2020/2021 REPORT TO OUR COMMUNITY
Scientists at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) have joined forces with some of Canada’s leading scientists in an effort to stay on top of the dangerous COVID-19 variants circulating throughout the country.
In March 2021, the federal government announced it is establishing a Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network, thanks to a $9-million grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
More than 30 scientists are part of the effort. Dr. Anne-Claude Gingras, a senior investigator at the LTRI, is among the eight co-principal applicants.
“Viral variants have emerged with multiple combinations of mutations that may have different effects on the virus’ ability to infect cells or to hide from the immune system,” Gingras says. “While many of the research groups involved, including ours, were already working on characterizing variants, this funding will enable them to do so in a more efficient manner through collaborations across the country. Laboratories with specialized expertise will be able to join the network and contribute to variant characterization and rapidly share the results back with the rest of the team.”
The scientists hope the network will allow them to rapidly act on the emergence of new variants of concern by quickly learning the virus’ features, including the potential for re-infection.
With the largest COVID-19 testing capacity in Ontario, the shared Sinai Health — University Health Network (UHN) microbiology department completed more than 1.5 million tests for residents across the province in the first year of the pandemic.
“We’re really proud to go from serving just our hospitals, to supporting residents throughout Ontario as a whole,” says Dr. Tony Mazzulli, Sinai Health’s microbiologist-in-chief. “Reaching the 1.5 million test milestone in one year shows we have been successful in meeting a critical testing need and contributing to the COVID response effort for the entire province.”
Under Mazzulli’s direction, the lab scaled-up COVID-19 testing by more than 20 times its initial March 2020 capacity, and now performs 10,000 COVID-19 tests per day, seven days a week. In that time, it has completed more COVID-19 tests than any other single laboratory in the province.
“We have a rock-solid foundation for testing and an incredibly talented team, who have allowed us to respond to testing needs very quickly,” says Mazzulli. “The team has not taken their foot off the gas since day one.”
In late 2020, the team shifted again, and in collaboration with Dr. Jeff Wrana, senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, developed a system to obtain sequence information on all positive samples identified in the shared clinical diagnostics lab. The goal is to identify known and novel variants that emerge in the population.
“By systematically screening all positives, we can provide rapid feedback on the frequency of known variants in the population and quantitate their expansion,” says Wrana, “and most importantly, enable early discovery of emergent variants.”
In 2020, a number of scientists at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) switched their focus to help provide solutions to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Their work spans all aspects of this crisis, from discovering how best to identify and treat COVID-19, to uncovering how the virus spreads, to exploring new drug therapies.
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The researcher has spent the majority of his career learning how to stop babies from arriving too early, sparing them from potential lifelong complications and enabling them to live long and healthy lives.
Lye is also among the many world-leading scientists at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) who have been answering the call to address some of the greatest health challenges of our time, including COVID-19, cancer and diabetes.
He took on the role of interim Koffler Director of Research at the LTRI in January 2021 as Sinai Health begins its search for a permanent replacement for Dr. Jim Woodgett, who served as director for 15 years. LTRI is the top-ranked biomedical research institute in Canada and home to scientists who are number one worldwide in the fields of diabetes, cancer and molecular biology.
“I am interested in building on how basic science can be further applied to clinical situations,” says Lye. “We’ve seen it recently in the COVID-era, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for benefit when research institutes and hospitals work together.”
Lye’s own work has recently expanded to include COVID-19 effects on women and infants. In a recent study, he outlined how a developing baby may be most vulnerable for being infected during early pregnancy, compared to later trimesters.
After more than a decade of helping develop some of the most promising researchers in the world, Dr. Jim Woodgett is stepping down as Koffler Director of Research at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) to focus on his own research.
Woodgett became director of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute (later the LTRI) in 2005, with a mandate to work with the hospital and foundation to create a research-based, world-class academic health centre. The director role was and continues to be viewed as vital in connecting the work of the research institute with the clinical activities of the hospital.
Woodgett has been a motivational leader to a team of highly successful and impactful globally recognized investigators and scientists. He has been instrumental in attracting exceptional researchers to the LTRI, both from Canada and abroad.
During Woodgett's tenure, the LTRI has consistently been ranked as one of the top biomedical research institutes in the world, attracting national and international funding.
Sinai Health and Sinai Health Foundation thank Woodgett for his amazing contributions to science and the LTRI.
Postdoctoral fellow TianTian Li and LTRI scientists led by Drs. Crystal Chan and Ellen Greenblatt at Mount Sinai Fertility identified biomarkers associated with receptivity for implantation. In patients undergoing ovarian stimulation for infertility, the team also found a set of RNA molecules that were differentially expressed in patients who conceived versus those who did not.
A study by Dr. Geoffrey Hesketh, an LTRI postdoctoral fellow, shed light on how cancer cells feed and grow — findings that could one day lead to the development of new, targeted therapies for certain aggressive cancers.
According to research by Dr. Denice Feig published in Lancet Diabetes & Endrocrinology, women with type 2 diabetes who take the blood glucose-lowering drug metformin during pregnancy are more likely to see various health benefits, including requiring less insulin, less weight gain and a reduction in their risk of a Caesarean birth.
