Making their mark

Globe and Mail

12 hours ago

In every corner of the country, in labs, hospitals and universities, a new generation of Canadians is making small but mighty advances in health, science and medicine.
They are in the early stages of their promising careers. And yet, they are already deepening our understanding of diseases, from Type 1 diabetes to Alzheimer's and epilepsy – and finding new ways to help Canadians and people around the world. As well, they are making strides in learning how early-life exposures shape long-term outcomes and developing new methods for performing brain surgery on cancer patients.
Canada has many early-career researchers making their mark. The Globe and Mail set out to profile five of them.
The neuron was first identified in the late 1800s, but more than a century would pass before Canadian scientists found the 'ovoid,' cells nestled deep inside the brain that help us store memories of new objects so they can be recognized down the road.
The discovery of this highly specialized neuron unlocks insights into how memory works, while cracking open new research pathways for better understanding – and potentially treating – neurological conditions like Alzheimer's disease.
It was a breakthrough made with powerful genetic tools and tiny DIY microscopes strapped to the heads of genetically engineered mice. But the enterprising scientist who first peered into their brains in 2020 and catalyzed the discovery was a PhD student at the University of British Columbia named Adrienne Kinman.
'This is a big discovery for what we call foundational neuroscience, or just understanding how the brain works on a day-to-day level,' says Mark Cembrowski, an associate professor in the department of cellular and physiological sciences at UBC and Ms. Kinman's PhD supervisor.
Growing up in Abbotsford, B.C., Ms. Kinman was a keen student and self-described 'sampler' of extracurricular interests. 'I did absolutely everything for, like, a hot second,' laughs Ms. Kinman, who is now 30.
She brought her sampling tendencies to McGill University, where she enrolled as an arts student in 2013 but wound up studying psychology, molecular biology and behavioural science. She got hooked on science while working a part-time research job and started seeking out new topics to explore – everything from Alzheimer's research to studying autism with mouse models.
While contemplating graduate school, she reached out to Dr. Cembrowski after he tweeted about hiring for his new lab, investigating learning and memory in the brain. 'Within five minutes of the call, I knew she was the one we had to bring into the lab,' he says.
Dr. Cembrowski's earlier work had pointed toward a tiny and mysterious cluster of cells in the subiculum region of the hippocampus, which governs memory and learning. He was eager to study them in a line of genetically modified mice using a miniaturized microscope that allows brain activity to be observed in real time – a tool he didn't have at the time.
He tapped Ms. Kinman. 'I needed a hero,' he says.
Using soldering skills learned from YouTube and open-source plans, Ms. Kinman taught herself to build these 'one-photon fluorescence miniscopes,' which she then strapped onto the heads of these mice, 'like a tiny top hat.'
She watched as these intriguing brain cells lit up whenever the mouse interacted with a novel object – say, a tiny orange pylon. But as the pylon grew familiar, the cells began to fade, never to light up again when confronted by the same object.
'It was our 'holy smokes' moment,' Dr. Cembrowski recalls. 'We were like, this is something special that nobody knows about.'
More lab mates were recruited to the research effort, with Ms. Kinman at the helm. Using a variety of cutting-edge techniques, including a method that uses light to turn cells on and off, they demonstrated the existence and function of the ovoid cell – and refuted a decades-old belief that the subiculum only has one type of neuron performing a wide array of tasks.
Their findings were published this February in the journal Nature Communications, with Ms. Kinman as lead author – an impressive accomplishment for someone so early in her career.
Dr. Cembrowski says his lab has since done research to show that ovoid cells also exist in human brains. Ms. Kinman believes these cells have something to teach us about neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's, autism or epilepsy – potentially leading to novel therapies down the road. 'I can't wait to see how this turns out.'
- Jennifer Yang
Growing up in Albania, one of Kozeta Miliku's favourite games was playing doctor, with her cousin enlisted for the role of pharmacist. Using empty pill bottles donated by a neighbour – an actual pharmacist – they passed many hours in this imaginary play. 'I always had the dream of becoming a doctor,' she says. 'I wanted to save people.'
She later got into medical school, but toward the end of her physician training it dawned on her that many patients suffer from diseases that can be prevented.
'I often saw the downstream effects of chronic disease but what I became increasingly interested in was the upstream factors,' she says. 'I wanted to understand how early exposures, even those before birth, can influence lifelong health.'
