Mac gets ‘super exciting’ $13.4M to boost programs

Goal is to take ‘amazing science’ to the next level, says researcher

McMaster University is getting more than $13.4 million from the province to build and equip research facilities for large-scale, collaborative projects.

The money from the Ontario Research Fund will help pay for more than $44.1 million in new infrastructure needed by McMaster scientists to develop products, including potential medical treatments.

“It’s super exciting,” said Eric Brown, lead investigator of the Good Bugs, Bad Bugs Program that received nearly $6 million from the province. “These groups are already doing amazing science and the goal here is really to take it to the next level.”

Brown’s new program is the largest of the four McMaster projects with plans to acquire $15-millionworth of leading-edge equipment to bring together researchers studying bugs that keep people healthy with those trying to eradicate ones that make us sick.

“There have been sort of two divides in terms of folks trying to understand how microbes are good for us and folks who are obsessed with killing microbes,” said Brown. “The truth is we’ve got an enormous amount to learn from each other.”

The good-bugs scientists at Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute and the bad-bugs investigators at Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research “designed research plans and an extraordinary list of instrumentation to work together now to a common goal of understanding what the role of good bugs and bad bugs are in health and in disease.”

Their work could lead to new antibiotics and treatments for a variety of illnesses.

In total, the province gave out $137 million to 53 projects across 17 institutions in January.

“Making sure they are working in state-of-the-art facilities with the most up-to-date technology will help researchers do their best work and lay the groundwork for new products and services, and economic opportunity for people in Ontario,” Reza Moridi, Minister of Research, Innovation and Science, said in a statement.

The other big winner at McMaster was the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy, which was awarded nearly $5.6 million for equipment to enable researchers to understand and develop new materials for health, energy, communications and safety.

In total, the centre will get nearly $14 million in upgrades to produce new materials for faster computers, efficient energy conversion and effective drug delivery. It could lead to discoveries in medical imaging, improved pipelines, safer operation of nuclear power plants, longer lasting rechargeable batteries, better sensors to detect explosives at airports and more.

The Canadian Research Data Centre Network got $1.1 million for infrastructure to provide researchers with access to massive data files led by McMaster professor Mike Veall.

The $4.3-million project will see data stored and processed on central servers with enhanced security.

The final McMaster-led project will see a physics lab built in British Columbia that will draw researchers from around the world.

Ontario is contributing $791,000 toward the $10.7-million project to add two new Muon Beamlines at Triumph, Canada’s particle accelerator centre.

“My students and I will make considerable use of this facility,” said McMaster professor Graeme Luke.

“This new facility will have unique capabilities that won’t exist anywhere else in the world. It will be a real destination.”

Luke proposed the project because of limits to the experiments he can currently do at the national laboratory to produce new materials that are technologically useful.

“New superconductors might be useful for making better magnets for MRI and could have applications in telecommunications,” said Luke.

“One of the things that we can do as well is to study the properties of materials at very extreme conditions.”