Integrated Discovery

Mobilizing Ontario’s Excellence in Brain Research

The Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) was created for three reasons:

1. To catalyze the various research strengths in Ontario.
2. To harness the clinical expertise across Ontario’s treatment facilities.
3. To bring the expertise developed in research platforms such as imaging, genomics and proteomics, neuropsychology, computation, and bioinformatics on the discovery of solutions to disorders of significant impact on the brain.

The approach to Integrated Discovery looks like this:

We call it "Integrated Discovery" because:

• it gathers together all the researchers and clinical sites dealing with a specific disease, for example, intractable epilepsy.
• it addresses disorders that represent a significant burden to Ontarians, their families and Ontario’s society and economy, by engaging clinicians and basic scientists.
• it mobilizes researchers skilled in all the relevant tools and platforms required to understand the causes and treatments of a disease, to enable the fullest understanding of the disease mechanisms.

Integrated Discovery enables researchers in one disorder area to apply their discoveries and findings to other disorders, because imaging and clinical data are gathered and kept in a common format. This lets researchers pursue questions and hypotheses across disorders to discover common mechanisms that may have unexpected explanatory power.