A Centre is Born

On August 20, 2008, Dr. Colin Carrie, parliamentary secretary to the minister of industry, and Dr. Eliot Phillipson, president and CEO of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), announced an investment of $74.6 million to build and equip the Centre for Research and Image-Guided Therapeutics at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. It is the single largest award ever made to the hospital.

The centre, which will be unique in Canada, will develop and test state-of-the-art medical imaging technologies, therapeutics and standards of practice, and translate them into the clinic. It will transform medical imaging by enhancing diagnosis and therapy for some of the most urgent problems in health care.

Establishing the centre will add more than 100,000 square feet of research space to Sunnybrook, which will house four institute-wide ‘platform’ facilities. Each facility spans a range of disciplines and four research programs at Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI): cancer, cardiac, musculoskeletal and neurosciences. This unique structure was designed in this way to maximize interaction among scientists, and to speed discoveries seamlessly along the continuum of translational research. The centre will allow SRI research teams to take giant strides forward in improving the health of patients, and in achieving SRI’s vision of inventing the future of health care.

Dr. Kullervo Hynynen, director of the discipline of imaging at SRI, leads the centre, which amasses a team of 55 scientists and clinician-scientists. When asked what he thought was the most important factor in the CFI’s decision to invest in SRI, Hynynen said, “The quality of the research we do. It is excellent. We are changing how health care is done.”

Read more about the Centre for Research in Image-Guided Therapeutics, including detailed information on the four ‘platform’ facilities by downloading Funded: Centre for Research in Image-Guided Therapeutics (PDF, 2.2 MB). This four-page insert is part of the autumn 2008 edition of SRI's newsletter Nexus.