Malnutrition is a serious public health concern in Inuit and northern regions of Canada, driven by a complex array of social and ecological determinants, including poverty, food insecurity, and climate change. In northern communities, country foods (wild foods harvested from the lands and waters) often comprise an integral component of food systems and contribute to food security, nutrition, and social and cultural integrity. Yet, many country foods are also high in environmental contaminants (e.g., mercury and persistent organic pollutants), which have negative implications for health. Meanwhile, due to transportation challenges, available retail foods in northern and Inuit communities tend to be pre-packaged, processed, and expensive.
In this research program, I will use existing health survey data to evaluate dietary patterns in Nunavik (northern Quebec) and associated nutritional benefits and health risks. Through interviews and community workshops, I will also identify political, social, geographical, and environmental factors that impact food access, affordability, and desirability. Findings will be shared with decision-makers to generate evidence for sustainable and healthy food systems in northern regions across Canada.
Under normal healthy circumstances our intestines are home to hundreds of species of microbes, collectively termed the microbiota. Our intestines can also be colonized by parasites, such as parasitic worms (helminths). Both the microbiota and helminths can affect the functioning of our immune system, which in turn, can influence our susceptibility to a variety of infectious, allergic, and inflammatory diseases. Research in my laboratory is focused on understanding the mechanisms by which helminths and the microbiota affect immune system functioning during normal development and during states of disease.
The incidence of allergies and inflammatory bowel diseases has increased dramatically in Canada over recent decades, and there is an urgent need both to understand the factors driving disease development and to identify new treatment strategies. My laboratory uses the mouse model system where the molecular mechanisms of interaction between components of the immune system, the microbiota, and helminths can be identified. Understanding the mechanisms by which the microbiota and helminths can influence immune system functioning may reveal new ways to treat or prevent allergic and inflammatory diseases.
Childhood obesity is a major public health challenge in Canada. Without intervention, overweight children will likely continue to be overweight during adolescence and adulthood. Family-based lifestyle programs delivered at local communities can be effective. However, many families cannot attend these in-person programs due to travel distances and program availabilities. The current situation has turned increasingly dire in the COVID-19 landscape, where face-to-face, group, and facility-based interventions are no longer viable. With continued improvements in the sophistication and access to digital communication technology (e.g. Internet, wearables, smartphones), delivering tailored lifestyle programs using these tools may be well-suited to meet these challenges.
The goal of this project is to evaluate the long-term efficacy and the cost of delivering a stand-alone web-based and a blended in-person and web-based program in improving health-related outcomes in children who are overweight or obese in British Columbia (B.C), Canada. This project can be incredibly impactful for B.C. residents as this web-based program can improve the access, reach and personalization of family-based childhood obesity management programs.
Mosquitoes are the deadliest animals on the planet. Many species use sophisticated sensory systems, including smell and taste, to locate human beings and other animal hosts in their environment as a source of blood. When they blood-feed, they can transmit microorganisms that cause human diseases including malaria and dengue fever. After converting a blood-meal into eggs, a female mosquito must find an appropriate body of water to lay eggs where her offspring will thrive. Selecting an egg-laying site is an important part of the mosquito lifecycle, since the juvenile larval and pupal stages are aquatic and cannot move from where they hatch. Mosquitoes do not fly far, and so their choice of breeding site strongly influences where they can be found as adults and thus, where they can transmit disease.
The goal of my research is to understand how mosquitoes use their sense of smell and taste to make decisions about who to bite and where to lay eggs. I use techniques to modify their DNA and to look at the activity in their brains under a microscope. Ultimately, this research will help us understand why some mosquitoes are more deadly than others and provide the basis for mosquito control strategies such as traps and repellents.
There are growing differences in health among population groups due to unfair social conditions that disadvantage some people more than others in British Columbia and beyond. Health systems play a role in holding this problem in place by presenting unnecessary barriers to accessing quality healthcare. Health systems also have a key role in closing these gaps by taking action to change the underlying conditions that shape health and wellbeing. The Population Health Approaches to Implementing Research (k)Nowledge for Equitable Systems & Strategies (PHAIRNESS) Research Program aims to make visible and intervene on systems-level problems in three connected systems: health systems, surveillance systems and research systems. By working closely with health systems, communities and people who are impacted by these issues, research findings will be relevant, useful, and ready to be rapidly applied to improve health systems and support the wellbeing of all people in British Columbia.
