal externs – helped Lyrata develop their technology and business. In 2022, the Hatchery provided $155,000 in seed funding, enabling the founders to be employed by their company and further supporting business development. The funding also enabled the company to rent greenhouse space on campus, where they began growing lettuce to provide to Spaces and Experiences at U of T.

Lyrata also developed something new: a modular unit that works exclusively with their SmartSoil and contains everything required to produce a variety of indoor crops – from lights and growth medium to irrigation systems.

“None of these technological and business developments would have taken place without the generous support of the over 50 Hatchery mentors, work-study students, and legal externs who contributed to our success,” says Sharif.

“Our current concept is what we call farming-as-a-service,” Hua adds. “The SmartGrow unit we developed is small enough to fit into a standard parking spot. Our clients sign a contract with us to place a unit on their site and we take care of everything from planting to harvesting.

“For a flat fee, they get a self-contained farm that provides a reliable quantity of their desired crop over a set period of time.”

In addition to providing a locally sourced, sustainable product, Sharif says the approach can also help mitigate fluctuations in the price of wholesale produce.

“In Canada, most of our lettuce comes from California, which has been dealing with drought and many other issues,” says Sharif. “Supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19 were also a big challenge for restaurants, which have very thin margins to begin with. At one point, the price of lettuce increased by a factor of six, so you can imagine the effect that would have.”

So far, Lyrata has produced more than 15 different types of crops, including basil, parsley and mizuna, also known as Japanese mustard greens.

Support from the U of T Engineering community has been key to Lyrata’s success.

For example, it was a U of T Engineering alumni connection that recently led to Lyrata launching an installation at the historic Casa Loma museum and landmark in Toronto.

“Lyrata’s competitive edge is that they provide an on-site, full service and they do not take up very much space,” says Nikol Watlikiewicz, Casa Loma’s horticulture and grounds manager. “In a small corner of our potting shed, we were able to build two grow units that provide a good yield weekly, without having to train our staff on the complicated system.

“Growing indoors gives us the stability and control that traditional agriculture does not. It’s an excellent example of how engineers can help solve the global food crisis with innovative thinking.”

In August, Lyrata launched another growing unit at U of T Scarborough, located within the Harmony Commons Dining Hall.

The priority for the next few years is growing Lyrata’s crop offerings and client base with ongoing support from The Hatchery. The incubator has facilitated graduate student placements through Mitacs, with matching funds. It also backed a recent $167,500 project with the Ontario and Canadian governments through the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership program to further advance the yield and efficiency of the SmartSoil system.

“The fact we’ve been able to come this far in such a short time is in large part due to the help we’ve had from U of T Engineering, and especially the Entrepreneurship Hatchery,” says Sharif.

“Whether it was getting seed funding, finding mentors, hiring work-study students or making important connections through their alumni network, we wouldn’t be here without their support.”

U of T Engineering student team wins international prize with sustainable wind turbine

rahul.kalvapalle — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 13:44:46 +0000

U of T Engineering student team wins international prize with sustainable wind turbine

rahul.kalvapalle Tue, 08/06/2024 - 09:44

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From left to right: UTWind team members Robert Zhao, Joeun Yook, Micheal Jing, Dhara Patel, Alexis Terefenko, Justin Ding, Andre Li and Alex Chen (photo by Niels Adema)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Our Community

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research and Innovation

Sustainability

Undergraduate Students

Subheadline

It’s the UTWind team’s second victory at the International Small Wind Turbine Contest, following their win in 2022

A team of students from the ��߲ݴ�ý’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have earned top spot in the International Small Wind Turbine Contest with a design that utilized components from recycled pop bottles and plant-fibre composites.

The competition, which is hosted annually at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen in the Netherlands, challenges student teams to design and build a small-scale wind turbine for deployment in sub-Saharan Africa. Teams are evaluated on the overall energy yield of their turbine, the sustainability of their design, the quality of their construction and the presentation they give to the judges.

The UTWind team's first-place finish saw them outcompete seven other teams from countries including Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands and Spain. This is the second time the team won the contest, following their debut performance in 2022.

Justin Ding, a second-year mechanical engineering student and incoming co-lead of UTWind's mechanical and manufacturing team, says the team made improvements to the pitch system for this year’s design and implemented more sustainable materials.

“For example, we used plant-based flax fibre composites to make the blades, which makes them lighter. The nose cone was made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate, or PET plastic, which is more sustainable than using new material,” Ding says.

“We gathered plastic pop bottles from around campus, including the student-run Hard Hat Café,” says third-year mechanical engineering student Elena Sloan, the other co-lead of the mechanical and manufacturing team. “We then cut these bottles into strips and extruded them through a heated nozzle to make 1.75 mm diameter filament, which we could use in our 3D printer.”

Once the turbine was complete, it was disassembled and packed into four bags of checked luggage for the flight to the Netherlands. The team’s first stop was Delft, where their turbine underwent testing in a wind tunnel at Delft University of Technology’s Open Jet Facility.

The testing showed that the team was able to harvest about 36 per cent of the available energy at a wind speed of 8.5 metres per second, a solid, but not outstanding result.

From there, the team members took a three-hour train ride across the country to Groningen, where they gave their technical presentation, followed by the awards ceremony.

“We didn’t really expect to win best overall, but we thought we had a decent chance at winning for the most sustainable design,” says Dhara Patel, incoming co-president of UTWind and a second-year electrical engineering student.

“When we found out we didn’t win that award, we were pretty devastated, but it was a complete shock to then find out that we won the whole competition – our mouths just hung open for a while.”

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Going forward, Patel says the team would like to try building a vertical-axis turbine in addition to their standard horizontal-axis version. “Vertical-axis turbines look really cool, and they are structurally simpler and have a lower profile than horizontal-axis ones,” she says.

