The first few weeks of 2024 have been busy as the Profound Impact team continues to work with universities and colleges and industry partners across Canada to deploy our AI-powered Research Impact tool, which matches researchers with the best research funding opportunities in their field and helps find industry partners to support successful grant applications. Through our innovative new partnership with CS-Can|Info-Can, the first of a series of collaborations with researchers across Canada, Profound Impact is providing CS-Can|Info-Can member Computer Science departments and researchers with free evaluations of Research Impact. Interested in learning more about Research Impact? You can view a video here or sign up for a live demonstration during one of the bi-weekly Demo Days that the Profound Impact team will be presenting throughout 2024.
I was pleased to share my insights on building Profound Impact’s team and our successful and healthy small business culture in the Grow a Small Business podcast. Profound Impact and my work were also featured in an edition of Women’s Biz podcast, where I talked about my journey in information security, my role in commercializing Elliptic Curve Cryptography, and the inspiration behind founding Profound Impact.
In August of 2023, Profound Impact announced the successful close of a $3.125 million pre-seed funding round of nearly all female investors, including many first-time angel investors. Inspired by this achievement, I joined forces with Profound Impact board chair Deborah Rosati and Lara Zink, VP of Client Service and Development at Delaney Capital Management, to create Women Funding Women Inc. (WFW). This collective, which challenges the status quo in the venture capital world and with first-time female angel investors by breaking barriers and building bridges for a more inclusive investment community, will launch in Toronto on February 7. You can read more about how WFW plans to change the VC landscape in Disruption Magazine’s recent article.
In this month’s Impact Story, you’ll meet WFW co-founder Lara Zink and learn more about her journey from working as a political aide to a successful career in finance. In our Researcher Spotlight, we profile Dr. Luigi Benedicenti, Professional Engineer, researcher and Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick, whose career took him from Genoa, Italy to Regina, Saskatchewan to Atlantic Canada.
We hope you enjoy this month’s edition of Profound Connections!
Dean, Faculty of Computer Science University of New Brunswick
Dr. Luigi Benedicenti joined the research community in Canada after receiving his Laurea in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Genoa in Italy. A Professional Engineer licensed in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick and a licensed Italian Engineer, Luigi joined the University of New Brunswick as Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science, Canada’s original faculty of computer science, in 2017.
Luigi’s interest in software engineering was sparked in high school when he worked on a version of a computer game being developed by Electronic Arts. The game was never released, but his appreciation for making and playing games led him to study computer engineering in his hometown of Genoa. “My father, who was a surgeon, was devastated when I didn’t follow in his career footsteps,” says Luigi. “But he did support me as I followed my passion.”
His journey from Italy to Canada came as a result of his academic supervisor’s move from Genoa to Calgary. Luigi traveled to Calgary to meet with his supervisor while completing his Ph.D. and applied for positions in Canada after graduation. He started his tenure at the University of Regina in 1998 as a lecturer. “When I landed in Regina, I didn’t have the right clothes. I was prepared for the weather in Calgary, but not for Regina’s temperatures of -30 to -50 degrees. The wind was so cold and deep that my eyelids froze the first time I walked to work!”
Luigi describes his 19 years at the University of Regina, where he served as a professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science and terms as Associate Dean for Special Projects, Associate Vice-President, Academic, and on the university’s Board of Governors as faculty representative, as an unforgettable experience during which he learned a lot and was afforded many opportunities for growth and innovation. While in Saskatchewan, Luigi developed strong connections with industry through his participation as a board member for SpringBoard West Innovations and SaskInteractive and as a Research Professor at TRLabs, where he conducted research in software engineering, mobile agents and media provision for 11 years.
“Being an academic involves, by definition, a relationship with the public. We are contributing to the common good and there are many ways to do that. Ours is a collective effort that has a significant impact – both via our research findings and through preparation of the next generation of researchers through teaching,” notes Luigi. “I love teaching and research in more or less equal measure. They provide a nice balance and generate ideas as I move from one to the other. Teaching often provides surprising insights to my research.”
Luigi’s research focuses on Software Agents, Software Process, and New Media Technology and he specializes in program management and technology transfer. His interdisciplinary work has provided opportunities to collaborate with colleagues in Europe, South East Asia and across North America. Although his role as Dean limits the time he is able to devote to research, Luigi continues to publish regularly, run conferences and symposia in his field, and has been a member of the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) from 2014 to 2021. “Being on a national accreditation board has been an exciting and challenging experience and I am humbled by my colleagues, who always bring contributions of the highest quality,” he says.
He is proud of the research excellence within the Faculty of Computer Science. “The Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity is one of the top three such research institutes in Canada,” notes Luigi. The outstanding young researchers within the institute balance between pure and applied research and provide immediate technology transfer to industry members through graduates who join those companies.
