Sagi Abelson, Kim Tsoi and Alanna Weisman win 2020 Banting Discovery Awards

Three University of Toronto professors are among the winners of the 96^th annual Banting Research Foundation Discovery Awards.

The prizes, announced by Mitacs and the Banting Research Foundation, support investigators at universities and research institutes in Canada with seed funding within the first three years of their first academic appointment.

The winners are:

• Sagi Abelson, assistant professor of molecular genetics and principal investigator, computational biology, at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, for his project using large, publicly available single-cell datasets to build a comprehensive single-cell classifier, to detect cancer and measure changes associated with chemotherapy.
• Kim Tsoi, assistant professor in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, orthopaedic surgeon in the Sinai Health System and research clinician-investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, for her work developing a treatment for soft tissue sarcomas, a rare, aggressive type of cancer.
• Alanna Weisman, assistant professor in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, clinical scientist in the Sinai Health System and University Health Network and scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and ICES, for her study using anonymized provincial health-care data to determine whether factors such as sex, income, and socioeconomic factors are barriers to insulin pump use for people with type 1 diabetes and the impact that has on people living with the disease.

“The University of Toronto congratulates Alanna Weisman, Kim Tsoi and Sagi Abelson on this important recognition from Mitacs and the Banting Research Foundation,” said Professor Leah Cowen, associate vice-president, research.

“They are building on the legacy of discovery, innovation and collaboration at U of T sparked a century ago with the discovery of insulin – and their bold ideas will make a real difference in the health of Canadians and people around the world.”