McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health

The McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health was established in 2004 at the University Health Network and the University of Toronto. We have close ties with foundations, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and with institutions in the developing world, who share the goal of enabling better, healthier lives for the world’s poor. We have a global network of partners – scientists, entrepreneurs, policymakers and government officials, non-governmental organizations and funding agencies – that can help bring the models we develop to scale. Our comparative advantage lies in our strong focus on engaging and supporting “voices of the south” to generate domestic solutions for domestic problems, and the bright young minds of our graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from the developing and developed worlds who have embraced our mission, making it their mission. Our pool of talent includes some 60 or more researchers at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health.

Our Vision, Mission and Strategy

Our Vision is a world where everyone benefits from new diagnostics, vaccines, drugs, devices and other life science solutions.

Our Mission is to develop and evaluate new models of global health innovation and facilitate their adoption where they are most urgently needed.

Our Strategy is built around four pillars, each of which represents a critical dimension of the solution to the challenge of improving the health and lives of people in the developing world. Each pillar has its own plans, projects, funding sources and priorities, while also interacting closely with the others to ensure that our overall mission is coherent, aligned and well targeted. Each pillar is ultimately focused on developing locally-relevant and empirically-grounded models to facilitate developing world innovation in global health.

The four pillars are:

  1. Global Grand Challenges Pillar, which helped establish The Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases and will host a new non-profit corporation, Grand Challenges Canada/Grands Défis Canada. This new corporation will deliver the Canadian government’s Development Innovation Fund, which aims to address global grand challenges in health. This pillar is focused on institutional innovation.

  2. Translational Research Pillar, which is focused on biomedical research for new diagnostics and interventions for infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV, tuberculosis and sepsis, and translating new discoveries into clinical trials. This pillar is focused on technological innovation.

  3. Ethics Pillar, which develops and brings forward social and institutional innovations designed to overcome ethical, social and cultural barriers to the acceptance of new medical technologies and to improve the diffusion and delivery of these technologies. This pillar is focused on social innovation.

  4. Commercialization Pillar, which develops financial and collaborative models to enhance the domestic and commercial production of health technologies in developing countries. This pillar is focused on business innovation.