Donald K. Johnson Eye Centre

The Discovery District is one of the commercial districts in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It has a high concentration of hospitals and research institutions, particularly those related to biotechnology. The district is roughly bounded by Bloor Street on the north, Bay Street on the east, Dundas Street on the south, and Spadina Avenue on the west.

In 1834, the United Kingdom passed a new Poor Law which created the system of Victorian workhouses (or "Houses of Industry") that Charles Dickens described in Oliver Twist. Sir Francis Bond Head, the new lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada in 1836, had been a Poor Law administrator before his appointment. Fearing that Head wanted to introduce these workhouses in Toronto, a small group of reformers and dissenting ministers led by publisher James Lesslie and Dr. William W. Baldwin founded the Toronto House of Industry on alternate, humane principles. The Toronto House of Industry was started by the reformers in the ‘unused’ courthouse on Richmond Street in January 1837 where they had previously met as the "Canadian Alliance Society" of which Lesslie had been president. The Toronto House of Refuge and Industry appears to have been founded on the model of the Owenite Socialist "Home Colonies". A constant struggle between the ruling elite, the "Family Compact", and the Reformers to gain control of the institution prevented this plan from ever fully being implemented.In 1848, a building for the House of Industry was erected at the corner of Elm Street and Elizabeth Street, in the middle of the Toronto district known as The Ward, which housed a highly dense slum populated by successive waves of immigrants. The House of Industry provided permanent and temporary lodging as well as food and fuel to the needy in the community, who often were required to do chores in return for help. It also assisted abandoned or orphaned children, often placing them as indentured servants in homes and farms in and around Toronto.By 1947, the clients of Ontario's houses of industry were predominantly the elderly poor and the Toronto House of Industry building was converted into a home for the elderly and renamed Laughlen Lodge after Arthur and Frances Laughlen. When new senior citizens' housing was constructed 1975-83, in association with the Rotary Club of Toronto, the north section of the old House of Industry was preserved as part of the Rotary-Laughlen Centre.

The University of Toronto Faculty of Dentistry is a dental school located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is one of the ten dental schools in Canada. It is the largest dental school in Canada with a range of undergraduate and graduate level programs with a total enrolment in the range of 560. The faculty is located at the heart of Downtown Toronto's Discovery District, a neighbourhood with a high concentration of hospitals and research institutes, just south of the University of Toronto's St. George campus. In 2014, the Faculty of Dentistry joined the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration (TAAAC), providing support in building capacity for oral health in Ethiopia by creating collaborative teaching opportunities.

The Hospital for Sick Children (HSC), corporately branded as SickKids, is a major pediatric teaching hospital located on University Avenue in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Toronto, the hospital was ranked the top pediatric hospital in the world by Newsweek in 2021.The hospital's Peter Gilgan Centre for Research and Learning is believed to be the largest pediatric research tower in the world, at 69,677.28 square metres (750,000.0 sq ft).

The Toronto General Hospital (TGH) is a major teaching hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and the flagship campus of University Health Network (UHN). It is located in the Discovery District of Downtown Toronto along University Avenue's Hospital Row; it is directly north of The Hospital for Sick Children, across Gerrard Street West, and east of Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Mount Sinai Hospital. The hospital serves as a teaching hospital for the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine. In 2019, the hospital was ranked first for research in Canada by Research Infosource for the ninth consecutive year.The emergency department now treats 28,065 persons each year, while the hospital also houses the major transplantation service for Ontario, performing heart, lung, kidney, liver, pancreas, and small intestine, amongst others, for patients referred from all over Canada. The hospital is the largest organ transplant center in North America, performing 639 transplants in 2017. The hospital is also renowned for cardiac and thoracic surgery. The world's first single and double lung transplants were performed at TGH in 1983 and 1986 and the world's first valve-sparing aortic root replacement was done by Tirone David at Toronto General Hospital in 1992. The Lung Transplant program is currently the largest in the world, performing 167 lung transplants in 2017. In 2015, surgeons performed the world's first triple organ transplant (lung, liver and pancreas) in 19 year old Reid Wylie at Toronto General Hospital. TGH teaches resident physicians, nurses, and technicians; it also conducts research through the Toronto General Research Institute. Currently, Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, as a member of the Canadian Royal Family, is patron of the hospital.

Victoria Hospital for Sick Children is a building in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The building served as a hospital until 1951 and currently serves as a blood centre. The building has received a Commendation of Adaptive Re-use from the Toronto Historical Board.

The McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine was established at University Health Network in Toronto in 2003, with a donation from Rob and Cheryl McEwen, which they matched in 2006 with a second donation. The McEwen Centre's vision is to be a world-renowned centre for stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. To achieve this ambitious goal, the team of McEwen Investigators is working together to accelerate the development of more effective treatments for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes mellitus, respiratory disease and spinal cord injury. The McEwen Centre is based in the heart of Toronto's Discovery District at the MaRS Centre/Toronto Medical Discovery Tower. The current Director of the McEwen Center for Regenerative Medicine is Prof. Gordon Keller, Canada Research Chair in Embryonic Stem Cell Biology.

MaRS Discovery District is a not-for-profit corporation founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 2000. Its stated goal is to commercialize publicly funded medical research and other technologies with the help of local private enterprises and as such is a public-private partnership. As part of its mission MaRS says, "MaRS helps create successful global businesses from Canada's science, technology and social innovation." As of 2014, startup companies emerging from MaRS had created more than 4,000 jobs, and in the period of 2011 to 2014 had raised over $750 million in capital investments.The name MaRS was originally drawn from a file name, and later attributed with the title "Medical and Related Sciences." It has since abandoned this association as it also works in other fields such as information and communications technology, engineering, and social innovation.

The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) is a not-for-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada that focuses on the prevention, early detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. OICR intends to make Ontario more effective in knowledge transfer and commercialization while maximizing the health and economic benefits of research findings for the people of Ontario. OICR was launched in 2005 by the Government of Ontario, which provides funding through the Ministry of Colleges and Universities. The Institute employs more than 300 people at its research hub at the MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto and funds more than 1,900 scientific staff at hospital-based research institutes and universities around the province. In 2018 it was the highest funder of cancer research in Canada.

The Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute is a medical research institute in Toronto, Ontario and part of the Sinai Health System. It was originally established in 1985 as the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, the research arm of Mount Sinai Hospital, by an endowment from the Lunenfeld and Kunin families. It was renamed to the current name on June 24, 2013, after a $35 million donation from Larry and Judy Tanenbaum. It comprises 36 principal investigators, has a budget of C$90 million (2005/6), has over 200 trainees and approximately 600 staff. The institute conducts research into various forms of cancer (colon, breast, pancreatic, prostate, lung, etc.), neurological disorders and brain illnesses, women's and infants' health, diabetes, developmental biology, stem cell biology and tissue regeneration, mouse models of human disease, genomic medicine and systems biology. The institute has 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of space and is split between the main hospital and the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Health Complex. The Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute is a world pioneer in the fields of Systems Biology, Diabetes, and Infectious Bowel Disease. Its Systems Biology team consistently ranked Top 5 worldwide. Researchers at the Lunenfeld have the highest per capita funding and citations in Canada. The founding director was Louis Siminovitch (1984–1994), followed by Alan Bernstein (1995–2000), Janet Rossant and Anthony Pawson (2001–2002), Anthony Pawson (2002–2005) and James Woodgett (2005–).

The Sons of England War Memorial is installed at the intersection of University Avenue and Elm Street in downtown Toronto, in Ontario, Canada. The statue was designed by Charles Adamson.

Bay Street is a major thoroughfare in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the centre of Toronto's Financial District and is often used by metonymy to refer to Canada's financial services industry since succeeding Montreal's St. James Street in that role in the 1970s. Bay Street begins at Queens Quay (Toronto Harbour) in the south and ends at Davenport Road in the north. The original section of Bay Street ran only as far north as Queen Street West and just south of Front Street where the Grand Trunk rail lines entered into Union Station. Sections north of Queen Street were renamed Bay Street as several other streets were consolidated and several gaps filled in to create a new thoroughfare in the 1920s. The largest of these streets, Terauley Street, ran from Queen Street West to College Street. At these two points, there is a curve in Bay Street. North of College past Grenville Street to Breadalbane Street was St. Vincent Street, which was later bypassed with new alignment to the west leading to a stub now called St. Vincent Lane from Grosvenor Street to Grenville Street. "Bay Street" is frequently used as a metonym to refer to Toronto's Financial District and the Canadian financial sector as a whole, similar to Wall Street in the United States. "Bay Street banker", as in the phrase "cold as a Bay Street banker's heart", was a term of opprobrium especially among Prairie farmers who feared that Toronto-based financial interests were hurting them. Within the legal profession, the term Bay Street is also used colloquially to refer to the large, full-service business law firms of Toronto.