We’re learning more about a little-known gene and the pivotal role it plays in female fertility and egg quality. In a new study in Science Advances, Dr. Andrea Jurisicova found when the gene is inactivated in a variety of species, the animals are infertile or lose their fertility unusually early, but appear otherwise healthy.
Findings from Drs. Laurie Baggio and Daniel Drucker revealed a class of drugs widely used to treat type 2 diabetes don’t have much impact on inflammation, a key element of the disease. Dr. Daniel Durocher and PhD student Michele Olivieri published new research in Cell that offered a deeper look at which proteins have the potential to repair DNA damage, which may have broader implications on how cancer patients are treated in the future.
Being fed breast milk exclusively as an infant can help ward off weight gain for those at risk of becoming obese later in life. Reporting these findings in PLOS Genetics, Dr. Laurent Briollais and his colleagues investigated whether the body mass index or BMI-reducing impact of breast milk can counteract the effects of genetic variations that increase the odds that a person will become obese.
Detailed in the journal Science, Dr. Daniel Schramek identified a common molecular mechanism that fuels cancer growth in up to 70 per cent of head and neck cancer patients, shedding light on possible new therapeutic strategies.
A team of scientists from Canada, the U.K. and U.S. discovered a new compound that could lead to better treatments for a host of serious brain disorders including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and depression. Dr. Graham Collingridge, senior investigator at LTRI, was part of an international consortium of researchers that created a new chemical tool for revealing how specific cell receptors function in the brain. Their findings were published in Nature Communications.
Dr. Kieran Campbell is an expert in statistical and machine-learning modelling of high-dimensional biomedical data, including single-cell and cancer genomics.
Recently, Campbell led efforts to use computational methods to understand how changes to a patient’s DNA impact the behaviour of individual tumour cells, with important implications for how personalized therapy can be applied. Such findings can improve our understanding of cancer progression and of why certain tumours are resistant to therapies, leading to relapse.
Dr. Hartland Jackson is working at the cutting edge of cancer research. His research involves the use of mass cytometry for highly multiplexed imaging of tumour tissues and the development of methods for the analysis of spatially resolved single-cell data.
In his lab, Jackson oversees a team of three doctoral students and two senior scientists who apply high-dimension imaging technology to understand how cells interact and communicate. Their work is advancing cancer research, developments in imaging technology and new approaches to creating customized treatment plans.
To find out why his colleagues at LTRI have affectionately nicknamed him "the human pin cushion," click here.
Sinai Health Foundation remembers one of Canada’s most significant scientific visionaries and founding director of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health.
Dr. Louis Siminovitch — or “Lou” as he was affectionately known — passed away on April 6, 2021. In May 2020, he celebrated his 100th birthday at a time when COVID-19 forced the world to socially distance while simultaneously required urgent support from today’s top scientists.
“The better the science, the better the patient care,” Siminovitch used to say. With his passing, it turns out the better the scientist, the more he’s beloved and revered by his colleagues.
As a molecular biologist and pioneer in human genetics, Siminovitch made important contributions in the fields of bacterial and animal virus genetics, human genetics and cancer research. His work helped uncover the genetic bases of muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, and laid the groundwork for the genetic connections to cancer.
Siminovitch contributed to the Nobel Prize-winning work in molecular genetics of Jacques Monod, Francois Jacob and Andre Lwoff during his years at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. An inductee into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, he was also both an Officer and Companion of the Order of Canada.
“Lou’s leadership of the scientific and academic community changed so many careers,” says Gary Newton, President and CEO of Sinai Health. “His work shaped Canadian medicine in a very profound way and his impact can be seen every day in the halls and labs of Mount Sinai Hospital.”
At age 65, when others might have contemplated retirement, Siminovitch was at the top of his game. Mount Sinai recruited him to build a first-rate academic research institute in 1985.
As inaugural director, Siminovitch attracted 25 of the globe’s most eminent scientists to his team. Thanks to his foundational efforts, the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) is the top-ranked biomedical research institute in Canada and home to scientists who are number one worldwide in the fields of diabetes, cancer and molecular biology.
In 2023, Mount Sinai Hospital will mark its 100th anniversary. While Siminovitch will not be here to celebrate his own meaningful contributions, Sinai Health Foundation is honouring his achievements through a Sinai 100 Chair in his name.
Early in the pandemic, philanthropists Larry and Judy Tanenbaum made a new donation of $1 million to fuel COVID-19 research at Sinai Health’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI). Their gift was used to match all new donations to the LTRI for COVID-19 and other related groundbreaking research.
Thanks to their generosity, Sinai Health Foundation has received just over
$1 million in new donations, including $490,000 from major gifts.
“Larry and Judy Tanenbaum are visionary supporters of research,” says Louis de Melo, CEO of Sinai Health Foundation. “Thanks to their generosity, LTRI is at the forefront of a significant number of advances and treatments related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Drs. Jeff Wrana and Laurence Pelletier, senior investigators at the LTRI, are using the institute’s DNA sequencing expertise to develop mass scale COVID-19 variant tests to pinpoint emerging variants of concern.
“Turning ideas into scientific advances wouldn’t be possible without people like Larry and Judy Tanenbaum,” Wrana says. “The work being done today is our best hope for a world free from the fear of COVID-19 and will provide a road map of how to tackle other infectious diseases that might emerge in the future.”
