From new artificial intelligence tools to innovative medical devices, a research competition at St. Michael’s Hospital is taking pitches on how to improve the health-care system, and bringing them to life.
The competition, called Angels Den, is now in its 11th year and will take place at Koerner Hall Wednesday with scientists vying for prizes that could change lives.
Here’s how it works.
Six teams of St. Michael’s Hospital’s top scientists share their groundbreaking research ideas to judges, jurors and over 1,000 attendees. The teams have just a few minutes to pitch their ideas, competing for $700,000 in prizes to put toward the research, as well as $300,000 in grants.
The event, led by St. Michael’s Hospital Foundation, will hear pitches ranging from a device that quickly clears blocked dialysis catheters — avoiding high-risk surgeries — to physician‑paramedic teams that bring life‑saving ER care directly to trauma patients at the scene.
Dr. Hagar Labouta, a scientist who focuses on nanomedicine research at St. Michael’s Hospital, is one of six finalists in this year’s competition. For her pitch, she created a targeted drug delivery system that treats pregnant women while protecting their babies.
Labouta says the challenge is that three out of four pregnant women take medication, yet for a high percentage of the drugs, it’s not known whether they’re safe for the baby. In some cases, she says, the medications actually may cause harm to the baby.
Labouta and her lab partner, Luis Pérez Dávalos, are developing a breakthrough drug delivery system that targets treatment to the mother only, shielding the baby from potential unknown side effects.
“We design what we call nanoparticles,” Labouta said.
“These are very tiny particles that, when used to wrap the medicine and to change the composition of those particles, we are able to get those medications to exactly where they should be in the body,” she said.
Labouta said the innovation could transform care for a wide range of conditions, from cancer to epilepsy, and more.
Dr. Ori Rotstein, vice president of research and innovation at St. Michael’s Hospital, said the competition has had widespread impact over the last decade.
That includes over $7 million dollars awarded to medical research, support for 86 research projects to be transformed into patient care, the development of 34 medical devices and 10 spin-off companies, he said.
“So if that’s your metric, which is taking science and bringing it to society, that’s a pretty good metric for it,” he said, adding another benefit to the competition is that it showcases science to the public.
“And it’s also a really good funding structure for our scientists. We’re doing early stage kind of research where it’s very difficult to get funding from other areas,” he said.
Dr. Christopher Witiw, a neurosurgeon at St. Michael’s Hospital, and Dr. Alun Ackery, an emergency physician, were last year’s Angels Den winners.
They said they developed their pitch to address a specific problem: only one in five traumatic brain injury patients require surgery, but with neurosurgeons flooded by consults, it’s hard to immediately determine who those people are.
They came up with an AI surgical consult that quickly assesses which patients need surgery.
“We developed this here at St. Mike’s using thousands of previous trauma patients and we’ve deployed it here in the emergency department,” said Witiw.
“It’s been a really big success for us. It functions as well as a board-certified neurosurgeon and in some cases, a little bit better actually.”
Since winning Angels Den, the team is preparing to launch a 12-hospital pilot across Ontario to validate the platform in real-world settings, while expanding partnerships globally.
“St. Michael’s Hospital Foundation, and Angels Den have been a huge catalyst for us having momentum and building a team that’s allowed us to actually get our idea off the ground,” Ackery said.
The winners of this year’s Angels Den competition will be selected Wednesday.
