Jonathan Irish

Administrative Assistant: barb.miklavcic@uhn.ca

Research Synopsis

My research is in the areas of Cancer NanoTheranostics and Optical Guidance of Cancer Surgery/Interventions. The Guided Therapeutics (GTx)Program has been committed to the development and translational research of nanoparticles for imaging and therapeutic use. The $5.5M 7-year Terry Fox New Frontiers Program Project Grant for “Porphysome Nanoparticle-Enabled Image-Guided Cancer Interventions” in 2017 and the renewal of the grants in 2024 for $7.2M has accelerated this work enormously and moved the program to first-in-patient (veterinarian companion dogs and cats) and closer to first-in-human clinical trials. The TFRI-support work has underpinned the GTx Program’s continued research and development of porphysome nanoparticles (developed by and in collaboration with Dr. Gang Zheng) as an imaging and therapeutic (theranostic) agent for thyroid and oral cavity cancers. As part of this research effort, the GTx program (in collaboration with other research groups at UHN and Sunnybrook) has continued to advance porphysome-enabled photodynamic therapy (PDT) and photothermal therapy (PTT). The TFRI-support work in pre-clinical models to determine safety and efficacy have supported ongoing surgical guidance and tumour ablation pre-clinical work and allowed our team to leverage other grant acquisitions such as OICR Clinical Translation Pathway Team Grant (PI, Zheng; Co-PIs, Irish and Wison) and PM Cancer Grand Challenge (PI, Oza; Co-PIs, Irish and Wilson). I am the Principal Investigator in the first-in-patient (veterinarian animal patients) clinical trial investigating porphysome-enabled photodynamic therapy and fluorescence guided surgery for treatment of oral cavity cancer (Canadian Cancer Society Challenge Grant). 
Critical to the development of the nanoparticle ablation program is the development of parallel imaging and tracking surgical systems. Michael Daly (GTx Lab Engineer) developed a 3D fluorescence imaging system for head and neck surgical guidance (OHNS Raymond Ng & Wendy Chui Innovation Fund) and in 2021 demonstrated use of spatial frequency structured illumination to generate tumor depth maps in pre-clinical models (Daly et. al, SPIE BiOS, 2021). This will enable more accurate fluorescent-guided surgical interventions and specifically allow more accurate determination of tumour depth. Furthermore, our work in 3D modelling and multidimensional-material printing capabilities (Davies et al, Laryngoscope, 2020) and in evaluation and implementation of custom augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies for surgical training and guidance further enables real-time surgical guidance during tumour ablation. In 2021, we conducted pre-clinical studies quantifying the accuracy and usability of an in-house AR system for guiding tumor resection (Sahovaler et. al., Frontiers in Oncology, Submitted 2021; Taboni et. al., Frontiers in Oncology, Submitted 2021) including developing and translating image-guidance and 3D intraoperative imaging technologies for open and endoscopic sinonasal and maxilla resection.