Spectral, UNB’s spatial computing training and research lab, combines virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality to bring together the digital and physical. Under the leadership of Dr. Scott Bateman, the lab conducts research with applications in areas including aerospace, health training, therapy and rehabilitation. “It’s one of the best User Interface/Human Computing research labs in North America,” says Luigi.
One of the faculty’s newest research ventures, the Research Institute in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RIDSAI), was developed in response to New Brunswick’s needs in the areas of AI and data science. “RIDSAI does more than conduct pure research,” says Luigi. “The institute is developing algorithms, applications and literacy in machine learning and data science to graduate students who will have the tools to succeed in a world that relies on these technologies.” RIDSAI researchers from a range of disciplines work to develop solutions for community and industry partners in areas ranging from policy and planning to entertainment, agriculture and health.
Luigi is deeply committed to excellence in the classroom and collaborative decision-making and is appreciative of the flexibility, interest and engagement of the members of the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick. “We can do something great and everyone can contribute in their own way,” he says. “Our collaborative culture leads to the good of the faculty as we work together on the mission and targets identified in the vision document we developed almost four years ago.”
A self-described passionate computer geek who loves programming, software engineering, computers, video games, and everything IT, Luigi also enjoys playing and creating music, traveling, and e-biking and is a pizza aficionado. As for his future plans, he says: “There are three stages to a career. I am exiting the middle and starting to prepare for the final stage. For me, retirement is about choice. I plan to work on research that has been postponed, experiment with pizza dough and enjoy hiking, skiing and life in general.”
Do you have an impact story to share? Let us know at connections@profoundimpact.com for a chance to be featured in an upcoming newsletter!
It was serendipity that brought Lara Zink from Vancouver to the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) and the keen interest she developed in politics in grades 11 and 12 led her to study political science. “I visited a great aunt in London while in high school and thought the Western campus was amazing,” says Lara.
Lara’s journey, from graduating with an Honours BA degree in political science to working as part of the federal government team that negotiated the NAFTA agreement to a long and successful career in finance, was a non-traditional one. Her experience makes her a role model dedicated to helping women overcome barriers to entry and to ensure that leadership, representation, and gender equity exist within the finance industry.
Lara’s degree in political science and experience working with the Young Conservatives as a teenager led to a role as political assistant to federal Member of Parliament Michael Wilson, then Minister of International Trade and Industry Canada. “I loved my two years working in Ottawa,” says Lara. “I was able to speak with members of Parliament and their staff about the benefits of NAFTA to Canada and traveled to Washington for the final stages of negotiation of the agreement.”
After two years on Parliament Hill, Lara wrote the GMAT exam and applied to business schools, including the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto where she ultimately earned her MBA. Although she had hoped to return to Vancouver after graduation, job opportunities were more plentiful in Toronto. After considering options in marketing and private wealth, Lara chose to enter a corporate lending training program with RBC in Toronto. She started in business banking and moved to another lending group in RBC’s financial institutions group before embarking on a 20-year career in global equity sales and trading on the trading floor at RBC Capital Markets.
When she left RBC in 2019, Lara paused and considered her next career move. “While exploring job opportunities during the pandemic lockdown, I threw my name in the hat for the position of President and Chief Executive Officer of Women in Capital Markets,” says Lara. She joined WCM, the largest network of women in finance whose mission is to accelerate equity, diversity and inclusion in finance, in 2021. Lara led WCM in developing programs to unite the finance industry in supporting EDI in capital markets and delivering research, programming and strategic value to the organization’s sponsors, members and stakeholders.
Lara left WCM in September of 2023 to join a woman-led asset management company, Delaney Capital Management, where she currently serves as Vice President of Client Service and Development.
Lara’s commitment to embracing equity and helping women succeed, both in the finance sector and as company founders, is reflected in her role as a member of the board of Canadian Women’s Network, where she will work to help Canadian female founders grow and secure funding. She recently joined Sherry Shannon-Vanstone and Deborah Rosati to create Women Funding Women (WFW), a collective aimed at addressing the persistent funding gap faced by women founders in North America.
WFW, which will launch on February 7 in Toronto, brings together organizations and resources committed to empowering women, offering gender equality, and catalyzing economic growth by increasing access to seed funding for women-led ventures. Lara’s vast experience in capital markets and her passion for driving change and ensuring women’s success is key to the work that WFW will do to increase access to funding for women founders.
Lara’s professional success in the finance sector, her belief that strategy and culture differentiate organizations, and her work as a leader and mentor for women – as entrepreneurs, funders and investors – have made her an influential champion for equity, diversity and inclusion, and a powerful initiator of change for women’s access to venture funding.
Do you have an impact story to share? Let us know at connections@profoundimpact.com for a chance to be featured in an upcoming newsletter!
