In the spring of 2026, thirteen research teams at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario were awarded $12.7 million through Canada's most competitive health research funding body, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The grants span some of medicine's most persistent challenges — stroke recovery, brain tumour recurrence, cancer surveillance, sepsis, and the burdens of dialysis in old age — each project designed not merely to understand disease but to change how it is treated. It is a moment that speaks to a quiet but consequential truth: that the distance between a laboratory discovery