$6.2 million investment to create Canada’s premier translational research facility

The new centre is a collaboration between Sinai Health, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine (Temerty Medicine).

TGMC will integrate and expand the capabilities of The Centre for Phenogenomics (TCP) and Temerty Medicine’s Division of Comparative Medicine (DCM), forming an integrated mouse research facility designed to support a broader range of scientific questions related to human disease than either could address alone. In Canada, regulatory requirements mandate that new therapies demonstrate safety and efficacy in animal studies before proceeding to human clinical trials.

“The TGMC represents a genuine leap forward, not just for Toronto but for how Canada approaches the fundamental question of what drives disease. The ability to model disease across diverse genetic backgrounds that more closely mirror human biology is paramount for developing effective treatments. With this infrastructure we can move faster, ask bigger questions and make those capabilities available to researchers across the country who otherwise wouldn’t have access to them,” said Dr. Daniel Schramek, part of the TCP senior management team, a senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and deputy director for discovery research at Sinai Health.

In addition to Dr. Schramek, TGMC leadership includes Dr. John Sled, a senior scientist at SickKids and Dr. Dana Philpott, a professor of immunology at Temerty Medicine.  

The TGMC team brings together deep and complementary expertise from several LTRI investigators. Dr. Daniel Drucker is a pioneer in GLP-1 biology whose foundational preclinical research underpins today’s leading treatments for diabetes and obesity. Dr. Ken Croitoru is an international leader in inflammatory bowel disease research and Dr. Tatsuya Tsukahara specializes in how the brain interprets sensory information.

Using advanced automation and computational systems, researchers at the new centre will be able to develop and study more precise preclinical models of disease that better reflect the genetic diversity found in real human populations. The centre will establish Toronto’s first facility capable of providing researchers with access to models incorporating diverse microbiomes, the communities of resident microorganisms living in the gut and elsewhere in the body, and humanized immune environments. 

By matching preclinical research more faithfully to human biology, the emerging discoveries are more likely to lead to safe and effective treatments and diagnostics for Canada’s diverse population.

The TGMC’s upgraded infrastructure will power several interconnected areas of research, each targeting diseases that collectively affect millions of Canadians. Among them are metabolic and heart disease, cancer, brain disorders, infectious diseases and microbiome-host interactions. These efforts are expected to generate new knowledge and tools that advance the understanding of the genetic and environmental bases of brain disorders, cancer, maternal-fetal health, and responses to chemotherapy and radiation therapy, among others.