Profound Impact is excited to start the new year with the announcement of a new partnership with CS-Can|Info-Can, a professional organization representing more than 60 Computer Science departments and faculties across Canada.
CS-Can|Info-Can and Profound Impact worked together in 2023 to produce two webinars on researcher and industry collaboration. Recordings of those webinars are available for viewing here.
This new partnership provides an exciting benefit to the CS-Can|Info-Can members – a free evaluation of Research Impact, which uses advanced AI to match researchers with the best research funding opportunities in their field and helps find industry partners to support successful grant applications.
Would you like to see Research Impact in action? You can view a video here or sign up for a live demonstration during one of the bi-weekly Demo Days that the Profound Impact team will be presenting throughout 2024.
This month, we’re proud to present profiles of two 2023 Impactful Action Award finalists. These finalists exemplify what it means to make a profound impact in the world, and we are honoured to share their stories. You’ll meet Leigh Zachary Bursey, an activist, journalist, former three-term politician, singer-songwriter, recording artist, and author, and Lynn Smith, a proud member of the Peavine Métis Settlement who is leading her northern community through a significant change to take control over monitoring the impact of climate change on their land and waterways.
The Profound Impact team is excited about our plans for 2024 and looks forward to sharing those with you. Enjoy this month’s edition of Profound Connections and best wishes for a productive and happy new year!
Leigh Zachary Bursey Community Advocate Young Leader Impactful Actions Award Finalist
International best-selling author, loss prevention officer, research consultant, supportive housing program coordinator, community organizer and journalist. Through these roles, Leigh Zachary Bursey has engaged with vulnerable people and worked to amplify their voices to produce social change.
Leigh has never shied away from tackling challenging social topics such as homelessness, mental health, harm reduction and allied support for the LGBTQIA – and for him, this work is personal. “My mother and I dealt with homelessness while I was in high school, giving me an early education in trauma and desperation,” notes Leigh. “As a result, I understood early on that I wanted to help people.”
It was while standing calf-deep in snow at a bus stop in Brockville, Ontario and realizing that this was a daily experience for many people that Leigh decided to run for city council. “I used my punk rock ethos, music background and big mouth to go out and make a difference,” says Leigh.
During his three terms as Brockville city councillor, Leigh participated in important discussions about social justice issues including gender equity, homelessness, mental health, harm reduction and affordable housing. “I was tagged as the punk rock councillor and was called by people in crisis to help. That experience provided powerful, hands-on experience in dealing with the circumstances and traumas of others,” he said.
Leigh’s passion for community development and helping those who are often marginalized and in need of support is reflected in his work. In addition to his role as a city councillor, Leigh has served as Vice-President of the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association, and as a Child Protection Support Worker for Family and Children Services of Lanark, Leeds and Grenville, and for Cornerstone Landing Youth Services in Lanark County. He has worked in youth homeless shelters and adult warming centres, advocating for naloxone training and increased harm reduction supports, and has been a vocal supporter of increased public transit hours and of adding operating dollars to local library budgets.
A highlight of Leigh’s career was speaking at the International Journal on Homelessness Symposium in Chicago in 2023. “I presented case studies that told the stories of rough sleepers – putting a name and a face to homelessness. Some of the rough sleepers I’ve worked with are the most incredible people I’ve known. I have come to understand that my lived experience is trivial in comparison,” says Leigh.
Leigh has shared his research findings as a frequent presenter at national conferences including the Canadian Rural and Remote Housing and Homelessness Symposium, the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness Conference, the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention National Conference and the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association National Congress.
The focus of Leigh’s work has been to represent marginalized people in order to communicate their challenges and share their ideas for change to develop scalable solutions that can be replicated across borders. He has challenged stigmas and amplified the voices of the people he works with through outreach and engagement. “When asked what I do, I often say that I love people who are sometimes hard to love,” says Leigh. “I encourage people to make better decisions.”
Leigh’s dedication to advocating for the most vulnerable in the community is exemplified by his philosophy in life: “Kindness is free and a very underutilized form of currency that we should all exhaust.” Profound Impact is honoured to share the story of Leigh’s work and its impact and to recognize his accomplishments as an Impactful Action Awards finalist in the Young Leader Category.
You can see more about Leigh’s career and impact in the visualization below.
Do you have an impact story to share? Let us know at connections@profoundimpact.com for a chance to be featured in an upcoming newsletter!
Lynn Smith
Regional Planning Coordinator
Lifetime Achievement Impactful Actions Award Finalist
Lynn Smith has fond memories of walking through the jack pine forest of the Peavine Métis Settlement in northern Alberta, of which she is a proud member, with her grandmother to pick blueberries and of camping with her family in those same forests. In her current role as Regional Planning Coordinator within the Consultation Department in the Settlement, developed in partnership with NAIT (the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology), she is leading her community through a significant change to take control of monitoring the impact of climate change on their land and waterways.