“Only one other team has tried that. We’d like to take on that challenge, and ultimately put one on our own campus buildings to generate clean wind power.”

Patel was a high school student when UTWind won their first competition in 2022, and says reading about their success was one of the things that inspired her to study engineering at U of T. The team she eventually came to co-lead now includes more than 50 engineering students as well as some from the Faculty of Arts & Science.

Students are divided into five sub-teams: aerodynamics, mechanical and manufacturing, control systems, power systems and sustainability.

The team members say they’re energized by their win, and have big plans for next year.

“We’ve learned so many lessons – before, during and after the contest,” says Robert Zhao, UTWind's other incoming co-president and an undergraduate student in the department of physics.

“But our competitors have also learned those lessons, and there are more of them than ever before. We need to improve our winning design, making it more robust and more mature to better defend our title.”

More with less: Researchers map a more sustainable path to home construction in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:16:30 +0000

More with less: Researchers map a more sustainable path to home construction in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 07/31/2024 - 14:16

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(photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Tyler Irving

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Breaking Research

Cities

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Graduate Students

Research & Innovation

Sustainability

Subheadline

From more multi-unit projects to fewer basements, a computer simulation shows that multiple building strategies will be necessary to address the country's housing affordability while meeting climate targets

Adopting the right mix of sustainable construction practices could allow Canada to meet its housing goals – as many as 5.8 million new homes by 2030 – without blowing past its climate commitments.

Researchers in the ��߲ݴ�ý’s Centre for the Sustainable Built Environment (CSBE) developed a computer simulation that forecasts the emissions associated with new housing and infrastructure construction.

The work builds on previous CSBE research that showed that, in order for Canada to meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets, homes built in 2030 will need to produce 83 per cent fewer greenhouse gases during construction than those built in 2018.

“There is an obvious tension between our commitment to reducing our emissions and the need to restore housing affordability,” says Shoshanna Saxe, an associate professor of civil and mineral engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering who is the CSBE’s director.

“But that tension only exists because of our status quo approaches to housing. As our research shows, we can build 5.8 million homes and cut GHG emissions from construction – it’s just that we must build them differently than we have in the past.”

In their latest paper, the CSBE team built what they call the future infrastructure growth (FIG) model, which enabled the team to evaluate the effect of implementing various strategies that aim to lower these emissions.

“We built our model using open data from the roughly 50,000 neighbourhoods we currently have in Canada,” says Keagan Rankin, a PhD student who is first author of the new paper published in Environmental Science & Technology.

“We looked at aspects such as how many units there are per neighbourhood, what type of housing stock comprises them, what length of road services them, etc. We then used what we know about current construction methods to model what the embodied emissions would be if you built a given number of new homes in the future, using the same distribution of neighbourhood types.

“Once we had that, we were able to ask the question: how much could we reduce those emissions by adopting sustainable construction strategies, such as denser neighbourhoods or better building design?”

The team looked at five strategies that could be implemented to reduce emissions associated with housing construction:

Urban form: Analysis of existing neighbourhoods showed that emissions per unit are lower for those that contain more multi-unit buildings (either high-rise or low-rise) than they are for those that consist mostly of suburban, single-family homes. This strategy would involve a shift toward more of these multi-unit neighbourhood forms.
Higher infill rate: This refers to placing new housing in existing neighbourhoods – areas that are already built up. Because it reuses existing infrastructure, such as roads and water pipes, this new housing can be built with lower emissions than greenfield developments.
Circularity: This strategy involves re-using existing buildings or infrastructure in the construction of new ones. For example, renovating a single-family home to become a multi-unit dwelling would require fewer materials than razing it and starting from scratch.
Material technology improvements: Innovations in the way that materials such as concrete or steel are manufactured can reduce their carbon footprint. This strategy assumed that by 2030, our main construction materials will be produced with 20 to 25 per cent fewer emissions than today.
Best-in-class design: The team found that some housing designs were associated with lower emissions per unit, such as making the home smaller overall through better layouts. Another example involves the proportion of residential building that is underground. Since basements are typically made of carbon-intensive concrete, the same sized dwelling with a smaller basement would have lower emissions.

Multiple strategies will be required

Using the FIG model, the researchers showed that building housing at the rate required to restore affordability without any changes to construction practices would cause Canada to overshoot its climate commitments by 437 per cent.

However, if the above strategies are implemented, the FIG model suggests that they would in fact be able to reduce emissions to below the target level.

The model also showed that while all five strategies are needed to reach the target, some of them had a stronger effect than others. For example, changing urban forms and using best-in-class design together accounted for roughly two-thirds of the improvements needed. By contrast, the strategies of infill, circularity and improvements in manufacturing each accounted for roughly one-tenth of the changes needed.

The researchers found that for the next one to two decades, the most important elements of sustainable building will be designing better buildings and building denser neighbourhoods.

“The numbers are very close, and of course there’s a certain amount of uncertainty associated with all of these estimates, but it was good to see that we came in below the line, because it means the situation is not completely hopeless,” says Rankin.

“There’s no question that building 5.8 million homes by 2030 is an aggressive target. We may not get there, and if not, it would of course make it a bit easier to stay within our carbon budget.

“But we’ve done ambitious things as a country before, such as building a railroad from coast to coast in just five years. This analysis shows that the strategies we already know about are sound, and that all of them will be needed if we are going to prevent the worst impacts of climate change while also restoring housing affordability.”

