BC is facing a public health emergency due to the high number of overdose deaths. In 2017 alone, over 1,448 people died from drug overdose.
- According to BC Coroner’s services, 58 percent of overdose deaths occurred in private residences (e.g. garage, trailer homes) and 27 percent in other housing facilities (e.g. rooming house, hotel/motel, homeless shelter, single room occupancy (SRO), drug recovery house, halfway house, group home, senior residence). The number of deaths in these housing facilities have increased from 19 percent (2016) to 27 percent (2017).
- Coast Mental Health (CMH), which manages 37 housing facilities with approximately 4,000 residents across the Lower Mainland, have lost many residents due to overdose.
Staff at these facilities work closely with residents, creating an opportunity to provide support services. The UBC Addictions and Concurrent Disorders Group has partnered with CMH to facilitate implementation of evidence-based solutions within the housing facilities to prevent further overdose incidents. This partnership included gaining a better understanding, a clinical assessment of high-risk residents, and an opportunity to create a more appropriate service model.
Risk management of opioid overdose is complex and comes with risk factors spanning across health and social determinants of health. Communicating such complexities require knowledge exchange tools that engage and guide an individual through a logical pathway. This team will develop and distribute a 10-minute documentary that communicates the research evidence on the major risk factors of overdose fatalities and risk management strategies that housing facilities can implement.
The three major risk factors are unsupervised injection, concurrent disorders, and low opioid tolerance. This short documentary will be co-developed with CMH to engage housing providers through dynamic audiovisuals, narratives of those most affected by the overdose crisis, and animations. It will be distributed through a screening event and online channels (e.g. websites, YouTube, etc.). The knowledge acquired from this documentary will support non-profit housing organizations to integrate evidence-based risk management strategies into their practice to prevent further fatal and non-fatal overdose incidents.
Human papillomaviruses (HPV) can lead to cervical cancer and other anogenital, head, and neck cancers in both women and men. A safe and effective vaccine against the most common types of HPV associated with cancer was introduced in 2008 into BC’s exemplary school immunization program. However, rates of HPV vaccine uptake have remained low, with less than 70% of eligible students receiving the vaccine each year.
Evidence suggests parents are more likely to consent to an HPV vaccine for their child if they engage in a conversation with a trusted health care provider. Suggesting that simply leveraging existing public health infrastructure could improve HPV vaccine uptake to reduce the future burden of HPV related diseases.
Dr. Racey’s research will evaluate the implementation and impact of a tailored messaging intervention, delivered by public health nurses , to improve HPV vaccine uptake for grade 6 girls and boys in a rural community in BC. BC’s robust immunization registry and monitoring will allow the measurement of HPV vaccine uptake across comparable communities to assess the impact of the intervention.
The results of this research will be directly relevant to school-based immunization programs across BC and Canada, and could lead to or help inform future expansion of the intervention.
Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is a group of disorders characterized by fibrosis and inflammation of the lungs. Dyspnea (i.e., breathlessness) is the most common symptom in ILD. To minimize dyspnea, ILD patients commonly avoid physical activity, leading to a progressive decline in exercise capacity, and eventually the inability to perform daily activities. Maintaining exercise capacity is important, given that ILD patients with the lowest physical activity levels have the lowest quality of life and the highest mortality.
Unfortunately, treatment options for improving dyspnea and exercise tolerance in ILD patients are limited. It is thought that skeletal muscle dysfunction, which appears to be common in ILD patients, may contribute to dyspnea and exercise intolerance. However, few studies have adequately investigated skeletal muscle dysfunction in patients with ILD.
Relative to the inexorable damage to the lungs, the skeletal muscles could be an important site by which to therapeutically reduce dyspnea and improve exercise tolerance. Dr. Molgat-Seon’s research aims to determine the role of skeletal muscle dysfunction on dyspnea and exercise intolerance in ILD. The results of this research could lead to improved functional capacity and quality of life in ILD patients.
Dementia with Lewy bodies is the second most common form of dementia following Alzheimer’s disease. This disease can be challenging to identify because symptoms can resemble those of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and/or mental illness. Currently, there is no test that can spot dementia with Lewy bodies and the only way to confirm the presence of this disease is by autopsy.
In this type of dementia, deposits known as Lewy bodies accumulate in the brain. Lewy bodies are formed by a protein inside neurons called alpha-synuclein. Alpha-synuclein is also found in cerebrospinal fluid, which is the fluid surrounding the brain and spinal cord. While we know that alpha-synuclein in cerebrospinal fluid is helpful for distinguishing dementia with Lewy bodies from Alzheimer’s disease, further work is needed to improve this test.
The goal of Dr. Singh’s research program is to develop a test that can identify dementia with Lewy bodies and distinguish and the disease from Alzheimer’s. She will create a diagnostic tool for clinical use to measure alpha-synuclein, and also explore modifications of alpha-synuclein that occur in disease that could improve our ability to identify dementia with Lewy bodies.
Antibiotics revolutionized our medicine against pathogen infection. However, pathogenic bacteria have recently evolved resistance to multiple antibiotics, becoming a global health care risk. We urgently need to develop novel strategies to combat antibiotic resistance and develop evolution-proof antibiotics.
