This centre aims to expand research efforts focused on understanding the growing role of pharmaceutical agents within the health care system. In particular, unit researchers will focus on studying population-wide aspects of the financing, delivery and use of pharmaceuticals for the purpose of informing health policy, strengthening the health system and improving health. This will include developing a comprehensive pharmaceutical data infrastructure to support the research.
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Serious mental disorders affect thinking, mood and behaviour. The consequences are suffering, impaired function in daily life and yearly costs estimated in Canada at tens of billions of dollars. Like diabetes, hypertension and asthma, mental disorders are complex disorders, meaning there is no single gene mutation, experience or environmental effect that can be held responsible. With a history of focused but isolated research strategies that have failed to address these complexities, present day treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are no more effective than those developed 50 years ago. There is also a lack of effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. The Centre for Complex Disorders (CCD) will seek integrative and transformative solutions to these health problems, with an initial focus on psychotic illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and some types of depression. These often begin in adolescence and cause those affected to lose contact with reality, and chronically become socially isolated and unable to work. The unit’s secondary focus will be complex disorders affecting memory in old age.
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This unit combines the skills and talents of researchers in the BC Cancer Agency’s Cancer Control Research Program and Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre to create a critical mass of expertise in cancer epidemiology, environmental exposure assessment, genetics and biostatistics. The unit will explore the interaction between environmental toxins and genetic susceptibility in determining cancer risk, focusing on environmental, genetic and gene-environment studies in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, skin cancer, ovarian cancer and cancers of the mouth.
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This unit’s goal is to improve understanding and ability to address the emergence of infectious diseases such as West Nile virus that are passed to humans by interaction with an animal host (such as mosquitos in the case of West Nile). The unit will focus on gathering sound evidence of the origins of such diseases in animal/environmental systems as a basis for developing effective, evidence-based disease prevention and control plans.
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