New contaminant-tolerant catalyst could help capture carbon directly from smokestacks

rahul.kalvapalle — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:45:48 +0000

New contaminant-tolerant catalyst could help capture carbon directly from smokestacks

rahul.kalvapalle Wed, 07/24/2024 - 12:45

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PhD students Rui Kai (Ray) Miao (left) and Panos Papangelakis (right) hold up a new catalyst that is designed to convert captured CO2 gas into valuable products (photo by Tyler Irving)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Breaking Research

David Sinton

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Mechanical & Industrial Engineering

Research & Innovation

Sustainability

Subheadline

The research marks an important step towards developing economically viable techniques for carbon capture and storage

Researchers at the ��߲ݴ�ý’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have designed a catalyst that can efficiently convert captured carbon into valuable products – even in the presence of contaminants that degrade the performance of current versions.

The discovery, described in a paper published in Nature Energy, is an important step toward more economically viable techniques for carbon capture and storage that could be added to existing industrial processes.

“Today, we have more and better options for low-carbon electricity generation than ever before,” says David Sinton, professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering and senior author on the paper. “But there are other sectors of the economy that will be harder to decarbonize: for example, steel and cement manufacturing. To help those industries, we need to invent cost-effective ways to capture and upgrade the carbon in their waste streams.”

Sinton and his team use devices known as electrolyzers to convert CO2 and electricity into products such as ethylene and ethanol. These carbon-based molecules can be sold as fuels or used as chemical feedstocks for making everyday items such as plastic.

Inside the electrolyzer, the conversion reaction happens when three elements — CO2 gas, electrons and a water-based liquid electrolyte — come together on the surface of a solid catalyst.

The catalyst is often made of copper but may also contain other metals or organic compounds that can further improve the system. Its function is to speed up the reaction and minimize the creation of undesirable byproducts like hydrogen gas, which reduce the efficiency of the overall process.

While several high-performing catalysts have been developed around the world, nearly all of them are designed to operate with a pure CO2 feed. But if the carbon in question comes from smokestacks, the feed is likely to be anything but pure.

“Catalyst designers generally don’t like dealing with impurities, and for good reason,” says Panos Papangelakis, a PhD student in mechanical engineering and a co-lead author on the paper.

“Sulphur oxides such as SO2 poison the catalyst by binding to the surface. This leaves fewer sites for CO2 to react, and it also causes the formation of chemicals you don’t want.

“It happens really fast: whereas some catalysts can last hundreds of hours on a pure feed, if you introduce these impurities, within minutes they can be down to five per cent efficiency.”

Although there are well-established methods to remove impurities from CO2-rich exhaust gases before feeding them into the electrolyzer, these require substantial time, energy and expense. Furthermore, in the case of SO2, even a little bit can be a big problem.

“Even if you bring your exhaust gas down to less than 10 parts per million, or 0.001 per cent of the feed, the catalyst can still be poisoned in under two hours,” says Papangelakis.

In the paper, the team describes how two key changes to a typical copper-based catalyst can make it more resilient to SO2.

On one side, they added a thin layer of polyteterafluoroethylene, also known as Teflon. This non-stick material changes the chemistry at the catalyst surface, impeding the reactions that enable SO2 poisoning to take place.

On the other side, they added a layer of Nafion, an electrically conductive polymer often used in fuel cells. This complex, porous material contains some areas that are hydrophilic, meaning they attract water, as well as other areas that are hydrophobic, meaning they repel water. This structure makes it difficult for SO2 to reach the catalyst surface.

The team then fed this catalyst with a mix of CO2 and SO2, with the latter at a concentration of about 400 parts per million, typical of an industrial waste stream. Even under these tough conditions, the new catalyst performed well.

“In the paper, we report a Faraday efficiency — a measure of how many of the electrons ended up in the desired products — of 50 per cent, which we were able to maintain for 150 hours,” says Papangelakis.

“There are some catalysts out there that might start at a higher efficiency, maybe 75 per cent or 80 per cent. But again, if you expose them to SO2, within minutes or at most a couple of hours, that drops down to almost nothing. We were able to resist that.”

Papangelakis says that because his team’s approach doesn’t affect the composition of the catalyst itself, it should be widely applicable. In other words, teams that have already perfected high-performing catalysts should be able to use similar coatings to confer resistance to sulphur oxide poisoning.

Although sulphur oxides are the most challenging impurity in typical waste streams, they are not the only ones, and it’s the full set of chemical contaminants that the team is turning to next.

“There are lots of other impurities to consider, such as nitrogen oxides, oxygen, etc.,” says Papangelakis.

“But the fact that this approach works so well for sulphur oxides is very promising. Before this work, it was just taken for granted that you’d have to remove the impurities before upgrading CO2.

“What we’ve shown is that there might be a different way to deal with them, which opens up a lot of new possibilities.”

U of T study highlights tension between Canada’s climate and housing goals

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 15:56:06 +0000

U of T study highlights tension between Canada’s climate and housing goals

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 07/03/2024 - 11:56

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A study led by researchers at the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering shows that Canada will not be able to meet its targets for both new housing and emissions reductions without significant changes to residential construction practices (photo illustration by Adrian So/elxeneize/edb3_6/Envato Elements)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Breaking Research

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

"Unless things change, by 2030 nearly half of all the allowable emissions in Canada would be due to construction alone"

Canada cannot simultaneously meet its targets for emission reductions and new housing unless there’s a drastic change in construction practices, according to research from the ��߲ݴ�ý’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

The new study, published in Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, found that if Canada is to stay within its emissions targets, homes built in 2030 will need to produce 83 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions during construction compared to homes built in 2018.

“Our analysis shows that in 2018, which is the latest year for which we have the data, the construction sector in Canada was responsible for the equivalent of 90 megatonnes of CO2,” says Shoshanna Saxe, an associate professor in the department of civil and mineral engineering and one of the senior authors of the study. “That was about eight per cent of Canada’s total emissions at the time, but we were not producing nearly as much housing as we needed then, let alone what we need now. To restore housing affordability, we need to triple the rate of housing construction by 2030.”

