Sinai Health’s Dr. Michael Fralick receives 2024 Gairdner New Investigator Award

Established in 2021 by the Gairdner Foundation, the New Investigator Award recognizes early career investigators from across Canada who have distinguished themselves in health sciences research. Five awards are announced each year, and the finalists are chosen by the Gairdner laureates themselves.

Dr. Fralick was selected from among the field of applicants by Dr. Cherry Kang, 2024 recipient of the Canada Gairdner Global Health Award for her work on enteric disease, vaccine development and health policy in infectious disease.

“It is an honour to receive this award, and it reflects the incredible amount of work by the students, research coordinators, and project managers in my lab” said Dr. Fralick.

Prior to the pandemic, his area of research expertise was the intersection between supervised machine learning and clinical epidemiology. During the COVID-19 pandemic he shifted focus to become the site lead for multiple clinical trials, some of which identified life-saving treatments for patients hospitalized with COVID-19, such as remdesivir. The results of these trials informed practice guidelines globally for the management of patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Through this, Dr. Fralick also led the creation of infrastructure at Sinai Health so that patients hospitalized on a general medical ward have access to clinical trials. This infrastructure has remained in place and has led to the completion of multiple clinical trials for infectious diseases beyond COVID-19.

Dr. Fralick also co-led the Coronavirus in the Urban Built Environment (CUBE) initiative. The CUBE team demonstrated that floor swabs can serve as an early warning for COVID-19 outbreaks. While similar to wastewater surveillance, this research has greater spatial resolution with lower technical and financial costs. Their seminal work, published in the New England Journal of Medicine Evidence, demonstrated that floor swabs can be used to predict and potentially prevent outbreaks in long-term care homes. Similar results were late demonstrated in hospital, and the team can now detect four separate viruses, influenza A, influenza B, respiratory syncytial virus, and SARS-CoV2, with a single swab. Their hope is that environmental surveillance might one day be an effective early warning system for respiratory outbreaks in congregate settings, said Dr. Fralick.

“I wholeheartedly congratulate Dr. Fralick on this tremendous and highly deserved achievement,” said Dr. Anne-Claude Gingras, Director of LTRI and Vice President of Research for Sinai Health. “Through his creative and innovative thinking, and his use of technology, he has been able to make tangible improvements in patients’ lives during a fairly short time as an independent researcher.”

Find out more about Dr. Fralick and other recipients of the 2024 New Investigator Award here.