March 7 , 2007

LONDON RECEIVES $15 MILLION FOR RESEARCH

Through the Research Excellence program of the Ontario Research Fund, the McGuinty government provides research institutions with funding to undertake major research projects, hire research teams and cover other operational costs. This first round of funding under the Research Excellence program will invest $15,225,190 to support three projects in London. The funding will leverage matching investments from 18 partners in industry and other fields.

Centre for Brain and Mind Neuroimaging Facility
New treatment options for brain disorders to come from new equipment

Lead institution: The University of Western Ontario
Lead researcher: Dr. Melvyn A. Goodale
Total project cost: $6,835,500
Provincial funding: $2,278,500

The University of Western Ontario’s Centre for Brain and Mind is expecting to develop new ways to address a variety of brain and nervous system disorders, such as dyslexia, schizophrenia, dementia and epilepsy. These disorders create significant challenges for the people who suffer from them, and result in large health care and lost productivity costs on the patients and the community at-large. The centre’s neuroimaging facility, led by Dr. Melvyn A. Goodale, will train a new generation of neuro-imagers to conduct more detailed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research and transfer the resulting knowledge to the clinic and industry. Conventional MRI shows anatomy in great detail. fMRI allows scientists to map brain activity and identify centers responsible for memory, recognizing objects and words and controlling movement. This permits the development of new methods to prevent, or intervene in, disease.

Major industry and other partners:
Siemens, Canadian Institutes of Health Research

Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network

Lead institution: The University of Western Ontario
Lead researcher: Dr. Jeff Chen
Total project cost: $32,865,000
Provincial funding: $10,946,690

The University of Western Ontario's Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (SHARCNET) will support 1,200 researchers across the province. The state-of-the-art HPC facilities are hundreds or thousands of times faster than a regular desktop computer. A Canadian researcher using SHARCNET can produce results in a single day that would normally take a year or more on a personal computer.

Major industry and other partners:
Bell Canada, Hewlett Packard, Nortel Networks, Optical Regional Advanced Network of Ontario, Platform Computing, Quadrics Supercomputing World, and Silicon Graphics Inc.

Structural and Functional Annotation of the Human Genome for Disease Study*
Working on the "new, improved edition” of the human genome map

Lead institution: John P. Robarts Research Institute
Lead researcher: Dr. Robert Hegele
Total project cost: $9,630,230
Provincial funding: $2,000,000

Any two humans are 99.9 per cent identical at the level of their DNA sequences. But recently, new forms of genomic variation have been appreciated above and beyond single nucleotide polymorphisms. These include large-scale variations that may be much more widespread than was previously appreciated. Dr. Robert Hegele at the Robarts Research Institute will to undertake an innovative project, which aims to bridge new biological knowledge with medical applications. The project will deliver a “new improved edition” of the human genome map, which Dr. Hegele and his team of researchers will use to unravel the genetic basis of diseases such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease.

Major industry and other partners:
Sanger Institute, McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Scalar/Sun Microsystems, Agilent Technoligies Inc., European Bioinformatics Institute, Edith Schulich Vient Endowment, Fournier Pharma - Thylmer Division, Pfizer Canada Inc.

For more information about the Ontario Research Fund, please visit www.ontario.ca/innovation.

* Selected through the federal Genome Canada program and co-funded through the Ontario Research Fund – Research Excellence program.