At the same time, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions target for 2030 is to be 40 per cent below 2005 levels, which works out to 443 megatonnes, Saxe notes.

“That means that unless things change, by 2030 nearly half of all the allowable emissions in Canada would be due to construction alone.”

Saxe is the director of U of T’s Centre for the Sustainable Built Environment (CSBE), which carries out research on the construction and urban design pathways that will enable Canada to meet its housing and infrastructure needs while curbing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, an international climate change treaty enacted in 2015.

The CSBE team’s first step was to quantify the scale of the challenge – but they faced hurdles in gathering data on the construction industry’s carbon footprint.

“What we found was that this data is split across many different parts of the economy: manufacturing, buildings, transportation, etc.,” Saxe says. “There are also questions around consumption versus production: if a piece of steel is made in China and used for a building in Canada, whose emissions are those?

“Until now, it’s been difficult to get a picture of the construction sector as a whole, which is partly why it’s been overlooked.”

Hatzav Yoffe, a post-doctoral fellow and lead author on the paper, used what’s known as an environmentally extended input-output model to conduct a high-resolution, top-down analysis of Canada’s construction sector.

The researchers calculated that residential construction was responsible for the largest share of total construction emissions, at 42 per cent.

Their model also enabled them to ask another question: given the expected increase in housing construction, how much would emissions per constructed home have to decrease by in order to stay within emissions targets?

“You can’t just take the overall 40 per cent reduction target and apply that to the construction sector. That won’t be enough, because you are also tripling the rate of housing construction,” says Saxe.

The other members of the research team included Keagan Rankin, a PhD student in the department of civil and mineral engineering, Daniel Posen, an associate professor in the department of civil and mineral engineering and Christian Bachmann, associate professor at the University of Waterloo.

While the study throws the tension between Canada’s housing targets and its climate targets into sharp relief, Saxe and her colleagues believe it is still possible to reconcile the two – and are researching ways to tackle the challenge.

“For example, if you build more densely, you use fewer materials to build the same number of units. If you are strategic about where you place those units, you don’t have to build as many new roads or sewers to service them,” Saxe says.

“We can also think about changing the balance between housing construction and other types of infrastructure, such as oil and gas infrastructure.

“At the end of the day, if we’re going to build what we need while avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, we need to seriously think about how we can deliver more with less.”

Academic hospital network joins centre for research on microfluidic devices for human health

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 17:05:46 +0000

Academic hospital network joins centre for research on microfluidic devices for human health

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 02/14/2024 - 12:05

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Researchers work in the Device Foundry, one of three facilities that are part of the Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies (photo by Dahlia Katz)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Our Community

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Unity Health

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

The Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies, or CRAFT, is a partnership between U of T, the National Research Council of Canada and, now, Unity Health Toronto

The Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies (CRAFT) has expanded to formally include Unity Health Toronto, an academic hospital network and leading Canadian health research institute.

A partnership between the ��߲ݴ�ý, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and now Unity Health Toronto, CRAFT develops leading-edge microfluidic devices – technologies that take advantage of the fundamental difference in behaviour of many fluids at the micro-scale – that can address many challenges in human health.

The latest agreement, which includes $21 million in new investments and an extension of the partnership to 2028, will support dozens of U of T trainees who will work alongside NRC scientists and engineers, as well as clinical scientists, on projects related to diagnostics bio-fabrication and organ-on-chip systems.

With the addition of Unity Health Toronto, clinicians will now join CRAFT scientists in developing new microfluidic technologies such as detection and monitoring risks of infection in intensive care unit (ICU) environments and rapid detection of arterial peripheral diseases. This will allow scientists and clinicians to directly test and validate their technologies in care settings, and develop new pathways to work with industry partners.

“CRAFT was built from the common vision that microfluidics could make a real impact on Canada’s scientific and clinical fields,” says Teodor Veres, director of R&D at the NRC’s Medical Devices Research Centre and co-director of CRAFT.

“Focused on providing new student generations with opportunities to forge ground-breaking scientific and technological advancements in microfluidic devices, these advancements have the potential to revolutionize disease diagnosis and treatment in Canada and globally. This vision was crucial to our initiative’s growth and our current success.”

Left to right: Claudia dos Santos, Pamela Plant, Valeria DiGiovanni and Marlene Santos at the CRAFT Translational Research Station inside the Medical Surgical ICU at St. Michael’s Hospital (photo by Unity Health Toronto)

Microfluidics refers to the study of fluids’ unique behaviours at the scale of microns – one thousandth of a millimetre – or smaller, as well as the design and manufacture of devices with tiny channels or other features that can precisely control these fluids. That, in turn, offers new approaches to a variety of challenges in engineering, medicine, biology and chemistry by miniaturizing, automating or innovating on established laboratory techniques.

Applications include rapid diagnostic devices that help clinicians to reliably test for the presence of certain diseases at the patient’s bedside while avoiding the cost and time delays associated with sending samples to large testing laboratories. Microfluidics are also used in biosensors that allow patients in remote communities to send accurate data to specialists located hundreds of kilometres away.

As an example, Claudia dos Santos, Unity Health critical care physician and scientist, has pinpointed a need to quickly identify ICU patients at risk of sepsis. She is working with CRAFT researchers to develop a microfluidic instrument that can detect biomarkers for sepsis on the ICU floor. Such an instrument will allow for faster diagnosis and treatment of sepsis, which can be deadly if left untreated.