“Indigenous people have been stewards of the forests and waterways for generations,” notes Lynn. “I am now in a position to make changes to bring things back, as closely as possible, to the way they were when I was a child, when my cousins and I could drink directly from the river and streams in our community.”
Lynn works with compassion and perseverance in collaboration with community members to build knowledge and achieve data sovereignty in order to better hold industry and all levels of government accountable for how their actions impact Indigenous lands. She has developed an environmental monitoring program managed by a team of community-based environmental monitors and data technicians that deliver real benefits to the Settlement. This mentoring model ensures that the skills of those monitors and technicians are retained within the community.
Lynn regularly initiates, enables and sustains collaborations with a broad range of stakeholders, including Elders, traditional hunters and fishers, NAIT staff and students, all levels of government, and companies from the energy, forestry, and environmental consulting sectors. She reaches out to people and organizations with different experiences and expertise and enables her team to weigh in on decisions to achieve her community’s goals – all while demonstrating her compassion and strong interpersonal connections.
Although Indigenous peoples own, occupy, or use about a quarter of the world’s surface, they safeguard 80% of the world’s biodiversity. Attempts in the past by those communities to set up environmental monitoring programs have suffered from a lack of knowledge, thereby hindering the development, sustainability, quality and viability of the programs. Lynn has developed innovative partnerships between the Indigenous community and Western scientists, to teach Indigenous ways of knowing and to share Western-based methods of doing science with professionals who create environmental monitoring programs in her community. Lynn is also breaking new ground by communicating her learnings in setting up environmental monitoring programs to the scientific community by participating in the upcoming Chemical Society of Canada conference – a first for a non-traditionally trained scientist.
The sharing of knowledge and learnings with other Indigenous communities suffering from similar environmental challenges is a vital element of Lynn’s work. She works with communities to build competencies in their consultation teams to autonomously monitor their land, generate and interpret data, and implement management programs.
Lynn has been recognized for her achievements by being asked to represent her community on the Board of Directors of the Lesser Slave Lake Watershed Council, which works to improve and maintain a healthy watershed through education, planning and implementation of shared initiatives supporting communities and ecosystems throughout the region.
Lynn is mother to three young adult children and, when not working for the Settlement, owns and operates, along with her husband, Jesse Smith, three businesses: P’J’s Eavestroughing, Lynn and Jesse Grain Farm and D’Vine Trap Range. The trap range evolved from her love of the sport of trap shooting, where she was named the 2019 Canadian Ladies Champion. She is currently and has been, for the last 5 years, the reigning Alberta Provincial Ladies Champion.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a pioneer,” says Lynn about her work. “This is the best job I’ve ever had!”
Profound Impact is delighted to showcase Lynn’s important work and its incredible impact on the Peavine Métis Settlement and across Indigenous communities.
You can see more about Lynn’s career and impact in the visualization below.
Do you have an impact story to share? Let us know at connections@profoundimpact.com for a chance to be featured in an upcoming newsletter!
November was a busy month for the Profound Impact team as we released our annual Social Impact Report, participated in industry conferences and met with venture capitalists in the US in preparation for the company’s next funding round.
The Profound Impact Social Impact Report highlights strategies we’ve undertaken over the last twelve months to maintain and improve a positive environment for our employees. These initiatives have included monthly in-person team meetings, team-building activities, virtual social events (including group cooking sessions), group volunteering, professional skills and growth support education programs, a team-wide book club and the matching of charitable contributions to community organizations. I’m proud to report that Profound Impact has achieved an employee retention rate of 100% (with 0% attrition) while growing the team by 33%. This employee retention rate is in stark contrast with tech companies globally, where the average attrition rate sits at 13.2%.
Conference attendance and presentations took Profound Impact employees across North America to learn more about key technologies and to meet current and potential customers.
Our Technical Program Manager, Sohail Ramzan, attended AWS Reinvent in Las Vegas to meet with AWS experts and to learn about the latest cloud industry innovations and how generative AI is revolutionizing the workplace.
Sherryl Petricevic, Director of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships was joined by Mike Folinas, Director of Research Administration at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto to present a case study on the use of Profound Impact’s Research Impact tool at the Canadian Association of Research Administrators (CARA) East in London, Ontario.
Jacqueline Watty from our Business Development team represented Profound Impact at qConnect 2023 in Calgary to connect with researchers and industry representatives discussing Canada’s role as a leader in quantum research and development, and how and why quantum is going to affect, change and benefit businesses.
Karl Burger, Director of Sales, attended the VentureLAB HardTech Summit, Canada’s premiere technology and innovation-focused summit that brought together global industry leaders, Canadian founders, investors, and innovators to explore the necessary ingredients to build a strong, connected hardware and semiconductor ecosystem in Canada.
