CAMH’s brain imaging centre gets $15M gift
Garron family donation will help support lab’s research projects
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has received a $15-million donation from the Garron family — the first-ever donation to the hospital by the longtime health-care philanthropists — that will enhance the hospital’s brain imaging capabilities.
CAMH’s Brain Health Imaging Centre is credited with breakthrough advances on conditions like depression and Alzheimer’s. The gift, to be announced on Tuesday, will help support the lab’s equipment and ongoing research projects with the potential for transforming mental-health diagnosis and treatment in the future, said Dr. Neil Vasdev, director of the hospital’s brain imaging centre.
“This is a very generous investment by the Garron family to provide critical resources we need for CAMH to really stay as a leader in brain imaging,” he said.
“This will allow us to multiply our capacity by a factor of eight from the inception of our centre 30 years ago,” he added. CAMH’s brain imaging lab, which was established in 1989, is one of a few worldwide dedicated solely to mental health research, Vasdev said.
The brain imaging technique the centre uses is called positron emission tomography, or PET. It goes further than MRIs or CT scans, which offer an Xray vision of the brain, by providing a detailed image of its functions. It does so by tracking a radioactive drug the patient takes and how the brain responds to it in real time.
“We can use this information to guide anywhere from early and accurate diagnosis, to dosing of drugs and selecting patients for clinical trials,” Vasdev said.
For example, the technology has helped CAMH doctors pinpoint exactly how much dosage of a drug is needed to treat a patient’s depression symptoms, avoiding a larger dosage that may have unintended side-effects. This technology also has the potential of revolutionizing treatments for addiction and substance use, Vasdev said. In light of the Garron family’s donation, a PET imaging suite at CAMH will be named the “Garron Family PET Imaging Suite,” and the Intergenerational Wellness Building located at 80 Workman Way will be renamed the “Garron Family Building.”
In a statement provided to the hospital, Myron Garron said his family is proud to invest in CAMH’s brain imaging capabilities.
“The human brain is the final frontier, and imaging will help us get more people the right diagnosis and treatment so they can recover from mental illness,” Garron said. The Garron family are Nova Scotia natives whose fortune comes from a successful automative manufacturing business. They have donated millions to Toronto hospitals in the past, including $50 million to the East General Hospital, which was later renamed the Michael Garron hospital after their 13-year-old son who died from cancer.
The Garron family has also given $30 million to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and millions to hospitals in Nova Scotia.
Vasdev said the Brain Health Imaging Centre has been focused lately on areas of mental health that are of a high socio-economic burden to the country, including mood disorders like major depression, suicide, substance use and Alzheimer’s.
The centre is also exploring brain cancers, looking at medications and their effect on brain function. Vasdev added the imaging centre has actively worked with pharmaceutical companies on a broader scale to develop drugs that are more effective and pose less risk to a patient’s brain function.
CAMH, Vasdev said, has the highest-resolution head-only brain PET scanner in the world. It also houses 17 hot cells, which are chambers used to create radioactive medicine that can then be tracked using the PET scanner. The funding will help the centre expand to about 24 hot cells, and will upgrade existing scanners.
“It will help us build the infrastructure required to strive for our ultimate goal, which is to build towards the best brain health imaging centre in the world,” Vasdev said.