Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty/Courtesy of Toronto General - University Health Network
By Katherine Fung
Senior Writer
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Like many Canadians, Bram Bussin was planning to move to the U.S. after finishing his PhD. But when he graduated, scientific funding in America was being clawed back—and Canada's University Health Network (UHN) was just launching its Canada Leads initiative, positioning itself as “the ultimate destination" for the world’s most promising scientists. Bussin signed on. In November, he began his post-doc work at UHN’s Toronto General Hospital (TGH).
Shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration dealt a major blow to scientific research, cutting tens of thousands of scientists from federal agencies, freezing and terminating grants across the country and proposing drastic budget cuts, like a 57 percent slash to the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Congress nixed those requests last month, passing a funding package that delivered larger-than-expected budgets to the NSF, NASA and the National Institutes of Health, but over the course of that year—when much of the science community felt paralyzed by fear of the future—institutions in other countries found a way to usurp the U.S.
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Climbing up to the No. 2 spot on Newsweek’s ranking of World’s Best Hospitals 2026, and knocking down Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic to third place, was Toronto General-University Health Network.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty/Courtesy of Toronto General - University Health Network
The list, published last week in partnership with Statista, evaluated more than 2,500 hospitals around the world. Sweden's Karolinska University Hospital also climbed up to fourth place, beating out last year’s No. 4 hospital, Maryland’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, which fell to No. 6 this year.
“Because of [the pullback in scientific support] and the uncertainty on funding, there were a number of institutions that were closing new recruitment for a period of time,” Dr. Brad Wouters, UHN’s executive vice president of science and research, told Newsweek.
“We thought, here’s a great opportunity. There’s going to be a unique cohort of talent from around the world, and it’s our chance to put up our hand and say, ‘Hey, have you thought about Toronto? Have you thought about UHN as an opportunity?'”
Asked what factors drove the hospital’s success this year, Statista’s Head of Health Care Analysis Meilin Mollenkamp told Newsweek, “Toronto General Hospital achieved a higher international recommendation score than the Cleveland Clinic.”
That doesn’t surprise Kevin Smith, UHN’s president and CEO.
Noting that Canada is a small country of just 40 million people, about an eighth of the U.S. population, Smith said there are very few peers for UHN to compare itself to on home soil.
“Our peer comparison is international,” he told Newsweek. “We’re looking at the best in the world in the categories in which we play a major clinical and scientific role, and we ask the leaders of those institutions to come and externally review us, and we beg them to be brutal. That makes all the difference.”
Recruits from all over the world have told Smith that Canada has emerged as a new research destination because of their concerns about traveling to the U.S. and the uncertainty that clouds many health care policies, as they relate to transgender patients and reproductive care. Scientists also find Toronto appealing because of its vast academic expertise and its diverse gene pool, which greatly benefits those working in population-based science research.
“I don’t know any politician in the world who’s universally popular in their own country, let alone in others, and political cycles will come and go, but this is really about great science in great places,” Smith said.
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With over 24,000 staff members, TGH is Canada’s leading teaching hospital with one of the highest volume organ transplant programs in North America. It also has a long history as a global leader, having been the site of the first clinical use of insulin in the treatment of diabetes, as well as the site of both the first successful single lung transplant and double lung transplant.
Today, the hospital performs 20 to 25 percent of the country’s transplants, carrying out a record-breaking 777 transplants in 2025. TGH is also a pioneer in ex vivo organ perfusion, which allows clinicians and researchers to preserve, assess and repair an organ outside of a human body.
“What we are [doing is] imitating the body out of the body,” Dr. Markus Selzner, the surgical director of TGH’s liver transplant program, told Newsweek. “The fluid [that goes through the organ] will have blood with oxygen, nutrition, everything blood [would typically] have. We are fooling the organ, thinking it’s in the body when it’s actually out of the body.”
This technology has allowed for higher rates of transplantation. It extends the amount of time that an organ can survive outside the body from the standard eight hours on ice to 24 hours—the same amount of time it would take to fly an organ from Singapore to North America. It also gives clinicians the ability to rid viruses from donor organs and to perfuse a higher number of organs.
"We often don’t know if the liver is okay or not,” Selzner said, while standing beside an ex vivo liver that is about to save a patient across the hall in the Department of Surgery. “Seventy percent are okay. Thirty percent are not. In the past, we wouldn’t know, so we’d decline them all. Now, we can test and take the ones we like.”
