Just a few days before the annual Terry Fox Run that honours one of Canada’s most legendary figures, the Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI) is providing $25 million to 14 Canadian projects working on AI-powered cancer detection and other health innovations through a novel data-sharing platform.
“These collaborations show research and enterprise coming together to drive innovation and accelerate clinical care, enabling personalized treatments tailored to the individual patient.”
Dr. Jim Woodgett,
Terry Fox Research Institute
TFRI announced the contributions in Montréal on Wednesday as part of the ALL IN conference. They will be given out under TFRI’s inaugural national funding program, the Digital Health Innovation Fund (DHIF), which is supported by federal funding through the Strategic Response Fund.
The selected projects bring together 55 partners from across Canada—including businesses, academic institutions, and healthcare organizations—to work on health projects with a combined total value of nearly $41 million. The projects are working to improve diagnosis and treatment for cancer, neurodegenerative disease, diabetes, ophthalmology (eye care), and other conditions.
They include an AI-powered imaging platform to detect bone cancer from Montréal-based Qalam Health Solutions; a project to use AI and Canadian healthcare data to improve cancer treatments from Calgary-based Onco-Innovations; and a secure Canadian skin-health dataset to help doctors spot high-risk cases sooner from Vancouver-based MetaOptima Technology.
“These collaborations show research and enterprise coming together to drive innovation and accelerate clinical care, enabling personalized treatments tailored to the individual patient,” TFRI president Dr. Jim Woodgett said in a statement.
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The projects are built on top of TFRI’s Digital Health and Discovery Platform (DHDP), which the organization says facilitates secure data sharing and analysis. Through DHDP, researchers can analyze “vast amounts of complex health data across institutions without moving it,” according to TFRI. The organization said this preserves privacy while unlocking new insights with AI and machine learning.
In a statement, AI Minister Evan Solomon said that “collaboration on data sharing is essential to ensuring that advancements in precision medicine benefit patients across Canada.”
TFRI said it fielded over 200 expressions of interest for the DHIF after it opened applications in March 2025, and that its second call for applications will launch this fall.