Dr. Deborah Rosati, the chair of Profound Impact’s board of directors, and I took part in Pathways to Silicon Valley, where 24 female founders from across Canada participated in a curated immersion program designed for women founders of start-ups on their path to global business growth. We joined this program to establish relationships with US venture capital firms to prepare for our next fundraising round and our launch into the US in 2024.
December is the season of giving and the team at Profound Impact is demonstrating the power of small acts of kindness through our annual 12 Days of Impact, a program that encourages generosity. Our 12 Days of Impact campaign provides great examples of easy and inexpensive ways to be kind and generous and has also helped members of the Profound Impact team create a meaningful sense of contribution to their community while increasing bonds of collegiality on the job. We encourage you to download the 12 Days of Impact calendar and challenge your team to participate through small acts of kindness that have great big impacts.
I wish you all the best for 2024 and look forward to working with you in the new year.
Tabatha Laverty Vice-President, Marketing and External Relations, Accelerator Centre Young Leader Impactful Actions Award Finalist
It was during a Grade 8 field trip to a television station where a classmate’s father worked that Tabatha Laverty decided that she wanted to be a journalist. “I really didn’t consider another career until I graduated from Seneca College’s Television Broadcasting program, just as journalism as a business model was changing,” says Tabatha. “I realized that there wasn’t as broad of a variety of career options as I would have liked and ended up at a Big Four accounting firm, working in administration and marketing.” She was drawn to the storytelling aspect of journalism and discovered that marketing and communications would offer her the opportunities to tell those stories.
Tabatha’s career journey from project management, marketing, communications and community engagement to her current role as an acclaimed non-profit leader and award-winning marketer has seen her develop a passion for workplace equity and inclusion and an understanding of the vital importance of mentorship.
As VP of Marketing and External Relations at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo, Ontario, Tabatha has spearheaded the organization’s EDI Action Plan, resulting in significant progress in creating a more inclusive and equitable innovation organization and tech community ecosystem. Most significantly, when women-led start-ups account for approximately 17.5% of all private-sector businesses in Canada, over 63% of the Accelerator Centre’s most recent program launch are women-led businesses, with 26% being led by newcomers to Canada, and 5% by indigenous entrepreneurs.
Tabatha was also instrumental in developing the Accelerator Centre’s cleantech incubation program, a first for Waterloo Region. In 2020, the programming was expanded to support all entrepreneurs working on solutions that support the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, adding resources for med-tech, ed-tech, smart city and social innovation-focused start-ups and supporting nearly 100 start-up companies.
Tabatha’s commitment to the advancement of women in the workplace includes her participation in the Waterloo Region Chapter of Women in Communications and Technology (WCT-WR) as a board director. “I love this community. The Kitchener Waterloo area has been such an incredible place for my family to live and work, and I’m passionate about giving back. Serving on the WCT-WR board is one way I can do that. I look forward to doing amazing things with this incredible organization and increasing access to networks, mentorship, and community for women across the region,” says Tabatha.
In addition to her role on WCT-WR’s board, Tabatha serves as a mentor in the organization’s Mentoring Circles program. She participates in monthly meetings with a fellow mentor and 5-6 mentees in similar career stages to share stories, provide guidance and help build mentees’ skill sets. “Mentoring is very important,” notes Tabatha. “It’s essential to reach out to people who have accomplished something you want to accomplish. And it’s important to get out of the echo chamber by including mentors from different backgrounds. For me, that was learning about finance, strategy, and EDI from people more accomplished in those areas than I am.”
In addition to the wisdom gleaned from her mentors and career champions, Tabatha has broadened her skill set through post-graduate certificates in social media management, fundraising, digital marketing, stakeholder management and non-profit and voluntary sector management. As a wife and mother of three, Tabatha prioritizes making time for herself and her family. “I wouldn’t say I am an expert in work-life balance, or that I have it figured out,” she says. “But I am lucky to work at a place that values flexibility, and I do my best to find a balance that works for me and my family.”
In 2021, Tabatha received the Global Women in Leadership Award issued by the Global Council for the Promotion of International Trade and, in 2022 was nominated for DMZ Women of the Year Award. Profound Impact is proud to have designated Tabatha as a finalist in the Young Leader category for this year’s Impactful Actions Awards in recognition of her work as an accomplished leader and active community champion.
You can see more of Tabatha’s career and impact in the visualization below.
Do you have an impact story to share? Let us know at connections@profoundimpact.com for a chance to be featured in an upcoming newsletter!
We’re excited to make innovation in medicine the focus of this month’s newsletter and to introduce you to two Canadian trailblazers who are making profound changes in the treatment of diabetes and gynecologic cancers.
Our November Impact Story features Dr. Harald Stöver, Professor in the Faculty of Science at McMaster University and founder and CEO of Allarta Life Science. You’ll learn how Harald has moved his research on polymer hydrogels, bio-relevant macromolecules and the delivery of biologics from the laboratory to market to fundamentally change the way that patients with Type 1 Diabetes receive treatment.