Dr. Han’s research will study and engineer enzymes that could be used as potential antibiotic reagents to degrade a key chemical molecule that bacteria utilize to develop virulence and resistance to antibiotics (biofilm formation). Specifically, Dr. Han will look to discover novel enzymes and perform detailed profiles of these enzymes to interpret their molecular mechanisms. Using state-of-the-art enzyme engineering and laboratory evolution techniques, he will engineer these enzymes for higher stability and functionality and demonstrate anti-virulence and anti-biofilm capabilities of these engineered enzymes, crucial for biotechnological and pharmaceutical applications.
This research program will provide the first mechanistic study of enzymes that disrupt the virulence of diverse pathogenic bacteria, and could have significant impact in the field. Most importantly, this research could provide novel and effective tools to control bacterial population and infection, crucial in the fight against the development of antibiotic resistance.
Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death. Comprehensive analysis of genomes has the potential to inform precise prostate cancer treatments. However, a major challenge of prostate cancer genomic analysis is the inaccessibility of metastatic tissue. Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) offer great potential as an alternative source of genetic material, which would enable the identification of the relevant mutations and aberrations that define prostate cancer subtypes.
Despite the tremendous potential of CTC genomics, there has been little progress in genotyping CTCs. This is due to the rarity of CTCs and their genetically heterogeneous population. Current methodologies have overcome this limitation by performing single-cell sequencing. However, existing methods for single-cell isolation require precise manipulations using contaminant-free tools, which are either extremely difficult to perform or are associated with unacceptable cell loss.
Dr. Choi’s research will look to develop a new method to rapidly target and select single CTCs based on their phenotypic profile. This method would enable both in situ immunostaining and single cell sequencing, which would provide important insights when interpreting data from genetic analysis.
The results of this research could be significantly beneficial in the development of personalized therapy, evaluation of anti-cancer drugs, and surveillance for disease recurrence.
Epilepsy is one of the most common brain disorders. The condition is characterized by uncoordinated brain electrical activity and recurrent seizures. Epilepsy patients may die unexpectedly with unknown cause, a phenomenon termed “sudden unexpected death in epilepsy” (SUDEP). SUDEP accounts for about 50% of deaths in individuals suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy in which severe seizures are followed by alterations in respiratory and cardiac functions.
The underlying mechanisms triggering SUDEP remain unknown. Using animal models of human disease and live brain imaging, Dr. Thouta’s research will work to define the specific brain regions that promote brain inactivity during SUDEP-like seizures. This will include testing novel anti-epileptic drugs as a potential preventative SUDEP agent.
The results of this research will provide an understanding of the cause of SUDEP and could have a significant impact on epilepsy drug development efforts, potentially leading to the discovery of novel therapeutics for SUDEP prevention.
Diarrheal disease affects 1.7 billion people every year, killing around 760,000 children. A leading cause of this disease are bacteria like enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC). EPEC’s ability to cause disease relies entirely on creating an environment in which it can thrive. EPEC achieves this by secreting “effector” proteins directly into human host cells, which rewire the human cell, allowing EPEC to take control of cell immune signalling. One way effectors work is by chemically modifying host proteins with phosphate groups (phosphorylation), which may alter how proteins interact with one another.
Dr. McCoy’s research will develop a method for studying the interaction between bacteria like EPEC and their human hosts. His preliminary data has shown that a group of drugs called bumped kinase inhibitors (BKIs) can block this interaction. Expanding on this, he will aim to reveal how EPEC uses phosphorylation to manipulate the human host and establish infection.
Allergic diseases are reaching epidemic proportions, now affecting 1 in 3 Canadians. Allergies are inappropriately high immune responses against innocuous allergens. Understanding why the immune system reacts in this way is crucial to identify new drug targets.
Proteases are enzymes that cut other proteins from allergenic sources, for example dust mites and mould. Proteases are potent triggers of allergic responses. However, an understanding of the proteins they cut and how they fit into the global picture of allergic responses is lacking.
Dr. Machado Hernandez’s research will work to identify the key proteins involved in allergic responses triggered by proteases, or cut by proteases, using an innovative and highly advanced technique known as “degradomics”—a method of uniquely identifying the cut ends of proteins by purifying them from the rest of the protein. As cuts are formed only during active disease, these segments are highly valuable as disease markers to develop new clinical tests and identify new drug targets.
The roles of these proteins and their cut products will be deciphered by biochemical and immunological studies to reveal the damaged proteins and proteases that can be targeted with new drugs to improve health outcomes and ensure sustainable health care costs.
Oxidative stress (OS) describes the occurrence of reactive oxygen species (ROS), chemicals that cannot be balanced by the body’s antioxidant defenses. OS can occur in every cell of the body and is linked to an increasing number of diseases.
Recently, several reports indicated the influence of OS on transient receptor potential (TRP) channels that are expressed in various cell types and involved in a broad array of functions. More recently, it was discovered that redox reagents can modulate the activity of TRPM3, a nociceptor channel, involved in the detection of pain and heat. TRPM3 is highly expressed in the brain, but no functional role has been established for TRPM3 in this area so far. However, the brain possesses a high oxygen content and diseases like epilepsy have been linked to the occurrence of OS.
Dr. Held’s research will investigate the role of TRPM3 in the brain and in brain-related diseases that induce oxidative stress. The outcome of this project will improve our understanding of TRPM3 function and its role in cell stress-inducing pathological conditions, which could help to develop new treatment options.
