The LMP Research Conference and Product Show (LMPRC) 2022

Download a PDF copy of the agenda

The agenda and your personal itinerary will be available in the conference app.

7:30 – 8:00 Breakfast and registration

8:00 – 8:15 Welcome address

Dr. Rita Kandel

8:20 – 9:20 Oral Presentations Session I 

9:25 – 10:25 Poster Presentations Session I

Neuroscience and Cancer

Cancer, Cardiovascular and Infectious Disease 

10:30 – 11:30 Concurrent Symposia

10:30 – 11:00 sessions

• Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Dr. Taufik Valiante 'Epilepsy a window to brain mechanisms'
• Organ-on-a-chip - 3D Modeling of a Disease: Dr. Yimu Zhao 'Towards the physiological relevant heart-on-a-chip'
• Unconventional Substances and Diseases: Dr. Adam Shlien 'The early origins and evolution of childhood cancer '

11:00 – 11:30 sessions

• Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Dr. Rahul Krishnan 'Learning representations of histopathological images with self-supervised learning'
• Organ-on-a-chip - 3D Modeling of a Disease: Dr. Eugenia Kumacheva 'Tumors-on-a-chip: a Model for Drug Screening and Personalized Cancer Therapies'
• Unconventional Substances and Diseases: Dakota Gustafson  ' Cancer therapy-related cardiotoxicity: Is the vasculature at the heart of the matter?'

11:30 – 12:15 Lunch

12:20 – 13:20 Keynote Speaker

Dr. Sonya MacParland 'Behind The Mask: Mapping the Human Liver in Health and Disease with Single Cell Resolution'

13:25 – 14:25 Poster Presentations Session II

Molecular cell biology, AI in Healthcare and Translational Research

Anatomical Pathology, Clinical Chemistry, Medical Microbiology

14:30 – 15:30    Oral Presentations Session II 

15:35 – 16:35 “Power Hour” Events

Career Panel: Exploring post-graduate opportunities 

• Medicine: Dr. Eleanor Latta
• Academia: Dr. Kelsey Thu and Dr. Sonya MacParland
• Alumni: Dr. Shawn Veitch (Medical Communications Writer), Dr. Nisha Kanwar (Genome specialist)

Mentorship Speed Dating

• Professional schools, Academia, Academic Industry, Non-academic Industry, and more 

Beyond the Scope: A High Power View of Pathologists’ Finances

• Speakers: Dr.  Mullen, Dr. Djordjevic, Dr. Yoon (See their bios on the Speaker Bios page)

Are you approaching the completion of the training, or do you want to be prepared to smartly use your first pay cheque? Join us this afternoon for a topic that’s the second most challenging in pathology: financial planning. In this panel discussion from our own LMP-affiliated pathologists, we will discuss the fundamentals of financial well-being for new pathologists. Our speakers are at differing stages of their careers and will offer insights on the relevant financial know-how at transition to practice, mid-career pathology, and at seasoned-veteran career status. The discussion will touch on investments, debt management, housing, payment models, and much more. The session will be a fusion of sage tell-all, and questions and answers. 

16:40 – 17:40 Awards and mixer

You will hear from the following speakers at the conference.

Read their bios.

Keynote session

Dr. Sonya MacParland

Scientist in the Ajmera Transplant Centre at Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Liver Immunobiology, and an Associate Professor in the University of Toronto’s departments of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology and Immunology. 

Talk title: Behind The Mask: Mapping the Human Liver in Health and Disease with Single Cell Resolution

If you were to build an artificial liver, what cells would you build it with? How can we harness the livers own immune cells to treat and prevent liver disease? This talk will discuss the complexities of the liver, the most regenerative organ in the human body. We will talk about the team effort to map the liver with single cell resolution and efforts to share this research open-access for scientists around the world. We will also talk about how we can apply these maps to understand liver diseases that lead to liver transplantation.

AI in Medicine session

Dr. Taufik Valiante

Associate Professor of Surgery, University of Toronto and Staff Neurosurgeon and Surgeon Scientist at University Health Network

Talk title: Epilepsy a window to brain mechanisms

Dr. Rahul Krishnan

Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Medicine (Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology), University of Toronto

Talk title: Learning representations of histopathological images with self-supervised learning

Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their multi-scale and hierarchical variations have been successful at capturing image representations, but their use has been generally studied for low-resolution images. For gigapixel whole-slide imaging (WSI) in computational pathology, WSIs can be as large as 150000 x150000 pixels at 20x magnification and exhibit a hierarchical structure of visual tokens across varying resolutions: from small patch images capturing individual cells, to medium sized patches characterizing interactions within the tissue microenvironment. We introduce a new ViT architecture called the Hierarchical Image Pyramid Transformer (HIPT), which leverages the natural hierarchical structure inherent in WSIs using two levels of self-supervised learning to learn high-resolution image representations. HIPT is pre trained across 33 cancer types using 10,678 gigapixel WSIs. We benchmark HIPT representations on 9 slide-level tasks, and demonstrate that: 1) HIPT with hierarchical pretraining outperforms current state-of-the-art methods for cancer subtyping and survival prediction, 2) self-supervised ViTs are able to model important inductive biases about the hierarchical structure of phenotypes in the tumor microenvironment. Our work presents a new way to create representations for histopathological images that are useful for a broad swathe of tasks.