Dr. Miliku pivoted toward clinical epidemiology, and today the 37-year-old mother of one is an assistant professor with the department of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto, where she runs a lab that investigates the factors that shape lifelong health.
Her research has already revealed alarming insights, including that Canadian three-year-olds were getting nearly half of their daily calories from ultraprocessed foods, putting them at higher risk of obesity.
This year, she published a study showing that children born to fathers who are obese or overweight around the time of conception are more likely to develop obesity themselves.
Dr. Miliku's research is largely powered by data from the CHILD cohort study – the research initiative that drew her to Canada in the first place, and for which she now serves as clinical science officer.
Since 2009, CHILD researchers have been tracking thousands of children from across Canada starting at birth, collecting health information and physical samples at different ages – everything from blood or diaper poop to the dust inside a baby's house. The result is a powerful and ever-expanding dataset that's already produced more than 200 peer-reviewed papers on everything from the infant gut microbiome to risk factors for asthma.
'It's a world-renowned research initiative,' Dr. Miliku says. 'It's an amazing study, one of the best and the largest cohorts we have in Canada.'
After receiving her medical degree from the Medical University of Tirana in 2013, Dr. Miliku moved to the Netherlands to pursue her masters and PhD at Erasmus University Medical Center, where she worked on Generation R, another prospective cohort study.
She became fascinated with breastmilk, especially its beneficial impact on kidney development. 'I couldn't sleep,' she says. 'I was like, what is in breastmilk that is driving these important health outcomes?'
At some point, she decided to look for breastmilk experts. The first name she came across was Meghan Azad, a University of Manitoba professor and deputy director of CHILD.
Dr. Miliku fired off an e-mail to Dr. Azad and they connected the next day. 'She said, 'Do you want to work as a postdoctoral fellow in my lab?'' Dr. Miliku recalls, chuckling. 'It happened so quickly.'
After moving to Manitoba in 2017, Dr. Miliku worked with Dr. Azad to continue studying breastmilk, investigating the components that might be protective against childhood asthma or allergies. Three years later, she was recruited to McMaster University, home to CHILD's national collaborating centre, and appointed the study's clinical science officer.
In this role, Dr. Miliku designs study protocols for the child visits, consulting with CHILD's massive expert network to determine what data to collect, as well as the research questions to explore.
Dr. Miliku says CHILD researchers want to empower study participants – something she credits for the study's high retention rate, even throughout the early pandemic. Last summer, CHILD asked some of its teenaged participants what they wanted researchers to focus on. 'They said mental health, which was not a key outcome in the CHILD study originally,' Dr. Miliku says. 'But now we're really pushing into mental health.'
Dr. Miliku has a long career ahead of her but she hopes that by the time she reaches the other end of it, she will have accomplished her childhood goal of saving people – by stopping diseases before they start.
'My goal is to improve the health and well-being of Canadian families, through the prevention path at the early stages of life,' she says. 'Before the problems develop.'
- Jennifer Yang
Grant Bruno, a member of Samson Cree Nation in Alberta, has a singular goal - working to establish a global network of Indigenous autism researchers.
Prof. Bruno, 38, completed his PhD in 2024 and has worked as an assistant professor in the University of Alberta's pediatrics department for nine months.
He brings a personal connection to this work: Two of his five children have autism; both present differently.
He said his eldest son is completely verbal, can attend high school and interacts with his peers. His younger son struggled to find the right words for several years and wasn't using full sentences until about two years ago.
'I think that it's important for people to understand that autism is very complex,' Prof. Bruno said.
Much of what people know about autism is influenced by a medical model that often involves the use of negative language, he added. But he said that his cultural teachings see it in a very different way.
'We don't have a word that directly translates as autism; we don't even have a word for disability,' he said.
'And I think that's really beautiful, because we're not looking for differences in people. We're celebrating those, and so elders have often told me that these children, they're sacred children.'
Prof. Bruno said he brings these teachings to the families that he works with. He is passionate about offering supports, which motivated him to create a program called the Indigenous Caregiving Collective.
The goal of the project is to build a network of organizations, Indigenous elders, researchers and health care providers that can share knowledge to improve policies for caregivers who may encounter challenges, such as delayed assessments and treatment.
While he was conducting research across many First Nations for his doctorate, caregivers shared that they can feel isolated and like no one understands them. Often, he said, families have questions or simply want to connect.
'I felt like starting the Indigenous Caregiving Collective was a really good step, at least to start to support and connect with caregivers right across Canada,' Prof. Bruno said.