You’ll also meet Dr. Laura Hopkins, a gynecological oncologist with the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency and Professor in the Division of Oncology and Provincial Lead for Gynecologic Oncology. A dedicated clinician, Laura’s devotion to providing excellent and timely care for patients through all stages of cancer treatment has led to the launch of the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency’s first investigator-initiated trial to explore patients’ preferences for precision medicine in ovarian cancer.
In keeping with the focus on medical technology innovations, this month’s Research Spotlight explores technologies that are providing advanced tools that, thanks to innovative research partnerships between clinicians, scientists, patients and industry, are vastly improving patient care and clinical outcomes.
This month’s newsletter also features an article about CANARIE, Canada’s National Research and Education Network, in recognition of its 30th anniversary. Along with its provincial and territorial partners, CANARIE operates NREN, Canada’s National Research and Education Network. This nationwide, ultra-high-speed network connects Canada’s researchers, educators, and innovators to each other and to global data, technology, and colleagues.
In late October, I was appointed as Vice-Chair for the CANARIE Board. I am extremely honoured to take on this role and have the opportunity to work closely with the Board Chair, Larry Rosia, President and CEO of Saskatchewan Polytechnic, Past Chair, Sylvie LaPerriere and the other Board members. As the CEO of a female-founded company, I’m proud to serve on the board of an organization committed to diversity as reflected in the appointment of Kathryn Anthonisen, CANARIE’s first female President and CEO, and, when women occupy just 23% of board seats in Canada, a board that is 60% female.
Thank you for connecting with us and the Profound Impact community.
Direct-to-consumer genetic testing, affordable virtual reality gaming for home use, AI-enabled home appliances and mRNA vaccines developed in quick response to a global pandemic have become part of daily life.
These technologies are among those revolutionizing the way healthcare is delivered and are giving rise to innovative and productive collaborations between clinicians, biologists, computer scientists and industry.
mRNA Technology
In 2023, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. As noted by the Nobel Prize organization, “Through their ground-breaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”
Although messenger RNA, or mRNA, was discovered in the early 1960s and research into how mRNA could be delivered into cells was developed in the 1970s, it wasn’t until 2020, when COVID-19 became a global pandemic, that the first mRNA vaccine was made widely available. Thanks to advances in nanotechnology, where lipid nanoparticles were developed to wrap mRNA and allow entry into cells, the first mRNA vaccines were developed against the Ebola virus. This milestone, combined with decades of research and huge increases in funding released during the pandemic, allowed for the worldwide release of the first mRNA COVID vaccine.
Because mRNA vaccines are made in a lab using easily available materials, these vaccines are developed quickly and can be tested via large-scale clinical trials to demonstrate their safety and effectiveness. These vaccines can also be quickly modified to address new virus variants.
The ability to quickly develop very effective vaccines through the use of mRNA for COVID has spurred the development of additional mRNA vaccines for use in HIV, flu, Zika, rabies and to trigger the immune system to target cancer cells.
Virtual Reality/VR
American computer scientist and visual artist Jaron Lanier coined the term “virtual reality” in 1987. Lanier and human-computer interaction pioneer Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves.
VR provides an immersive sensory experience that digitally simulates environments for applications in entertainment, education, architectural and urban design, engineering and robotics, archaeology and, increasingly, healthcare. Researchers and clinicians are exploring the use of VR to manage psychological and physical conditions including stress, anxiety, depression, dementia, autism, pain management and rehabilitation.
Healthcare providers have sought alternatives to opioids to address chronic pain as opioid addiction and death has become a worldwide crisis. In 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized the marketing of a prescription home-use VR device to manage chronic low back pain.
At the Pain Studies Lab at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Dr. Diane Gromala, Canada Research Chair in Computational Technologies for Transforming Pain, leads a research group that conducts patient-centred research to study, invent and design technology systems for people who live with chronic pain. Systems and techniques employed in clinics and in patients’ homes include immersive virtual reality, immersive games, personal data capture and visualization, physiological sensing, wearable computing and mobile technologies and systems.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), anxiety disorders are the world’s most common mental disorders, affecting 301 million people in 2019. The WHO predicts that by 2030, mental health conditions will be the leading cause of disease burden worldwide. Anxiety has traditionally been treated by a combination of psychotherapy and medication. Virtual reality is now being integrated with traditional therapies, safely immersing patients in a therapeutic environment to practice mindfulness, paced breathing and calming distraction to cope with anxiety and stress.
Virtual Reality for Supporting the Treatment of Depression and Anxiety: Scoping Review, a paper by researchers in New Zealand and China published in the peer-reviewed journal JMIR Mental Health in 2021 noted: “Most studies demonstrated the use of VR to be effective for supporting the treatment of anxiety or depression in a range of settings and recommended its potential as a tool for use in a clinical environment.”
