The Terry Fox Research Institute is putting $25 million toward 14 Canadian research teams building artificial intelligence tools to catch cancer earlier, cut medication errors and share hospital data securely, the Vancouver-based charity said Sept. 16.
The money flows through the institute’s Digital Health Innovation Fund (DHIF), a program backed by the federal government’s Strategic Innovation Fund and administered by the Terry Fox Research Institute’s Digital Health and Discovery Platform. According to BetaKit, the 14 selected teams draw on 55 industry, hospital and academic partners and were chosen from more than 200 expressions of interest, a selection rate of roughly seven per cent.
Among the funded projects is QudraPen, an AI-driven imaging platform for real-time bone cancer detection led by Dr. Ahmed Aoude of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), working with Montreal’s Qalam Health Solutions, Applicare.AI and Ontario Tech University, according to a MUHC release. A separate MUHC-led project, headed by chief of digital health Dr. David Buckeridge, aims to standardize medication data across the hospital network to prevent dosing errors and make records more usable for AI research, in partnership with NURA Medical Inc. and DT Consulting Group.
Other recipients extend the program beyond Quebec and Ontario. Calgary’s Onco-Innovations is applying Canadian healthcare data to improve cancer treatment planning, while Vancouver’s MetaOptima Technology is building a secure, Canada-specific skin-health dataset to help identify high-risk cases, according to BetaKit. A third MUHC-led effort, headed by innovation director Dr. Alan Forster, is building a cross-country synthetic data network with the University of Waterloo, the University of New Brunswick, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and other partners, using privacy-preserving data to let hospitals share insights without exposing patient records.
“These collaborations show research and enterprise coming together to drive innovation and accelerate clinical care, enabling personalized treatments tailored to the individual patient,” Terry Fox Research Institute president Dr. Jim Woodgett said in a statement.
The fund’s own program page shows the timeline behind the announcement is longer than the coverage of it suggests. The institute opened applications in March 2025, closed expressions of interest that July, took letters of intent that September and full applications that November, before selecting projects in December and starting to release money in January. Individual project budgets run $1 million to $7 million, and Ottawa’s cost-sharing rules cap government assistance at 75 per cent of eligible costs for industry partners, meaning companies had to put up real capital of their own to qualify, while academic partners can be fully covered.
That structure helps explain why the fund’s $25-million federal commitment is expected to leverage roughly $41 million in combined project value once industry and institutional contributions are counted, according to BetaKit’s reporting.
For Canadian health-AI startups that missed this round, the institute has already flagged a second call for applications for fall 2026, meaning the same competitive process, and the same odds of roughly one in 14, will run again within months.
