How can AI unlock better healthcare solutions for Canadians?

The challenge: Bridging AI expertise and clinical impact

Canada’s healthcare system faces mounting pressure to deliver faster diagnoses, more personalized treatments, and better patient outcomes – all while managing costs and resource constraints. Solving these challenges requires a new generation of professionals who can work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, clinical medicine, and commercialization. Yet finding talent with this rare combination of skills remains a critical barrier to innovation.

The solution: Creating lab-to-market solutions that address real-world health challenges

Across Canada, Mitacs is helping to address this gap by deploying graduate students, postdocs, and emerging professionals into companies and research projects where AI meets life sciences.

These aren’t traditional academic placements. Rather, they’re hands-on opportunities to build technology that saves lives and advances care, working alongside interdisciplinary teams of machine learning engineers, clinicians, biomedical scientists, and regulatory experts.

Between 2018 and 2025, Mitacs invested over $36.7 million in approximately 650 AI and health projects, supporting more than 2,300 internships across nearly 400 industry partners. This represents a significant portion of Mitacs’ broader AI investment: between 2018 and 2025, $174 million across more than 3,100 AI-focused projects, supporting over 4,800 interns with 1,600+ industry partners.

Beyond supporting interns, these investments advance economic growth and resilience. According to Statistics Canada (2024), firms partnering with Mitacs experienced 11% productivity growth, 9% revenue growth, and 16% sales growth — demonstrating that talent deployment drives measurable business impact.

Mitacs: Driving innovation in life sciences

Consider FluidAI Medical, founded by University of Waterloo graduates, which developed Stream™, an AI-powered bedside monitor that detects post-operative complications as they emerge. Mitacs worked closely with FluidAI at every stage, connecting the company with graduate students and postdocs specializing in machine learning, biomedical engineering, and clinical research.

This support helped de-risk early-stage innovation, accelerate prototype development, and move Stream™ from lab to bedside, ultimately linking FluidAI with major partners in the medtech space like Medtronic.

Or take Skinopathy, a Toronto health-tech startup that created GetSkinHelp, an AI app analyzing skin lesions with 88% accuracy. Mitacs enabled Skinopathy to assemble a team drawing from AI, dermatology, and software engineering to validate the technology and deliver a solution now serving over 24,000 patients through 2,300+ physician referrals.

In Newfoundland, Granville Biomedical used talent and develop AI-enhanced pelvic models for medical training, which are now sold in 28 countries. Co-founders Christine Goudie and Crystal Northcott credit Mitacs with making adoption of advanced technology possible, connecting them to applied R&D capacity they couldn’t otherwise access.

Mitacs continues to prioritize business-academic research collaboration in the healthcare sector, having recently signed an MOU with OBIO®, a not-for-profit, membership-based organization dedicated to advancing health technology innovation and commercialization. The renewed agreement establishes a structured framework for ongoing collaboration to drive health technology innovation and ecosystem growth in Ontario and across Canada.

The outcome: From internships to industry leadership

For the students and researchers involved, these internships are career-defining, with 31% of partners reporting eventually hiring their Mitacs intern after the project was completed. They gain exposure to live industry problems, regulatory contexts, and commercialization pathways while remaining connected to academic supervision and cutting-edge science. Companies gain access to top-tier research talent and R&D capacity that powers faster commercialization and tailored support for technology adoption. Furthermore, they also get access to funding as these internships are co-funded with Mitacs.

By ensuring AI research translates into products and services that benefit patients, providers, and communities, Mitacs helps position Canada as a leader in AI-enabled life sciences.

Talent in action: Fueling Canada’s AI and health pipeline

Since 2018, Mitacs has made a total investment of$1.42+ billion to support over 35,000 innovation projects, demonstrating its proven capacity to deploy talent into real-world applications across key innovation sectors.

Mitacs serves as a research-commercialization bridge, helping companies like FluidAI Medical, Skinopathy, and Granville Biomedical accelerate market entry and growth.

Ultimately, the convergence of AI and life sciences will be defined by the people who design, build, and deploy these technologies. By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and supporting hundreds of AI and health projects annually, Mitacs is helping Canada harness AI not just as a technical tool, but as a catalyst for better care, stronger health systems, and long-term economic growth.

Power your innovation with access to top academic talent

Looking to bring to life an AI health innovation of your own? Mitacs programs can provide the expertise you need to move your project forward, drawing top talent from post-secondary institutions in Canada with co-funding that extends your R&D budget.

Learn more about the benefits Mitacs can bring to your AI innovation project.