“We stopped guessing," he said. “[Now], we have information, we have data, we have readouts which we can rely on to predict the function of the patient.”
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There’s so much data being captured that TGH has had to deploy AI to analyze the influx of information and predict which livers to transplant.
Having been the first hospital in the country to appoint a chief AI scientist, TGH has been at the forefront of AI in health care. Today, its clinicians use it to evaluate organs to predict the viability of transplantation, its providers use it to reach more patients and its surgeons use it to guide their procedures.
“We had the idea to create an AI team about 10 years ago, before AI was really on everybody’s lips,” Dr. Barry Rubin, the program medical director of UHN’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, told Newsweek.
Dr. Amin Madani, the director of UHN’s Surgical AI Research Academy, has led the charge on bringing AI tools to the operating rooms of TGH. Before digital surgery existed, surgeons would essentially memorize a CT scan and perform the procedure. Now, with the help of various AI models that show which areas are safe to cut and which areas could lead to complications, surgeons can operate with a co-pilot in the room.
“AI models are not new, a lot of people are doing it, but actually bringing it into the operating room is a totally different thing,” Madani told Newsweek. “We’ve basically been creating these plug-and-play solutions to have it live in the operating rooms.”
He said this new technology allows for surgeons, anywhere and anytime, to access an AI that has “the brain of expert surgeons scaled to every operating room on the floor.” Just down the hall, one surgeon is preparing to use Madani’s model to perform a breast cancer operation.
“He’s going to use these AI models to help create a road map to know exactly where the cancer is, how to remove it, how much distance from the skin, and all that stuff,” Madani said.
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For all the international recognition, TGH’s ambitions haven’t stopped at Toronto’s border—AI is helping the hospital reach Canadians in communities that have never had access to this kind of care.
Dr. Heather Ross, the cardiology division head at UHN’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, for example, routinely flies out to Canada’s more remote communities to help deliver on the hospital’s commitment to providing equitable access to high-quality care.
“When we think about access to care, and we think about that in the Canadian context of our Indigenous peoples, First Nations, Metis and Inuit people... [it’s critical] to partner with our Indigenous communities to provide his care and meet patients where they’re at,” Ross told Newsweek.
With her trusty Pelican case, she and other physicians will travel over a thousand miles to provide care to communities that would need to get on a plane for a simple test. Her case fits: wireless Holter patches that monitor heart electrical activity, a blood pressure monitor, a remote heart monitor, a portable sleep apnea test, a point-of-care ultrasound and an Apple watch.
TGH also uses Medly, a comprehensive remote, self-management app that Ross helped develop. Device-agnostic, Medly allows patients to receive instantaneous diagnoses based on their daily vitals, symptoms and medical history. Should anything be worrisome, the AI will issue an alert that further instructs the patient on what to do next. That information is also immediately sent to their physician's dashboard, where all their patients are being prioritized based on their symptoms.
“Most of the time, the patients are actually well and they get normal feedback,” Ross said. “Critical alerts are very rare, but one in five times, patients get a very specific message that’s tailored to them about what to do, what medication to take to try to improve their symptoms, to get them back into the proper range that we have said is acceptable for that patient.”
Currently, there are a thousand active patients reporting into the program.
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“Heart failure is the number one admission to a hospital in Canada. A million patients a year. If you’re able to identify patients before they get sick, they never come to the emergency room,” Rubin said. “There’s less crowding in the emergency rooms, and there’s less ripple effect on the whole health care system.”
But reducing that burden means little if the people running it are breaking down.
According to the Canadian Medical Association’s 2025 National Physicians Health Survey, doctors are still struggling with high rates of burnout post-pandemic. While reports of high levels of burnout have fallen from 53 percent to 46 percent, nearly three-quarters of physicians continue to report bullying, harassment, microaggressions and/or discrimination.
“We live in a more divisive world than we’ve ever lived before, and on the front line, that’s hard,” Smith said. “People who once enjoyed that confidence and support and appreciation from patients are now experiencing horrific incidents of violence, name-calling of words you wouldn’t say to anyone, let alone someone here to help them."
It's the kind of pressure that no ranking captures—and yet the people keep coming. For Bussin, the opportunity arrived the way many good ones do, almost by accident. His future supervisor mentioned Canada Leads as they were walking out of the room after his PhD defense. He never went to the U.S.
"Canada Leads gave me the opportunity to stay in Canada," he said. "Quite honestly, I'm happy about that."
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