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
From disease detection and treatment recommendations to drug discovery and patient engagement, AI and machine learning promise to be game changers in healthcare. At the same time, governments around the world are concerned about the risks of AI. Representatives from 28 countries from across the globe including Canada, the UK, the US, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the EU met in the UK in November 2023 and identified, in the Bletchley Declaration, “the urgent need to understand and collectively manage potential risks through a new joint global effort to ensure that AI is developed and deployed in a safe, responsible way for the benefit of the global community.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) has noted that AI tools have the potential to transform the health sector by strengthening clinical trials, improving medical diagnosis and treatment and enhancing the skills of healthcare professionals. In response to the increasing use of AI for health, the WHO has released a new publication listing key regulatory considerations and emphasizing:
the importance of establishing AI systems’ safety and effectiveness;
rapidly making appropriate systems available to those who need them; and
fostering dialogue among stakeholders, including developers, regulators, manufacturers, health workers, and patients.
Enhancing the reliability and accuracy of AI-enabled diagnosis via complementarity-driven deferral to clinicians, a joint paper by Google DeepMind and Google Research published in Nature Medicine in July 2023, proposes Complementarity-driven Deferral-to-Clinical Workflow (CoDoC), an add-on tool for human-AI collaboration that learns when to trust a predictive AI’s diagnosis or defer to a clinician. CoDoC learns to establish the reliability of a predictive AI model as compared to a clinician’s decision and is designed to be used by non-machine learning experts.
According to Krishnamurthy Dvijotham and Taylan Cemgil, on behalf of the CoDoC team, “CoDoC is a promising example of how we can harness the benefits of AI in combination with human strengths and expertise. We are working with external partners to rigorously evaluate our research and the system’s potential benefits. To bring technology like CoDoC safely to real-world medical settings, healthcare providers and manufacturers will also have to understand how clinicians interact differently with AI, and validate systems with specific medical AI tools and settings.”
An example of the use of AI to bring information to patients is AskEllyn.ai, which launched last week in Waterloo. The platform uses generative artificial intelligence to help people get answers to their questions about breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. AskEllyn was developed by Ellyn Winters-Robinson, using stories from her book Flat Please – Hold The Shame as the base for its large language model, in collaboration with Pat Belliveau, CEO of Catalyst Entertainment, marketing pro Ryan Burgio and software developer Christian Silvestru. For external resources, Winters-Robinson curated a list of third-party sites that the tool will recommend. Users are able to chat with Ellyn anytime, anywhere, and in any language to ask questions ranging from what to expect from chemotherapy to how to speak with friends and family about a diagnosis.
“AskEllyn is there to answer the thousands of questions patients have that doctors simply don’t have the time to answer,” says Winters-Robinson. She envisions the project as the first instance of Conversation Care, a new kind of healthcare that could include platforms for information about a range of conditions “so that no one diagnosed will ever walk alone,” she says.
Precision Medicine
Precision or personalized medicine is defined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “an innovative approach that takes into account individual differences in patients’ genes, environments, and lifestyles.”
This approach to treatment is applied by oncologists to classify cancers into precise types and subtypes and to choose treatments based on the DNA signature of an individual patient’s tumor. Oncologists also use cancer immunotherapy through the use of the patient’s immune system to stop or slow the growth of cancer, stop cancer from spreading to other parts of the body, help the immune system work better to destroy cancer cells and deliver toxins, such as radiation or chemotherapy, directly to cancer cells.
Another form of precision medicine is pharmacogenetics, a field of research at the crossroads of pharmaceuticals and genetics and a rapidly growing field in human genetics. Pharmacogenetics studies how a person’s genes affect how they respond to medications in order to help clinicians prescribe the drugs and doses best suited for each patient. Pharmacogenetics is also expected to contribute to advanced screening for disease, providing people with the opportunity to make lifestyle and environmental changes at an early age in order to avoid or lessen the severity of a genetic disease.
Precision medicine is also emerging as a course for identifying therapies for the 6,000–8,000 identified unique rare diseases, with approximately 80% of those diseases being genetic in origin. According to the paper Rare disease emerging as a global public health priority, published in Frontiers of Public Health in 2022, 3.5–5.9% of the world’s population, which corresponds to 263 to 446 million people worldwide, are affected by rare diseases.
In Canada, All for One, a pan-Canadian initiative, was launched in 2022 to increase access to genome-wide sequencing for diagnosis and treatment of genetic diseases. Led by Genome Canada, the initiative provides access to genome-wide sequencing for diagnosis and treatment of life-threatening genetic diseases. A key component of the All for One precision health initiative is the development of a Pan-Canadian Health Data Ecosystem, which connects and leverages genomic data across clinical sites to drive research breakthroughs in order to improve patient care. The ecosystem will enable data sharing between institutions, across jurisdictional boundaries, and between clinical and research settings, serving as a data solution to deliver precision health for rare genetic diseases.
