Université de Montréal receives $40 million in funding for innovative projects

The development of antibiotics is one of the greatest advances in modern medicine. But in recent decades, there has also been an alarming increase in bacterial resistance to antimicrobial drugs, making many antibiotics ineffective against previously treatable infections. In addition, misuse of antibiotics in both humans and animals has caused the emergence of new, antibiotic-resistant superbacteria, making the situation worse. This ”shadow pandemic” is contributing to the deaths of over 5 million people around the world every year—a number that could reach 10 million by 2050 if no action is taken.

These are the challenges addressed by a research project led by Yves Brun, professor in the Department of Microbiology, Infectiology and Immunology and researcher at the Centre for Biomedical Innovation in the Faculty of Medicine at UdeM. In this project, which has received $21 million in funding, Brun’s team and their partners will create new partnerships with researchers from various disciplines, including artificial intelligence, microbiology, pharmacology and chemistry, to develop a rapid-response platform that will accelerate the discovery of new antibiotics to fight drug-resistant bacteria and thus prevent potential pandemics.

The team’s main strategy will be to design new drugs in silico—in other words, using computer-assisted design, an opportunity created by the latest advances in artificial intelligence. The researchers also plan to use a unique approach in which they run a battery of cutting-edge microscopic, biochemical and pharmacological tests to validate and train the model for designing drugs in silico, so as to optimize its predictions continually.

Founded during the COVID-19 pandemic, the POPCORN platform is directed by Caroline Quach, a professor at UdeM and a microbiologist and infectiologist at the CHU Sainte-Justine teaching hospital. POPCORN brings together the scientific communities of Canada’s 16 pediatric hospitals and pediatric-research networks to foster a multidisciplinary approach to pediatric research. This “network of networks” has done tremendous work, but still faces challenges in its ability to respond to future pandemics in Canada. Obstacles that the second version of the POPCORN platform will overcome include the inability to rapidly conduct clinical tests in children and pregnant women, a lack of real-time data to inform policy decisions based on scientific evidence, and difficulty in capturing the complete trajectory of children’s illnesses.

Dr. Quach’s team of researchers has received $16 million in new funding. They plan to use their unique research structure to quickly identify and exhaustively analyze emerging infectious diseases in children and pregnant women so as to maximize the capacity and preparation needed to include these populations in clinical trials. By becoming a national centre for monitoring maternal and childhood diseases, and by facilitating collaboration between the public and private sectors, POPCORN will contribute significantly to Canada's Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy, thus accelerating the discovery and development of treatments and vaccines for vulnerable populations.

In its report, the review committee stated that the proposals from professors Brun and Quach, who are already collaborating, were strategically complementary for the monitoring and control of antibiotic-resistant bacteria—a positive point that tangibly demonstrates the cross-disciplinary nature of UdeM’s research teams.

In addition to funding for the two projects led by researchers at UdeM, the Eastern Canada Pandemic Preparedness Hub has received funding for projects at two other research institutions. In one project, Gregory De Crescenzo, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, will conduct research on accelerated mass production of biomaterials in the context of health emergencies. His team has received close to $20 million to advance their research on this subject. In the other project, Université Laval professor Jérôme Estaquier has received $42 million to establish the infrastructure that will become the national Pandemic Preparedness Primatology Centre.