“With Unity Health Toronto formally joining CRAFT, we are bringing the power and potential of microfluidic devices into clinical settings. This partnership will allow clinicians to merge their expertise with CRAFT scientists, and take the next major steps towards transforming patient care,” says dos Santos, who is an associate professor in the department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

Another application of microfluidics, known as organ-on-a-chip, enables cells, tissues or even portions of working organs to be grown outside the body in microfluidic devices. These biological models can be used in high-throughput screening of large libraries of potentially therapeutic molecules for specific functions – for example, determining which ones would be most effective against a particular type of cancer. Such screens could even suggest the ideal therapies for an individual patient, opening the door to precision medicine.

CRAFT was founded in 2018 and includes three research and development facilities for microfluidic devices: the Tissue Foundry for bioprinting and device preclinical validation; the Device Foundry for microfluidic device design, prototyping and small-scale fabrication; and the NRC Device Fabrication and Scale-Up facility. The first two are located at U of T and available for use by academics, students, industry and government. The latter is located on the NRC campus in Boucherville, Que.

In 2023, the facilities hosted 125 unique users from across U of T as well as partner hospitals, including Sunnybrook, the Hospital for Sick Children and University Health Network. Since its inception, CRAFT has engaged 44 researchers and 114 trainees in a wide range of projects, leading to 69 peer-reviewed publications, 22 patent submissions and three spin-off companies.

“CRAFT has been a team effort all along. In addition to the NRC, we have been supported as an institutional strategic initiative through U of T’s Division of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, and by U of T’s faculties of Engineering, Arts & Science, Medicine and Pharmacy. We all look forward to an exciting next chapter in partnering with Unity Health,” says Axel Guenther, a professor of mechanical engineering at U of T and co-director of CRAFT.

“Developing the next generation of made-in-Canada microfluidic technologies and bringing them to the people who need them most – patients, health-care professionals and pharmaceutical companies – will require strong partnerships within and outside of CRAFT, with our clinical partners, U of T’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and Canadian industry.

“We invite everyone to visit and use our open research facilities in Toronto, attend our Microfluidics Professional Course on July 17-19, or attend our research symposium in Boucherville on Oct. 12, 2024.”

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U of T Data Sciences Institute trains workers in data analytics, applied machine learning

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 20:44:51 +0000

U of T Data Sciences Institute trains workers in data analytics, applied machine learning

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 11/28/2023 - 15:44

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(Photo: skynesher via Canva, Getty Images)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Our Community

Data Sciences Institute

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Faculty of Arts & Science

Subheadline

Powered by Upskill Canada, the Data Science and Machine Learning Software Foundations Certificates aim to upgrade workers' skills in fast-growing fields

A new training initiative launched by the ��߲ݴ�ý’s Data Sciences Institute (DSI), an institutional strategic initiative, is helping Canada meet its growing need for talent in data science and machine learning.

Applications for the DSI Data Science and Machine Learning Software Foundations Certificates opened in October to strong demand. DSI is now gearing up for a second session, scheduled to begin on Jan. 15.

By 2026, digital literacy is projected to be essential for 90 per cent of jobs in Canada

The certificates offer affordable, flexible and rigorous upskilling opportunities, designed for learners with a university degree or college diploma who have three or more years of work experience.

Prospective DSI Certificate participants can be employed or actively seeking employment and do not need experience or education in the field of data science. These certificates are accessible to individuals from all backgrounds, and do not require prior affiliation with the university.

The certificates are powered by Upskill Canada, a national initiative run by Palette Skills and funded by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED). Upskill Canada is designed to meet the talent needs of high-growth sectors while building a more inclusive economy.

Supported by funding from ISED’s Upskilling for Industry Initiative, more than 15,000 Canadian workers will benefit from an innovative approach to skills training. Central to the Upskill Canada initiative is the role of community training providers, who work closely with local and national employers to identify precise suites of skills being sought by industry. Equipping workers with these skills will create new career pathways for Canadians and better position Canadian companies to compete both domestically and internationally.

“What we’re hearing from our partners in industry is that targeted training in key areas can greatly increase the available talent pool in this fast-moving sector,” says Lisa Strug, academic director of the Data Sciences Institute, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children and professor in the departments of statistical sciences and computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science, and the division of biostatistics in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

“We’re pleased to be able to leverage U of T’s leadership in machine learning and data sciences to provide new opportunities for workers in the digital economy.”

“Through the industry advisory group, prospective employers like Thomson Reuters are actively engaging with the Data Sciences Institute as they develop learning opportunities that address the evolving data science and machine learning demands across small-, medium- and large-sized enterprises,” says Carter Cousineau, vice-president, data and model (AI/ML) governance and ethics at Thomson Reuters.

“This collaborative approach helps ensure learners gain the necessary skillsets to pursue new roles, or identify opportunities for advancement, in this swiftly changing landscape.”

Both certificates offer foundational concepts in data science and machine learning knowledge and provide opportunities for practical application through employer case studies. Each certificate also includes sessions dedicated to career advancement – from support for resume writing to networking and interview skills development.

The technical and job readiness programming will be delivered as online modules with in-person and hybrid opportunities for professional networking. Certificate recipients will be well positioned for roles such as data analysts, data managers or applied machine learning analysts.

The courses and job readiness sessions are offered part-time, allowing learners time to balance existing commitments and still accomplish their career goals. Over the course of the next two years, five cohorts of learners are expected to complete the 16-week certificates. Initially, the training will be offered to learners at a substantially reduced rate of $425 (+HST) per certificate, thanks to the support of Upskill Canada. The DSI has also committed accessibility funding for those with financial need.

“We’re so proud to formally launch Upskill Canada with our inaugural class of workers and training service providers,” says Rhonda Barnet, CEO of Palette Skills, which was chosen by ISED to run the Upskill Canada initiative.

