Celebrated as UHN trailblazers and legacy builders at the inaugural UHN Mission Excellence Awards ceremony in March of 2025, Drs. Jean Wang and John Dick, along with Dr. Jayne Danska, are the winners of this year's Inventor of the Year Award. They are being awarded for their work in cancer immunotherapy, recognized for identifying and commercializing a novel way that cancer cells evade destruction.

Their research led to development of TTI-621, a SIRPα fusion protein that specifically targets the signal receptor CD47, responsible for activating the “Don’t Eat Me” signal that cancer cells give to the immune system as they attempt to spread​, grow and avoid destruction. The novelty of the discovery at the time was unprecedented – while everyone was looking at other strategies, they began looking at signal receptors. This work partially underpinned the platform for UHN start-up Trillium Therapeutics, created in 2004.