The human gut is home to trillions of microbes that play a critical role in health and disease. My laboratory investigates common beneficial bacteria that colonize the intestinal mucus layer. While these bacteria offer benefits including improved metabolic health, they can also weaken the gut’s protective mucus barrier, leading to inflammation. We are using advanced genetic techniques to engineer probiotic strains that maximize health benefits, while maintaining gut safety. A major focus of our work is to engineer these bacteria as probiotics to promote healthy aging and longevity, and as innovative new types of vaccines. We are also working on strategies to modulate mucus degrading bacteria in the gut to combat graft-versus-host disease, a serious post-transplant condition. Using a combination of genetics, animal models, and bacteria isolated from human donors, we aim to contribute to the development of safe and effective microbiome-based therapeutics.
Program: Scholar
Understanding and exploiting the role of phagocyte mechanobiology in anti-tumor immunity
Cancer is the leading cause of mortality in British Columbia. Whereas the immune system has long been recognized as an effective protection against infections, recent breakthroughs have demonstrated that the immune system also has the capacity to control cancer progression. Thus, cancer immunotherapies are being developed as a new type of treatment that acts by boosting the natural capacities of the immune system and directing it to destroy tumors. Amongst the different types of cells composing the immune system, professional phagocytes have the unique capacity to eliminate cancer cells by engulfing and digesting them. Subsequently, they are able to activate other immune cells, called lymphocytes, to mount an immune response specifically directed against the tumor. However, new evidence suggests that mechanical cues and physical constraints prevent phagocytes from using their anti-tumor potential. The goal of this project is to understand how phagocytes sense, respond and utilize mechanical forces to overcome physical constraints, with the aim to harness these mechanisms to develop more effective cancer immunotherapies.
Characterizing metabolic biomarkers of drug response and precision treatment in triple-negative breast cancer
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is the deadliest breast cancer subtype, in part due to lack of targeted therapy. Therefore, there is a need to improve methods that determine if treatment is effective and to develop targeted therapies. Cancer cells reprogram their metabolism to enable tumour growth. In doing so, they release metabolites into blood and urine that can act as signals of tumour and treatment status, known as biomarkers. Rather than assessing treatment effectiveness months after therapy, measuring metabolite biomarkers may allow clinicians to determine response to therapy in real-time and early during treatment. Moreover, metabolite biomarkers can also indicate if a tumour is susceptible to specific treatment, thereby tailoring effective therapy to the individual patient. The proposed research program will determine how tumour metabolite biomarkers can indicate effective response and susceptibility to TNBC treatment. Ultimately, this work will contribute to validating metabolite biomarkers that can be used by clinicians to make informed patient care decisions and improve TNBC treatment.
The Road to Recovery Initiative (R2RI): A Prospective Evaluation of a Novel Program for the Delivery and Coordination of Addiction Care in a Canadian Setting
The consequences of substance use have had a devastating impact on British Columbia’s (BC) healthcare system. Since the declaration of the province’s public health emergency in 2016, over 10,000 British Columbians have died from an overdose. The lack of a coordinated addiction treatment system provincially is a significant contributor to BC’s present state. To address this, Providence Health Care is implementing the Road to Recovery Initiative (R2RI), an innovate model of care to address two aspects of BC’s addiction treatment crisis through: 1) increasing access to on-demand addiction care; and 2) reorganizing existing clinical services to support patients at every phase of recovery. The proposed Program of Research seeks to evaluate key health and social outcomes associated with the implementation of R2RI. Participants of this program will be followed for 5 years with data collection focused on: substance use, illness trajectory, community engagement, health care utilization, health risk behaviours, quality of life, overdose, and death. Knowledge gained through this research will identify outcomes associated with the provision of a coordinated addiction treatment system and will inform successful scale-up of this new approach.
Quantifying navigational impairments in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease
Our brain contains a ‘cognitive map’ of the external world that helps us navigate, and encode/retrieve memories. Dementias such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) degenerate these regions, causing well-known memory impairments and much less well-understood navigational impairments. My research program seeks to quantify how navigation is impacted in early AD in rodents and humans.
Young and older human participants will navigate a virtual reality maze. We will quantify how their errors in positioning and navigating scale when the complexity of the task is increased. We will perform similar experiments in rats navigating a physical maze, where we can additionally record neural activity. We will then extend the task to participants diagnosed with preclinical AD, and rodent models of AD. We will characterize the behavioural and neural correlates of early progression of AD, with the goal of finding a metric that is predictive of AD-induced cognitive impairment, and its underlying neural mechanisms.
Over 60,000 British Columbians currently live with dementia. A non-invasive and affordable test such as this will allow clinicians to perform early diagnosis, and start approaches that reduce symptoms and improve quality of life.