“This is a big first step – but it’s only the beginning. We’re looking forward to working with our supporters in government and industry to upskill many more Canadians so they can transition into high-demand roles in the modern workforce – and help fast-growing companies achieve their full potential.”

U of T students, learners awarded prestigious Rhodes Scholarships

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 15:04:48 +0000

U of T students, learners awarded prestigious Rhodes Scholarships

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 11/28/2023 - 10:04

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From left to right: 2024 Rhodes Scholars Sapolnach Prompiengchai, Leighton Schreyer, Adam Martínez, Tierrai Tull and Anne Xuan-Lan Nguyen (supplied images, photo of Tull by Tysen Harvey Photography Bermuda)

Topic

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Faculty of Arts & Science

Subheadline

Four U of T students and one medical resident are among the members of the 2024 cohort of Rhodes Scholars

For the first time in more than three quarters of a century, four ��߲ݴ�ý students have been selected for a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship in a single year.

With interests that span mental health, narrative health, gender and discovering next-gen materials, Sapolnach Prompiengchai, Tierrai Tull, Leighton Schreyer and Adam Martínez are headed to Oxford University with the support of the coveted scholarship, which identifies and supports exceptional young people with the potential to make a positive impact on the world.

Anne Xuan-Lan Nguyen (supplied image)

A fifth member of the U of T community, Anne Xuan-Lan Nguyen, an ophthalmology and vision sciences resident in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, also received a Rhodes Scholarship via her alma mater, McGill University.

“The ��߲ݴ�ý is delighted to see so many of our exceptional students and learners join the world-renowned community of Rhodes Scholars,” says U of T President Meric Gertler.

“We wish them continued success as they enter the next chapter of their academic journeys. And we look forward to seeing their accomplishments and contributions to society in the years to come.”

Here are the four U of T students – two Canadian students, two international students – who recently joined an elite group of more than 100 new Rhodes Scholars from across the globe as part of the 2024 cohort:

Sapolnach Prompiengchai

U of T Scarborough

(supplied image)

Prompiengchai, who grew up in Thailand and attended school in India, is one of two Rhodes Global Scholars this year – making him the first recipient selected from Thailand through the Global Rhodes program, which is open to candidates from parts of the world that aren’t covered by one of the 25 Rhodes constituencies.

He says the news took a toll on his vocal cords.

“I probably lost my voice from talking to so many incredible people at the University of Oxford and then calling everyone I know,” says Prompiengchai, a fourth-year neuroscience student at U of T Scarborough.

A 2020 recipient of U of T’s Lester B. Pearson International Scholarship, Prompiengchai earned recognition for his interdisciplinary mental health research and advocacy. That includes receiving undergraduate research prizes for several of his papers.

A member of the student advisory committee for Inlight, one of U of T’s institutional strategic initiatives, Prompiengchai has worked in five research labs specializing in disciplines including clinical neuroscience, memory and educational psychology.

He is currently working in Professor Andy Lee’s cognitive neuroscience lab at U of T Scarborough where he is doing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments to discover how the brain encodes time when memories are formed.

“I think to properly tackle mental health you need to become a multidisciplinary scientist, so I hope to learn more about genetics and chemistry,” he says.

“I hope to one day be a scientist who can work with diverse stakeholders – including politicians, clinicians, scientists and community groups from diverse backgrounds – in order to translate research into real-world solutions.”

Tierrai Tull

Faculty of Arts & Science

(photo by Tysen Harvey Photography Bermuda)

Tull, a fourth-year student in Woodsworth College studying political science in the Faculty of Arts & Science, says she was on her evening walk overlooking the waters of Bermuda when she got the call.

“I screamed, and I had to mute myself because I didn’t want to blow [the national secretary’s] eardrums out,” says Tull, an international student who is representing the Rhodes constituency of Bermuda. “I was just so overcome with joy that I ran for 15 minutes straight home.”

A recipient of the Dean’s Excellence Award and the Frank Peers Award for International Study, Tull says her studies have focused on gender in the Caribbean, pursuing research ranging from appropriation in the health and wellness industry to the case for reparations under John Locke’s theory of labour.

Her time at U of T has been a “global experience” spanning five countries, Tull says.

Starting her studies in fall 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Tull took courses virtually in Armenia during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. She continued her remote studies from Bermuda and the U.S. before arriving at U of T in her second year. After studying abroad at University College London, she returned to the St. George campus to finish her degree.

Tull says she’s looking forward to continuing her studies at Oxford, where she’s interested in exploring the social sciences and women’s studies.

A first-generation student on full scholarship, Tull says she hopes her success will inspire students in similar circumstances to shoot for prestigious programs like Rhodes.

“I would encourage anyone who is struggling but has big goals to dare to dream and dare to achieve,” she says. “Don’t tell yourself no before anyone else does.”

Leighton Schreyer

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Leighton Schreyer (supplied image)

Schreyer, one of two U of T students among the 11 Rhodes Scholars selected from Canada, says receiving the call from Rhodes organizers quickly turned into an impromptu celebration.

“I had to turn the stove burner off, so I wasn’t going to burn down my building,” they say. “I think I did a bit of a party dance.”

An activist, writer and poet, Schreyer says their emphasis on the human side of medicine was informed by interactions with the health system – a theme explored in works that have been published in leading medical journals, literary magazines and news outlets. They have also held research positions at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Unity Health Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children.

Schreyer plans on fusing passions for storytelling and medicine by pursuing a DPhil in anthropology at Oxford, specializing in medical anthropology. Their interests lie in the field of narrative medicine, which honours the fundamental role that story plays in health care and caregiving – and explores how narrative can help bridge the gap between the biological manifestation of disease and the patient’s lived experience of illness. They credit U of T’s health, arts and humanities program with formally introducing them to the field.

