A person walks into an emergency department with heart failure. Within hours, a doctor must make a consequential call to send them home or admit them to the hospital. Both options run their own risks – admitting the patient can lead to an unnecessary hospitalization...
For researchers studying heart disease, lab-grown heart cells are an essential tool. Created from human stem cells, they offer a powerful way to model disease, test therapies, and better understand heart function. However, the challenge remains that these cells behave...
For children living with cardiomyopathy, heart failure is not always caused by the heart losing its ability to pump. In many cases, the problem is more subtle, but just as serious: the heart becomes stiff and struggles to relax and fill properly between beats. This...
New findings from the UNEARTH CVD research team have shed light on an important but often overlooked aspect of cardiovascular care: the cognitive health of people living with heart failure. Published in Cureus, this new publication is the first study to examine...
The Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research is proud to celebrate an extraordinary milestone in the career of Dr. Paul Santerre, who has been elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the highest honour bestowed upon academic inventors. This...
Entrepreneurship for Cardiovascular Health Opportunities (ECHO) is a 12-month national training program supporting cardiovascular research commercialization through education, mentorship, networking, and funding. Led by a diverse team of experts, ECHO fosters...
Over ten years ago, the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research (TRCHR) set out to put engineers, biologists, and clinicians in the same room and see what happens when they take on heart failure together. Dr. Craig Simmons was chosen to lead that effort. A University of Toronto (U of T) Distinguished Professor of Mechanobiology, Craig became Scientific Lead of the Translational Biology and Engineering Program (TBEP), one of the most senior roles on the Centre’s executive committee. As he steps back from that position, we’re taking a moment to look back on over a decade shaped by his belief that the biggest challenges in heart health don’t get solved in isolation, but in unison.
Not long after TRCHR was founded, Craig launched TBEP as a first-of-its-kind incubator, pulling together ten U of T researchers and their trainees from Engineering, Dentistry, and Medicine into one open-concept lab designed to break down the usual boundaries between disciplines. Under his direction, TBEP grew into a driving force behind the Centre’s work in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering, grounded in his own research into how physical forces shape the growth and behaviour of heart cells and tissue.
An excellent example of the power of TBEP’s approach is Craig’s lab’s discovery – developed with partners across U of T, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), and the University Health Network (UHN) and published in Nature Communications – of a better way to grow human heart cells so they act more like mature, adult tissue. More realistic lab-grown heart tissue means safer, faster drug testing and fewer treatments that fail late in clinical trials. The resulting formula, C16, is licensed to AXOL Bioscience, ready for use by researchers around the world.
Now the team is focusing on growing heart muscle that can repair damage after a heart attack through boutIQ solutions, a U of T spinout applying artificial intelligence to design the specialized media that cell-based therapies rely on. The company has already won the 2022 ECHO PITCH competition and a $420,000 Stem Cell Network grant to bring its platform to heart repair, proving that this kind of journey is exactly why TBEP was built: to make it possible to go from an idea at the bench to a company with real potential to change how patients are treated.
Craig’s belief in collaboration reached well past the lab. In 2018, he co-founded TBEP’s ECHO entrepreneurship training program with Drs. Soror Sharifpoor and Paul Santerre. ECHO has trained and supported over 70 cardiovascular health ventures from across Canada, and awarded over $1.5M to enable translation of the most promising ideas from the lab to the market and clinic. In 2020, he and Dr. Heather Ross co-founded TRANSFORM HF, a network built to pair the engineers and researchers designing new heart failure technologies with the clinicians and people with lived experience who could tell them what mattered. Today, the initiative brings together engineers, clinicians, trainees, industry partners, and patient partners in pursuit of care that’s both digitally enabled and genuinely equitable. This commitment is reflected in its training arm, CaRDM Eq, which Craig co-directs, as well as in programs like On the Land and infrastructure like the Digital Hub.
For all he’s built, Craig will tell you the accomplishment he values most isn’t a publication or a program – it’s the researchers and clinicians he’s trained, many of whom now lead labs and ventures of their own. That mentorship earned him the 2026 Engineers Canada Medal for Distinction in Engineering Education. He also holds fellowships with several of engineering and biomedical engineering’s leading societies and has been recognized with several other awards at the interface of research and education. This recognition reflects not just his research, but his lasting commitment to lifting up the people around him.
Fortunately, Craig isn’t stepping away from the Centre. He will stay on as co-lead of TRANSFORM HF and CaRDM Eq, and his lab will keep pushing TBEP’s regenerative research forward. As his decade as Scientific Lead ends, we wanted to pause and say thank you. On behalf of everyone at the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research: thank you, Craig, for over ten years of discovery, mentorship, and proof that we accomplish more when we work as one.
