The Provincial Health Services Authority and the BC Ministry of Health are jointly sponsoring a clinical practice initiative to improve the quality and availability of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) for mental health and addictions in BC. While CBT has been established as an empirically supported treatment for many disorders, there has been a lack of availability of CBT in the community. Research is needed on issues related to dissemination and adoption/uptake of CBT. Another priority is evaluating the success of the joint CBT initiative by examining aspects such as changes in client care outcomes and cost-effectiveness. This award supports the creation of a team that will focus on developing a better, more integrated understanding of the most effective CBT dissemination methods. The team aims for its research effort to lead to increased access to CBT mental health services for British Columbians.
Program: Research Units
Rationing in health care
Limited health care resources require organizations to have mechanisms for making funding decisions. Decision makers, however, may not be familiar with tools to assist in maximizing resources. Decision makers also face organizational constraints and other challenges that counter the use of priority setting tools. This award supports the development of a team that will bring together two leading-edge, BC-based research programs on priority setting and resource allocation in health care, while also tapping into other related research areas. The team’s overall aim is to develop a plan that will establish BC as the international lead on research in health care priority setting. The team will structure activities around a series of interactive decision maker-researcher forums addressing key areas for development in health care priority setting.
Genomics Data Mining for Personalized Medicine Group
Personalized medicine is an approach to health care that involves using information about a person's genetic background to design strategies for the detection, treatment and prevention of diseases. But genetic variations, which can cause people to respond in different ways to medication, represent a barrier to personalized medicine. Individual genes or many genes interacting with each other can determine response to medication. Combing through this complicated genetic map is expensive and time-consuming. Data mining, the process of extracting knowledge from a large collection of data, is very effective at extracting the combination of genes that is collectively responsible for a reaction to a certain medicine and treatment. This award supports the emergence of a team that will develop relevant data mining and statistical programs that will help make personalized medicine a reality in BC.
OvCaRe
BC’s unique provincial cancer care system – with coordinated diagnosis, treatment and outcome tracking – has made it possible for our province to be a leader in the evolution of improved treatments for a number of different cancers. However, there have been no significant breakthroughs in ovarian cancer treatment for more than a decade. OvCaRe was created by a group of clinicians and scientists with the explicit goal of improving ovarian cancer outcomes by freely sharing data and promoting collaborations within the group and with outside researchers interested in ovarian cancer. OvCaRe has three major goals: to develop diagnostic tests for the most promising tumour markers and offer these tests province wide; to identify novel therapies in laboratories and translate these to the clinic; and to explore markers, diagnostics and potential therapies for ovarian cancers that are unresponsive to current therapies.
Model Systems and Cancer Therapeutics
Mutations that cause genome instability are known to contribute to the development of cancer. Most solid malignant tumours exhibit chromosome instability (mis-segregation of chromosomes during cell division), resulting in daughter cells that contain an incorrect number of chromosomes. A better understanding of the basis for this type of genome instability holds promise for identifying new targets for cancer-killing drugs.
Detecting, Treating and Preventing Drug-Related Morbidity
In Canada, 7.5 per cent of hospital admissions are complicated by an adverse event related to medical care that leads to death, disability, or a prolonged hospital stay. Adverse drug related events (ADREs) represent the most common cause of preventable non-surgical adverse events, with up to 130,000 patients in British Columbia (BC) presenting to Emergency Departments with a symptomatic ADRE. However, there are currently no efficient screening strategies for ADREs. This team is working to develop and evaluate a clinically effective, resource-efficient screening strategy. Once the strategy has been proven effective in an Emergency Department setting, the team aims to adapt it for use in community-based practice, and determine its cost effectiveness in comparison to the current standard of care.
Team for Monitoring and Control of Abnormal Brain Dynamics
The majority of treatments for neurological diseases involve drugs. Yet maintaining a steady state of medications in a person’s system may not be effective in targeting abnormal brain activity that is transient and oscillating. Therefore, patients may have to continually take drugs for conditions that only manifest themselves intermittently – such as with seizures – or to take drugs that disrupt normal brain activity. With a view to developing non-pharmacological interventions, this team is dedicated to measuring – and ultimately managing – disrupted brain function occurring at short temporal scales. Focusing initially on Parkinson’s Disease, the team is working to better pinpoint and understand subtle oscillations in abnormal brain activity, and developing and testing visual stimuli systems that have shown promise in disrupting these abnormal oscillations in the brain. The findings from this research will have broader impact with implications for many brain diseases.
TB Research Group
Mycobacterium tuberculosis – the bacteria that causes tuberculosis (TB) – is the most devastating infectious agent of mortality worldwide: it is carried by one third of all humans and kills nearly two million people annually. In BC and throughout Canada, First Nations and Inuit communities are at an especially high risk, and more than 300 new or relapsed TB cases are reported each year. With the emergence of a strain that is virtually untreatable with current medicines, novel therapeutics are urgently required to target persistent bacilli and to contribute to more effective treatments of TB. This Team brings together individuals from different disciplines who are seeking to establish a foundation to develop strategies to control TB, focusing their studies on the bacterium’s inherent resistance to antibiotics, and its ability to persist in host cells.
Spinal Cord Injury Proteomics
Each year, approximately 1,500 Canadians sustain an acute traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI). Disability from an SCI results both from the initial trauma, and secondary cell damage that occurs due to pathophysiological processes after the initial SCI event. Current research suggests that neuroprotective drugs need to be administered early after injury to head off secondary cell damage, yet current diagnostics aren’t able to determine and classify the exact severity of the spinal injury within this timeframe. This makes it difficult to predict how much spontaneous recovery can be expected and which treatment strategies will improve functional recovery. Using proteomics technologies, this team is working to identify and validate biomarkers to monitor the severity of spinal cord injuries (SCI), and allow the “real time” ongoing evaluation of candidate drugs in human clinical trials.
Vaccine Evaluation Centre
The Vaccine Evaluation Centre (VEC) was originally established in 1989 at BC Children’s Hospital. Now, the Unit is expanding and evolving to better meet provincial and national needs for applied vaccinology research, with emphasis on expanded local and national collaboration and leadership, greater use of advanced technology, active translation of new products into optimal immunization practice, and excellent training in vaccinology.