Plants are endowed with biological catalysts (enzymes) that make natural drugs used to treat various human illnesses. Among these, the Chinese happy tree (Camptotheca acuminata) produces the anticancer drug camptothecin. Although camptothecin is readily convertible to the more potent drugs topotecan (Hycamtin) and irinotecan (Camptosar), this requires chemical synthesis steps which rely on toxic chemicals and petroleum-based resources.
Our research program aims at developing multidisciplinary approaches to discover and modify happy tree’s enzymes that facilitate the production topotecan, irinotecan and new camptothecin-derived analogues. We aim to rapidly generate 25-50 camptothecin-derived analogues by biotechnological means and test these compounds using in vitro and cellular assays to assess potential anti-cancer activity.
Our biosynthetic approach will allow us to explore the untapped medicinal potentials of a whole host of novel camptothecin-related chemicals in addition to topotecan and irinotecan. Long-term efforts, also ongoing in our laboratory, will focus on synthetic biology approaches to scale up production of compounds that show promising bioactivity.
Morphogenesis is the process by which an organism develops its shape. Defects in this process are linked to several diseases and defects such as cancers, heart defects at birth, and cleft lip/palate. The study of morphogenesis is critical to understanding these conditions and identifying new treatments.
Cytokinesis, a critical step of cell division that separates a dividing cell into two daughter cells, plays a major role in morphogenesis. It not only contributes to the multiplication of cells but also their arrangement within their space, giving rise to different structures. It does this by controlling the position and orientation of division—a process called symmetry-breaking. The coordinated flow of a gel layer on the cell surface—cortical flow—is a driving force of symmetry-breaking.
The goal of this research is to understand the mechanisms that control cortical flow during morphogenesis. Using genetic methods and advanced microscopy in living cells, we have found new molecular pathways that control the speed and direction of cortical flow.
By shedding further light on these mechanisms our research will identify molecules and pathways which can be used to develop new medicines to prevent and cure morphogenesis defects.
Fear memory, like that occurring in post-traumatic stress disorder, imposes pronounced health and financial burdens. Our laboratory seeks to understand and therapeutically disrupt the neurobiological elements of fear memory.
To do this, we take a multidisciplinary approach that combines cutting-edge experimental and computational techniques. To begin, in mice that have obtained fear memory in a laboratory setting, we measure the expression of every gene in the mouse genome for thousands of individual brain neurons. From these Big Data, we identify genes and neuron types that participate in fear memory. Using genetic and pharmacologic approaches, we manipulate these genes and neuron types with the aim of disrupting fear memory in a safe, acute, and precise way.
The results of this research will provide a comprehensive understanding of the basic biology of memory, help to innovate novel targets and approaches for disrupting fear memory, and generate a framework with which other anxiety and memory disorders may be interpreted. In the long term, we aim for these results to guide the generation of new therapeutic approaches for preventing traumatic fear memory in humans.
Cancer is a disease of the genome that disrupt the cells’ key functions and make them grow uncontrollably. DNA sequencing projects have led us to discover that cancer cells involve many genetic changes and that even in a single tumour, there are often multiple cancer cell populations that each carry their own mutations.
Understanding this collection of mutations is important because we need to select therapies that kill all of the cancer cells, not just some of them. Unfortunately, existing computer programs for analyzing “normal” human genome data generated by genome sequencing technologies are limited in scope because they cannot fully characterize all the mutations present in the individual cells of a tumour tissue.
Ideally, researchers would like to monitor how the genomes of cancer cells mutate over time, and how cancer cells travel through the blood stream or the urinary tract and colonize other tissues, forming metastatic tumours. The new liquid biopsy technology has made it possible to capture tumour DNA circulating in the blood stream and to sequence it, however analyzing such data and identifying the spectrum of mutations in an individual patient will require new mathematical and computational approaches.
Brain disorders are among the most significant health problems of modern day with enormous medical, social and economic burdens in British Columbia, Canada and globally. There is a substantial gap between the burden of brain disorders and the resources available to treat them. Neurodevelopmental disorders are particularly devastating, placing a heavy emotional and economic burden on children and their families. A major challenge in tackling these disorders is the inability to obtain and study brain cells directly. New technologies which allow stem cells to be transformed into brain cells are starting to help overcome this hurdle.
By studying brain cells derived from human stem cells, Dr. Pouladi aims to
- understand how brain disorders develop and
- to identify new ways to treat them. A major focus of his studies are monogenic neurological disorders and in particular fragile X syndrome (FXS). FXS is the most common inherited form of intellectual disability and remains without effective treatments options.
The stem cell-based discovery platform established and knowledge gained as part of Dr. Pouladi's program have the potential to advance therapeutic development for not only FXS, but also other neurodevelopmental disorders.