“My story – the narrative of my life – is far from complete and, in many ways, I hope it never will be; I want to be continuously challenged to rethink, rework and refine my story,” Schreyer says. “I hope that, through Rhodes, I will have the opportunity to gain perspective and participate in experiences that will allow me to walk away from Oxford with a bigger, more complete and comprehensive story of the world.”

Adam Martínez

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

(supplied image)

Martínez, who was also named a Rhodes Scholar from Canada, says receiving the scholarship was a life-altering event.

“I was walking across campus when I got the call,” he says. “All I really heard were the words ‘Welcome to the Rhodes community,’ and after that it was kind of hard to focus. I could really sense a shift in the trajectory of my future.”

A recipient of U of T’s National Scholarship, Martínez is majoring in engineering physics and has taken on internships and fellowships at leading-edge labs in Ontario and around the world. A key theme of his research is the potential of new materials to solve complex challenges in different domains, from biomedicine to sustainability.

“One example I think about a lot is catalytic materials that can convert captured carbon dioxide into products that we already need, such as methanol and ethanol,” he says. “This could help us close the carbon loop and develop a low-carbon economy.”

However, synthesizing and testing the millions of potential catalytic materials in a lab is too slow, Martinez says, with emerging technologies such as AI and quantum computing holding the potential to dramatically speed up the process.

As a thesis student at the Vector Institute, he is using generative AI models to simulate quantum circuits and bring such systems closer to reality.

He plans to pursue similar research at Oxford, saying the scholarship will help him make new connections and find new problems to solve.

“The Rhodes community includes a lot of different people coming from different areas of the world and different disciplines,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to open dialogues, to think about the implications of my field on theirs, and to use that space to try to do good in the world.”

Prompiengchai, Schreyer, Martínez and Tull were all supported by U of T’s internal selection process for the scholarship.

When it comes to training AI models, bigger datasets may not always be better: U of T study

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 16:17:19 +0000

When it comes to training AI models, bigger datasets may not always be better: U of T study

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 11/14/2023 - 11:17

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A new study by researchers at U of T Engineering suggests that models trained on relatively small datasets can perform well if the data is of high enough quality (photo by Jasmin Merdan/Getty Images)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Breaking Research

Artificial Intelligence

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

“We need to pay attention to the information richness, rather than just gathering as much data as we can”

A new study by researchers at the ��߲ݴ�ý suggests that one of the fundamental assumptions of deep learning artificial intelligence models – that they require enormous amounts of training data to make accurate predictions – may not be as solid as once thought.

Jason Hattrick-Simpers, a professor in the department of materials science and engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, and his team are focused on the design of next-generation materials – from catalysts that convert captured carbon into fuels to non-stick surfaces that keep airplane wings ice-free.

Their findings, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, stemmed from efforts to navigate a key challenge in the field: the enormous potential search space. For example, the Open Catalyst Project contains more than 200 million data points for potential catalyst materials – which still only covers a tiny portion of the vast chemical space that could, for example, yield the right catalyst to help us address climate change.

“AI models can help us efficiently search this space and narrow our choices down to those families of materials that will be most promising,” says Hattrick-Simpers.

“Traditionally, a significant amount of data is considered necessary to train accurate AI models. But a dataset like the one from the Open Catalyst Project is so large that you need very powerful supercomputers to be able to tackle it. So, there’s a question of equity – we need to find a way to identify smaller datasets that folks without access to huge amounts of computing power can train their models on.”

This leads to a second challenge: many of the smaller materials datasets currently available have been developed for a specific domain – for example, improving the performance of battery electrodes. In other words, the data tend to cluster around a few chemical compositions similar to those already in use while missing more promising possibilities that may be less obvious.

“Imagine if you wanted to build a model to predict students’ final grades based on previous test scores,” says Kangming Li, a postdoctoral researcher in Hattrick-Simpers’ lab.

“If you trained it only on students from Canada, it might do perfectly well in that context, but it might fail to accurately predict grades for students from France or Japan. That’s the situation we are up against in the world of materials.”

One possible solution is to identify subsets of data from within very large datasets that are easier to process, but which nevertheless retain the full range of information and diversity present in the original.

To better understand how the qualities of datasets affect the models they are used to train, Li designed methods to identify high-quality subsets of data from previously published materials datasets, such as JARVIS, The Materials Project, and the Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD). Together, these databases contain information on more than a million different materials.

Li built a computer model that predicted material properties and trained it in two ways: one used the original dataset, but the other used a subset of that same data that was approximately 95 per cent smaller.

“What we found was that when trying to predict the properties of a material that was contained within the domain of the dataset, the model that had been trained on only 5 per cent of the data performed about the same as the one that had been trained on all the data,” Li says.

“Conversely, when trying to predict the properties of a material that was outside the domain of the dataset, both of them did similarly poorly.”

Li says that the findings suggest a way of measuring the amount of redundancy in a given dataset: if more data does not improve model performance, it could be an indicator that those additional data are redundant and do not provide new information for the models to learn.

“Our results also reveal a concerning degree of redundancy hidden within these highly sought-after large datasets,” Li adds.

The study underscores what AI experts from many fields are now discovering: that even models trained on relatively small datasets can perform well if the data is of high enough quality.

“All this grew out of the fact that in terms of using AI to speed up materials discovery, we’re just getting started,” says Hattrick-Simpers.

“What it suggests is that as we go forward, we need to be really thoughtful about how we build our datasets. That’s true whether it’s done from the top down, as in selecting a subset of data from a much larger dataset, or from the bottom up, as in sampling new materials to include.