In the US, Vertex Exa-cel therapy, a treatment and potential cure for sickle cell disease has been found safe enough for clinical use and may receive federal approval this year. Sickle cell disease, an illness that afflicts more than 100,000 Americans, affects millions of people worldwide, most of whom have African ancestry. Caused by a gene mutation, the disease results in strokes, organ damage and episodes of severe pain. If approved, this treatment would be the first medicine to treat a genetic disease using CRISPR gene-editing.
Researcher Spotlight: Laura Hopkins
Dr. Laura Hopkins Gynecologic Oncologist, Saskatchewan Cancer Agency Professor, College of Medicine, Division of Oncology, University of Saskatchewan Provincial Lead for Gynecologic Oncology
Laura Hopkins always knew she wanted to be a doctor. Growing up on a beef cattle farm north of Napanee, Ontario, she enjoyed sewing, knitting and making lace. She attributes her proficiency as a surgeon to the eye-hand coordination she developed doing these crafts.
After completing medical school at the University of Toronto, Laura trained as a resident at McMaster University, where evidence-based medicine was first practiced. Described as one of the most important medical advances in the past 150 years, evidence-based medicine integrates the best research data with clinical expertise and patient values in order to use the best evidence to give patients the best possible care. Laura wanted to focus on clinical care and loved doing quality assurance projects to answer questions about how patient care could be improved. Her work to acquire evidence on how the use of antibiotics prior to cesarean delivery and the prophylactic prescription of anti-clotting agents for all cancer in-patients improved infection and clot rates was very rewarding – for Laura and for the patients who benefitted from these projects.
Laura sampled the field of electives during her residency and it was an obstetrician-gynecologist who served as the role model that led her to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. “She was the first happy doctor I had met,” says Laura. “I never looked back after working with her.”
Laura was on a path to a career as a generalist obstetrician-gynecologist when she was encouraged to apply for a fellowship in gynecologic oncology. Gynecologic oncologists treat ovarian, cervical, uterine, and vulvar cancers and are a unique class of physicians who not only perform complex surgeries but also work with women through their entire course of treatment, including chemotherapy and palliative support. She was accepted to the program at the University of Toronto and says, “It was the right decision and best choice for me. There is immediate gratification in getting rid of a bad problem for a patient through surgery.”
Laura was recruited to Saskatchewan in September 2019 after 18 years at the Ottawa Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. During her tenure at the University of Ottawa, she published papers, participated in committee work and served as undergraduate director, post-graduate director and division head. After almost two decades of this work, she looked for a change from the focus on medical education and started doing locums, covering for physicians on leave in Halifax and Saskatoon.
In late 2018, Saskatoon lost both of its gynecological oncologists due to exhausting workloads that resulted in burnout. Another resigned in Regina in June 2019, leaving just one permanent gynecological oncologist practicing in Saskatchewan. When the province began recruiting new physicians, Laura expressed interest and was hired as program lead to create a provincial model of care guidelines, quality improvement initiatives and clinical trials. She set up clinical programs in Saskatoon and Regina, and hired five additional gynecological oncologists to staff those programs. She opened clinical trials for women with cancer for the first time in Saskatchewan, achieved the best surgical wait times for gynecologic cancer in Canada, and inaugurated a robotic surgery program. With research funding provided by the federal government, matched by the provincial government and made available through Ovarian Cancer Canada, Laura set up a biobank for ovarian tumor tissue and an academic program.
In September 2023, Laura launched the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency’s first investigator-initiated trial. This is the first pragmatic trial in Canada that will feature patients, oncologists, pathologists and scientists working together to deliver personalized treatment options and improve quality of life. Ovarian cancer patients’ tumors will be tested for mutations that predict response to a new class of drugs, providing accurate, personalized, genomic information about each patient’s tumor and helping patients make informed choices about their care. A total of 100 patients from across Saskatchewan will be enrolled in the 2.5-year trial. “For the first time, we will be able to give ovarian cancer patients very specific information about their chances of responding to treatment,” notes Laura. “When I was in training, we used to talk about “bench to bedside” and cutting-edge care. But I was trained to guess about what chemo drugs were going to work and in what order to administer those drugs. Now we work with scientists who can run a 1,200-drug panel against cancer cells to find the right drugs to kill those cells.”
Laura Hopkins holds nearly $5 million in active research grants spanning surgical quality and safety, precision medicine and new technologies in oncofertility. She is a clinician, educator, researcher and successful leader in building a strong gynecological oncology clinical and research program and team in Saskatchewan. Patient care remains her priority. “My passion is to provide excellent, compassionate, timely care for my patients through all stages of treatment,” she says.
