From the President and CEO, and Chair of the Board
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
David Agnew (left) and Dr. Barry McLellan (right)
Sunnybrook has an ambitious vision: we will invent the future of health care. To achieve this, we have developed a culture of discovery and innovation that permeates every corner of the organization.
From our roots as a hospital for Canadian veterans, Sunnybrook, which is fully affiliated with the University of Toronto, has evolved into one of Canada’s premier academic health sciences centres.
Care across our eight clinical programs is outstanding. This care derives in part from its grounding in research. Our practitioners always strive to do better, motivated by the challenges they encounter daily. In this magazine you will find a few of the many examples of how we are achieving our vision.
For example, researchers in our Hurvitz Brain Sciences Program have shown that exercise-based cardiac rehab programs help to maintain the size of the hippocampus, a region of the brain responsible for memory, which can become damaged in patients with heart disease. These are encouraging findings for those patients, who are at increased risk of stroke and dementia. Researchers are also examining the link between changes to the brain’s blood vessels and brain disorders, to develop interventions that may stave off disease. These are but two of many such examples.
Such discoveries wouldn’t be possible without the support of our funding, government and community partners, and the ingenuity and dedication of our staff and volunteers. Thank you for helping us to invent the future of health care.
David Agnew
Chair, Board of Directors
Barry A. McLellan
President and CEO
From the Vice-President, Research
Sunnybrook Research Institute
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
Dr. Michael Julius
Discovery to clinical impact via the medical marketplace—that’s the “business” that Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI) is in, and over the last year we’ve made significant headway.
As with every successful hospital-based research enterprise, our scientists are our most precious assets. We have created an ethos of innovation at SRI, an environment that has some of the best minds in the world who are enabling the most social of activities: discovery.
Our vision of creating an international hub for life sciences is supported by providing space without disciplinary boundaries. Physicists, engineers, geneticists, molecular and cellular biologists, and health services researchers, along with a growing family of business partners, work shoulder-to-shoulder with practitioners and patients toward solving the most challenging problems in medical science.
At first blush, it might seem out of place to have private sector partners walking the hallways of SRI. Their presence, partnership and investment, however, are fundamental to our success. Translating ideas into products that will help our patients is a high-cost, high-risk endeavor.
The result of such partnership is an “end-to-end” solution—from discovery to the uptake of innovative and disruptive technology into the health care system.
Welcome to this year’s SRI Magazine, with its special focus on brain sciences—an area in which we lead. We hope that you enjoy the captivating stories. In-between each line, know that we have implemented a commercialization speedway, one that ensures our patients will benefit from our breakthroughs faster than ever.
Michael Julius
Vice-President, Research
Professor, Departments of Immunology and Medical Biophysics
Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
