2025
Driving Discovery Delivering Impact
This report showcases TeamUHN’s goal of turning discovery into impact through collaboration, innovation, and a shared commitment to improving lives. Highlighting advancements in regenerative medicine and AI-generated tools, the report explores how innovation is driving progress toward novel therapies, smarter diagnostics, and more.
2025
Driving Discovery Delivering Impact
This report showcases TeamUHN’s goal of turning discovery into impact through collaboration, innovation, and a shared commitment to improving lives. Highlighting advancements in regenerative medicine and AI-generated tools, the report explores how innovation is driving progress toward novel therapies, smarter diagnostics, and more.
2024
A Year In Review
Explore the transformative impact of UHN's breakthroughs that echo worldwide. The format of our annual report this year is an engaging one-pager that features research advancements, milestones, awards, and other highlights from UHN's research institutes.
2023
Reaching Our North Star
Explore the transformative impact of UHN's breakthroughs that echo worldwide. The format of our annual report has changed from that of previous years and is now available as a dynamic multimedia website that features research advancements, milestones, awards and other highlights from across UHN's research institutes.
2022
Real People. Real Data. Real Impact.
Despite repeating waves of the pandemic, we've begun to slowly return to a new normal. As many of us cautiously return to in-person interactions, we've been meeting people face to face whom we've only known virtually—adding to the excitement of being part of a team. With science, much of what people see is on a screen, a social media post, a journal article…but science takes place in three dimensions.
2021
Science For Society
During the past year, the world's focus has been on science. The novel coronavirus called on all kinds of scientists from all over the world to delve into the unknown and rapidly find answers to the world's most pressing medical questions. The global crisis, infodemic and rapidly evolving policy recommendations were further calls to strengthen the relationship between science and society.
2020
One Team
UHN is Canada's largest research hospital. It is home to world-leading innovations in cancer, heart disease, neuroscience, rheumatology, rehabilitation, transplant and much more. This year, most of that research came to a halt.
2019
Health Is In Our Nature
Science is an exploration of nature. It's a back and forth exchange of questions and answers, with unlimited possibilities for discovery and innovation. At UHN, our research community of scientists, trainees and staff embraces values that drive this dialogue—towards delivering our shared vision of A Healthier World.
2018
In It Together
These are just a few of the paths on which UHN's scientists, trainees and staff are focused with intense curiosity and dedication. Their paths, however, do not exist in isolation; rather, they are set within UHN's research ecosystem, and are aligned by a driving mission to improve health through discovery and innovation. This common goal allows UHN to accelerate research into clinical impact at a much more tangible level. In other words: at UHN, we aren't just in it—we're in it together.
2017
Better. Faster. Stronger.
High-performance athletes train for years to become the best in their field. They consistently push themselves beyond what they are capable of, honing their skills through an unwavering drive. And once they've attained their goal—be it breaking a personal best, winning a gold medal or shattering a world record—it's on to the next challenge.
2016
Breaking Barriers Building Health
A surgeon, an engineer and a physicist are sitting at a bar—you may think a joke is coming but what they are discussing is deadly serious: how to detect residual cancer cells left behind after a primary tumour is resected. Failure to remove or kill these cells allows the cancer to recur. However, by applying their collective knowledge they devise, and eventually test, a device that replaces normal visible light with infrared light and the lurking cancer cells are revealed.
2015
E = Health
The success of the research programs at UHN depends on energy. For example, various forms of light energy have been harnessed to better define the margin between healthy tissue and tumour tissue, leading to the development of enhanced surgical techniques. Light at different wavelengths can activate novel, photoresponsive molecules that act as beacons to guide drugs to tough-to-cure cancers.
2014
Medicine Gets Personal
Recent advances in our understanding of human biology have set in motion a potential revolution in health care based on an individual's unique makeup. The best ways to acquire and integrate personal information into medical practice comprise major challenges to UHN's research teams.
2013
Seeing Beyond Achieving Health
What drives medical researchers at UHN to make award-winning discoveries? What drives UHN's clinical teams to develop successful first-in-human treatments? What drives hospital managers at UHN to enable our hospitals to be living laboratories that devise and test novel approaches to care delivery? What drives the UHN family of Foundations, and the generous donors they serve, to make investments that underpin the resource-intensive requirements of a top research hospital? The answers lie in a drive to see beyond; beyond present limitations, beyond current understanding and beyond status quo solutions.
2012
Connected...
At UHN, we think a lot about connections. Without them we could not fulfill our mandates in patient care, education and research. Connections are fundamental to our life as a research hospital.
2011
Understanding Life Improving Health
Understanding life can mean different things to different people. At UHN, we seek to improve health by understanding life at several levels.
2010
Driving Health Innovation
Quality patient care is enriched by innovative research— something we are proud to embody at UHN. Every day, our scientists search for solutions to medical mysteries and, in doing so, push the boundaries of our knowledge of human health and disease. These scientific discoveries pave the way for novel technologies and enhanced therapeutics, which ultimately allow for improved care for our patients, our community and the world. Please read on to learn more about some of the fascinating discoveries that are enabled at UHN every day and are set to help change our future.
2009
Achieving Global Impact
UHN is proud to be a Research Hospital—not just a hospital where individuals do research. Our mission of impacting health care through innovation drives strategic decisions across the institution. The Advanced Therapeutics Research Platform (ATRP) was designed to enable this by accelerating scientific breakthroughs through fully integrated research themes.
2008
University Health Network: The Research Hospital
Transformation is a current theme at UHN: we’re transforming our physical space through major projects including the Toronto Medical Discovery Tower and the Krembil Discovery Centre; we’re collaborating in the transformation of health care delivery in Ontario through the creation of the Local Health Integration Networks; and we’re leading the province in initiatives in patient centred care, patient safety and infection control, and information management.
2007
Regenerating Knowledge
This year our Research Report focuses on our successes in regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine is a compelling field of research that promises new treatments for some of the most devastating human diseases. And UHN is leading the way.
2006
Inspire. Innovate. Impact.
Inspiring questions. Innovative solutions. Impact on care. These are the hallmarks of a research hospital—a unique institution combining excellence in clinical practice with innovation and discovery. UHN is Canada's leading research hospital. Read on to find out why.
2005
Achieving With Partnerships
Research at University Health Network is built on partnerships. New research facilities, new research programs, new resources for research and new research staff—all have been achieved through partnerships. Partners include public and private agencies; donors and foundations; companies; other research organizations such as universities and hospitals; and governments at the municipal, provincial and federal levels.
2004
Investing In Future Health
University Health Network in 2004 is an amazing place to be, and UHN Research is one of the things that makes it so. Patient care, education, and research are all highly interconnected. UHN attracts some of the best clinicians—because it offers the opportunity to combine clinical practice with research. UHN attracts many patients from across Ontario due to high standards of care and the opportunity to participate in groundbreaking clinical research—all because of the thriving research community here.