Innovating health promotion efforts in response to youth tobacco use
Today’s tobacco use landscape has shifted since the introduction of e-cigarettes, which have become highly popular amongst youth. Nicotine addiction, subsequent smoking, and increased heart and lung disease risk are some of the major concerns brought forward within the public health community in relation to e-cigarette use, with youth disproportionately at risk for these detrimental impacts. Compounding this new landscape of tobacco use include socio-environmental factors that impact use, including rapid advances in technologies (e.g., new social media platforms; smartphone applications). As a result, the new generation of tobacco users are not the same as previous generations, and efforts to protect young people from exposure to tobacco smoke and e-cigarette vapor must similarly shift to adapt to this new landscape. I am responding to this need through my program of research, whereby responsive, youth-driven evidence is being harnessed to develop youth-friendly tobacco control resources for delivery on their preferred digital platforms. Ultimately, this research will lead to optimal solutions to curb tobacco use and reduce tobacco-related disease, situating BC as a leader in adapting to tobacco use of today.
Improving health information interventions to foster vaccine confidence and cultural safety of vaccination services
From monkeypox to measles, vaccination is essential to controlling infectious disease. COVID vaccines alone saved approximately 20 million lives in the first year. However, barriers to vaccination—including inaccessibility, lack of confidence in vaccine safety or effectiveness, and distrust in those providing vaccination—threaten our ability to stop epidemics.
My program of research applies unique interdisciplinary expertise in information science and population health to investigate how we can use information to reduce vaccination barriers. Over the next 5 years I will conduct a suite of studies aiming to improve population health interventions focused on vaccine communication and surveillance.
Studying how people use information and how vaccine communication and surveillance affects people in real-life contexts will help us meet needs of co-parents who disagree about child vaccination, people deciding whether to get new vaccines, and members of marginalized groups targeted by vaccination campaigns. It will generate evidence on how technologies can best be used for identifying and sharing information with vaccine hesitant people. Ultimately, this knowledge will improve vaccine uptake and reduce disease burden and inequity.
BC REACH (BC Research on Equitable Adaptation to Climate and Health)
The flood, fire and heat events of 2021 brought the health impacts of climate change into focus for British Columbians. New public health interventions are required to support effective adaptation, but especially for the most impacted population groups. The BC-REACH (BC Research for Equitable Adaptation to Climate and Health) project is a mixed-methods research platform to build evidence on effective and equitable public health adaptation to climate change. The project’s goal is to equip public health practitioners and residents of British Columbia (and beyond) with new evidence and interventions to enhance their preparedness to a variety of climate change-related health risks. Working in partnership with applied health system partners, this research will ultimately lead to the co-development and evaluation of novel programs and policies that have multiple co-benefits for populations that may be more exposed or physiologically sensitive, or lack the capacity to adapt to a changing climate. By centring equity in this analysis, this research will build knowledge and capacity to reduce population-level health inequities by ‘climate proofing’ the future of the health system’s responses to a wide variety of climate and health risks.
Bridging the Gaps: A One Health Communications Framework for Mobilizing Knowledge at the Nexus of Human, Animal, and Environmental Health
Health is connected and collective. Connections across species and geographies promote the spread of infectious diseases. Collectively, humans, animals, and environments face shared health threats like climate change. This concept of ‘One Health’ is a valuable lens through which to identify actions that support a healthy world. Yet, One Health’s major strength is also its largest challenge as it relies on bridging disciplinary silos — veterinarians and doctors, policy makers and public health practitioners, scientists, and the public. My community-engaged research explores a framework for mobilizing information at this nexus of health. Working with policy makers, health practitioners, and communities, I will identify communication structures that can be deployed at regional scales and across sectors. By understanding community knowledge and perceptions of three One Health issues (chronic wasting disease, avian influenza virus, and rat-associated diseases), I will resolve how health messages can be strengthened to promote public participation in disease surveillance programs. Engaging with knowledge users at all levels will help to improve data collection, monitoring, and inform government decision making and timely action.
The SLeep solUtions to proMote Better Early childhood Relationships (SLUMBER) Program: Helping families optimize infant mental health by supporting sleep health in early childhood
Most parents struggle with their baby’s sleep in the first year. Severe and persistent sleep difficulties can harm parent-child relationships and infant and parental mental health. Parental education, individual consultations, and/or group sessions can help parents improve their baby’s sleep but parents are often overwhelmed with rigid or conflicting advice. Canadian families are diverse, and what works for one may not work for others. For example, a family may be impacted by depression, poverty, or both, and these intersecting factors will affect what educational content and delivery will work best. The SLeep solUtions to proMote Better Early childhood Relationships (SLUMBER) program will give families options to meet their specific needs to get everyone sleeping better. Each part of the program will be designed in partnership with parents. We will develop groups of program options (portfolios) and test them to see who, how, and why they help. This personalized approach will prevent and/or lessen sleep problems with the added benefit of supporting parent-infant relationships and infant mental health. Having a baby is stressful, and this research will support sleep as a foundational pillar of family mental health and well-being.