Critical funding for health research

Canadian Institutes of Health Research funds $3.95 million in grants to seven Queen’s Researchers.

Seven Queen’s University researchers are contributing their knowledge in the areas of melanoma, intensive care unit survivors, postoperative pain, diabetes medication, Indigenous public health, and depression thanks to funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Queen’s received a total of $3.95 million from the Fall 2019 CIHR Project Grant competition, a program that helps advance health-related research. With an eye on collaboration, the competition funds both individuals and groups of researchers at any career stage in all areas of health-related research.

“Congratulations to the Queen’s researchers successful in garnering funding in an increasingly competitive funding environment,” says Kent Novakowski, Acting Vice-Principal (Research). “I look forward to hearing about the progress of their research projects designed to innovate in human health research and to benefit the population.’’

The successful researchers are:

• John Allingham (Biomedical and Molecular Science) $573,750 – Dr. Allingham’s research focuses on understanding how certain human fungal pathogens become multi-drug resistant, leading to major medical challenges in hospitals and long-term care facilities around the world. His aim is to learn how to preserve the efficacy of our existing antifungal agents, and to inform development of new therapies, by identifying drivers of drug resistance.
• Christopher Bowie (Psychology) $673,200 – Dr. Bowie is examining how early life experiences interact with cognitive abilities, decision making, and reward processing to predict both the recurrence of depression and the degree and timing of functional recovery after the first episode of depression.
• J. Gordon Boyd (Medicine) $562,275 - Dr. Boyd’s multi-centre study will inform on how to better manage patients when they are at their most sick in the intensive care unit, in order to improve their long-term brain function and quality of life.
• Robert Campbell (Ophthalmology) $130,000 – The goal of Dr. Campbell’s project is to assess the newer diabetes drugs now available and the development of severe diabetic retinopathy, the most common complication of diabetes and the leading cause of blindness and vision impairment in working-age adults.
• Janet Dancey (Canadian Cancer Trials Group) $1,303,560 – Dr. Dancey is leading the Canadian component of an international multicentre patient-centred clinical trial investigating the use of smaller surgical margins in patients with Stage 2 melanoma. Larger margins result in disfigurement, wound discomfort, and time away from work and, if positive, will change practice in Canada and around the world.
• Jeffrey Masuda (Kinesiology and Health Studies) $612,000 – Dr. Masuda’s team has created a research partnership that will strengthen a coalition of local- to -national Indigenous organizations who are organizing tenants living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to address the colonial harms resulting from the twin housing and overdose fatality crisis in their community.

Successfully earning bridge funding was Nader Ghasemlou (Anesthesiology & Perioperative Medicine, Biomedical & Molecular Sciences, $100,000) who is working to understand why and how pain occurs during inflammation caused by postoperative wounds. His group has identified a novel inflammatory pathway regulating the pain response and are now working to develop new health care strategies to prevent or treat pain in those undergoing surgery.

For more information on these granting programs, visit the CIHR website.

Note: This article originally appeared in the Queen's Gazette.