Prof. Bruno is hopeful neurodevelopmental differences can be supported and embraced. His perspective is rooted in a cultural teaching: children choose us. (His relationship with his sons was captured in a documentary called The Gift of Being Different.)
'I think that's really important, because that allows me just to practise unconditional acceptance with them,' he said.
- Kristy Kirkup
Yi-Chun Chen, who started working as an assistant professor of anatomy, physiology and pharmacology at the University of Saskatchewan in the past year, has focused her research on the body's endocrine system – and specifically its relationship with diabetes.
The endocrine system uses hormones as messengers to tell organs and tissue what to do in different situations. After humans eat food, blood glucose goes up and the body makes and releases insulin. For a patient with diabetes, the body doesn't respond to insulin well, or they don't make enough of it.
And while Canadian scientists have already made tremendous progress in diabetes research, including discovering insulin more than 100 years ago in Toronto, researchers want to learn more about when, and how much of, the hormone is needed.
Dr. Chen is also looking at preventative strategies. 'Our research focuses on studying how insulin is produced in a specialized cell called beta cells, in the pancreas.'
If she can discover how insulin functions in these cells, it could help unlock future therapies for stopping diabetes from developing in the first place.
At 39, Dr. Chen also is excited to see what researchers even younger than herself will uncover in her field – and she's guiding students who will be the next wave of researchers.
'The young scientists, they are actually the future of Canada,' she said. 'We're hoping to support them and mentor them and they are going to do great things.'
- Kristy Kirkup
Even as a young boy growing up in Scarborough, Ont., Dilakshan Srikanthan was keenly interested in the brain – both because of its pre-eminence and its vulnerability as the body's control centre.
He knew that a neurological condition had affected his grandmother in Sri Lanka, a personal experience that eventually steered him toward a degree in neuroscience at the University of Toronto, and then onto graduate work on brain tumours.
But it was a timely bit of made-in-Canada wisdom that set him on his current course.
'Skate to where you think the puck is going to be, not to where it's already been,' he was told by James Rutka, a renowned brain surgeon at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children who was his master's degree supervisor and mentor.
For Mr. Srikanthan, that has meant utilizing artificial intelligence to help turn an experimental technology into a reliable tool for brain tumour surgery. The project is one he is now pursuing in a combined PhD/MD program at Queen's University in Kingston under the guidance of computer scientist Parvin Mousavi and surgeon-researchers Teresa Purzner and John Rudan.
As a rule, any form of cancer surgery is a high-wire act in which the goal is to remove the disease while doing as little harm as possible to the surrounding tissue. And nowhere are the stakes higher than in the brain.
'Surgeons want to draw this fine balance between how much do I take and how much do I leave behind,' Mr. Srikanthan said. 'Do I want to cause neurological deficits for the sake of getting all the cancer?'
Answering that question requires a detailed understanding of the area being operated on and a tool that can allow the surgeon to discriminate between healthy and cancerous tissue with high precision.
A promising new technology in this area is the iKnife, a surgical instrument that identifies the biochemical composition of tissue that it comes in contact with in near real time.
First devised by Zoltan Takats, a chemist and professor at Imperial College London, the technology consists of a needle-like implement that burns away cells and vacuums up the resulting smoke, which is sent to a mass spectrometer to read its chemical signature.
Cancer cells have chemical differences that can be used to distinguish them from healthy cells. When brain tissue is vapourized by an iKnife, those difference should make it possible to identify where a tumour begins and ends while the surgery is in progress. The same technology has been applied to various kinds of cancers but it is not a standard tool for brain surgery.
Now Mr. Srikanthan is using artificial intelligence to train the iKnife to do just that. The work involves developing computer algorithms and using deep-learning techniques to teach the computer to reliably identify tissue types based on the constituents found in tiny wisps of smoke.
It is a new skill that he has added to his medical and neurological training, and a glimpse at what the future of surgery could offer.
'The possibilities are limitless,' said Mr. Srikanthan, who received a prestigious Vanier scholarship in 2023 to support his PhD research.
The ultimate goal, he said, is to accelerate the translation of such AI-driven experimental methods to the point where they can be of benefit to patients.
'I know that if I saw that future as a clinician I'd want to be able to do something about it,' he said. 'So I'm really focused on learning the skill set as a scientist that I can apply to whatever problem I see.'
- Ivan Semeniuk