Organ-on-a-chip session

Dr. Yimu Zhao

Postdoctoral research scientist at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto. 

Talk title: Towards the physiological relevant heart-on-a-chip

In our lab, we are focused on the development of heart-on-a-chip that is relevant to human physiology. We started with a simple element in the heart, i.e. muscle fiber, and further integrated with perfusable vessel structures. We incorporated electrical stimulation to encourage the tissue maturation that resembles the adult-like heart muscle, which facilitates the drug toxicity test and disease modeling.

Dr. Eugenia Kumacheva

Professor and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, University of Toronto

Talk title: Tumors-on-a-chip: a Model for Drug Screening and Personalized Cancer Therapies

Compelling data demonstrate advantages of organ-on-a-chip models for drug screening and personalized medicine for therapeutic cancer treatment.  Integration of organ-on-a-chip platforms with machine learning would enable accelerated screening of combination therapies. Will pharmaceutical, regulatory, and academic researchers adopt these new strategies into their laboratories, after making large investments in the way they carry out research at present? This is a conceptual challenge.

Unconventional Substances session

Dr. Adam Shlien

Associate Director, Translation Genetics in the Department of Paediatric Laboratory Medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children, and Scientist in the SickKids Research Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology, University of Toronto

Talk title: The early origins and evolution of childhood cancer 

The talk discusses how genome-wide mutational signatures can be used to reveal the processes and etiology of childhood cancer as well as their changes at relapse.

Dakota Gustafson

Senior Scientist, Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, University Health Network, Associate Professor, Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology, University of Toronto, Tier II Canada Research Chair in Vascular Cell and Molecular Biology.

Talk title: Cancer therapy-related cardiotoxicity: Is the vasculature at the heart of the matter?

Cancer therapy can have damaging effects on the heart and in some individuals this can lead to heart failure. We currently have no way of identifying individuals at the greatest risk of cardiotoxicity. In this presentation we will look at novel biomarkers and mechanisms that point to endothelial dysfunction as being critically important for cancer therapy-related cardiotoxicity.

• 9 am - 5 pm
• Arcadian Studio

Several vendors will be available to speak to you. Please visit them during the conference.

See the full list of vendors at the LMPRC 2022

• As a University of Toronto event, all attendees must wear a mask except when presenting in an oral plenary session, eating and/or drinking. We ask poster presenters to wear their masks when presenting.
• During lunch (from 11:30am – 12:15pm), we encourage you to take your boxed lunches and spread out across the venue, beyond the main ballroom and into the lofts and studio, and even outside, weather permitting – to encourage physical distancing.
• We will have masks at the registration desk if you need one.
• If you have access to a rapid test consider performing it before you come to the conference (night before or morning of). If the result is positive, please stay home.
• If you are presenting and cannot make it to the conference due to a positive test, email lmp.rc@utoronto.ca and lmp.grad@utoronto.ca as soon as possible to let them know.

If you have any questions, feel free to email lmp.rc@utoronto.ca and/or lmp.grad@utoronto.ca. We hope to see you all at the conference!

A professional photographer will be at the event and we will also be doing some video recordings for departmental purposes. 

If you do not wish to be in any of the photos or videos, please make yourself known to the person taking pictures or videos.

You must have registered for the conference in addition to submitting an abstract.

It is compulsory for the following learners to submit an abstract:

• Second and fourth-year LMP research-graduate students
• Second-year Translational Research Program students (capstone project presentations)
• All postgraduate clinical trainees

Abstract submission and registration is now closed. If you have missed the deadline, please contact lmp.rc@utoronto.ca.

Do you want help practicing your poster presentation? Contact the Peer Communication Team and access expert coaching and feedback on your presentation.

Templates

Download PowerPoint and Publisher templates from LMP

See also:

• Free Research Poster PowerPoint Templates from posterpresentations.com
• Scientific Poster PowerPoint Templates from Make Signs
• Free PowerPoint research poster templates in various sizes and styles from Genigraphics

And from the School of Graduate Studies

• Design of Scientific Posters, Michael Alley, Penn State University
• Advice on Designing Scientific Posters, Colin Purrington, Swarthmore College
• Poster Presentation Guidelines, Varinder K. Randhawa and Philip J. Bilan
• Creating Effective Poster Presentations, George R. Hess, Kathryn W. Tosney, and Leon H. Liegel