“We need to pay attention to the information richness, rather than just gathering as much data as we can.”

Why is COVID-19 more severe in some people? Researchers use genetics, data science to find out

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:08:53 +0000

Why is COVID-19 more severe in some people? Researchers use genetics, data science to find out

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 10/25/2023 - 10:08

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(Photo by Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Our Community

COVID-19

Data Sciences Institute

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Princess Margaret Cancer Centre

Sinai Health

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Unity Health

Computer Science

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty of Arts & Science

Hospital for Sick Children

Mount Sinai Hospital

Research & Innovation

St. Michael's Hospital

Statistical Sciences

University Health Network

Women's College Hospital

Subheadline

With the help of U of T's Data Sciences Institute, researchers from the university and partner hospitals gathered more than 11,000 full genome sequences from across Canada

Why do some people have a more severe course of COVID-19 disease than others? A genome sequence database created by an international collaboration of researchers, including many from the ��߲ݴ�ý and partner hospitals, may hold the answers to this question – and many more.

The origins of the Canadian COVID-19 Human Host Genome Sequencing Databank, known as CGEn HostSeq, can be traced to the earliest days of the pandemic.

Lisa Strug, senior scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and academic director of U of T’s Data Sciences Institute, one of several U of T institutional strategic initiatives, says genetic data was top of mind for her and other researchers in late 2019 and early 2020 as reports of a novel form of coronavirus emerged from China and then other locations across the globe.

Lisa Strug (Photo courtesy The Hospital for Sick Children)

“In my research, I use data science techniques to map the genes responsible for complex traits,” says Strug, who is a professor in U of T’s departments of statistical sciences and computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and in the biostatistics division of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

“We knew that genes were a factor in the severity of previous SARS infections, so it made sense that COVID-19, which is caused by a closely related virus, would have a genetic component, too.

“Very early on, I started getting messages from several scientists who wanted to set up different studies that would help us find those genes.”

Over the next few months, Strug – who is also the associate director of SickKids’ Centre for Applied Genomics, one of three sites across Canada that form CGEn, Canada’s national platform for genome sequencing infrastructure for research – collaborated with nearly 100 researchers from across U of T and partner hospitals and institutions, as well as other researchers from across Canada to enrol individuals with COVID-19 and sequence their genomes.

Some of the key team members from the Toronto community included:

Stephen Scherer, chief of research at SickKids Research Institute and a University Professor in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, as well as director of the U of T McLaughlin Centre
Rayjean Hung, associate director of population health at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health, and a professor in U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Angela Cheung, clinician-scientist at University Health Network, senior scientist at Toronto General Hospital Research Institute and a professor in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Upton Allen, head of the division of infectious diseases at SickKids and a professor in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine

The projected was initiated by Scherer and CGEn’s Naveed Aziz, along with Strug, and a $20-million grant was secured from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, administered through Genome Canada.

“We had to go right to the top to get this project funded fast and our labs and teams worked seven days a week on the project right through the pandemic,” Scherer recalls.

Identifying associations between individual genes and complex traits typically requires thousands of genomes – both from those with the trait and those without. Though there was no shortage of cases to choose from, it was critical to gather and sequence DNA – and then organize the data in a way that would be ethical, efficient and useful to researchers now and in the future.

“One of our key mandates at the Data Sciences Institute is developing techniques and programs that ensure that data remains as open, accessible and as re-producible as it can be,” Strug says.

“That vision was brought to bear as we assembled the data infrastructure for this project – for example, ensuring that consent forms were as broad as possible so that this data could be linked with other sources, from electronic medical records to other health databases.

“We wanted to be sure that even after the COVID-19 pandemic was over this could be a national whole genome sequencing resource to ask all kinds of questions about health and our genes. The development of the database and its open nature also enabled Canada to collaborate effectively with similar projects in other countries.”

Partner hospitals and institutions:

The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)
Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health
Mount Sinai Hospital, Sinai Health
St Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto
University Health Network (UHN)
Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, UHN
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Women’s College Hospital
Toronto General Hospital, UHN
Baycrest Health Sciences

In the end, the project gathered more than 11,000 full genome sequences from across Canada, representing patients with a wide range of health outcomes. Those data were then combined with even more sequences from patients in other countries under what came to be called the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative.

It didn’t take long for patterns to start to emerge. A paper published in Nature in 2021 identified 13 genome-wide significant loci that are associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection or severe manifestations of COVID-19.

Since then, even more data have been added, and subsequent analysis has confirmed the significance of existing loci while also identifying new ones. The most recent update to the project, published in Nature earlier this year, brings the total number of distinct, genome-wide significant loci to 51.

“Identification of these loci can help one predict who might be more prone to a severe course of COVID-19 disease,” says Strug.

“When you identify a trait-associated locus, you can also unravel the mechanism by which this genetic region contributes to COVID-19 disease. This potentially identifies therapeutic targets and approaches that a future drug could be designed around.”

While it will take many more years to fully untangle the effects of the different loci that have been identified, Strug says that the database is already showing its worth in other ways.

“It can be difficult to find datasets with whole genome sequence and approved for linkage with other health information that are this large, and we want people to know that it is open and available for all kinds of research well beyond COVID through a completely independent data access committee,” she says.

“For example, several investigators from across Canada have been approved to use these data and we’ve even provided funding to trainees to encourage them to develop new data science methodologies or ask novel health questions using the CGen HostSeq data.”

“This was a humongous effort, where researchers from across Canada came together during the COVID-19 pandemic to recruit, obtain and sequence DNA from more than 11,000 Canadians in a systematic, co-operative, aligned way to create a made-in-Canada data resource that will hopefully be useful for years to come. I think that was really miraculous.”