CIHR funding announcement

Congratulations to the following members who received Spring 2020 CIHR funding. 

Dr. Jason Weatherald, MD, is the principal investigator for a project, “Establishing patient priorities for pulmonary hypertension research that received a $99,149 CIHR grant. The one-year project will catalyze a partnership between patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH), their caregivers, clinicians and researchers to set priorities for future research into the condition. The multi-site study is the first patient priority setting partnership for PH globally.

Dr. Tolulope Sajobi, PhD, is the principal investigator for IMPROVE CV Care (An Electronic System for Individualized Monitoring of Patient Reported Outcomes for Value and Effectiveness in Cardiovascular Care). The project received a $100,000 CIHR Patient-Oriented Catalyst Grant. The goal of the project is to develop an app or software to collect patient-reported outcomes and experiences to improve health care. The app will replace the current telephone and paper surveys.

Dr. Cathy Eastwood, PhD, is the co-principal investigator for a project with the goal of estimating the cost of transitioning from ICD-10 to ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases) in Canada. ICD is a standardized system of reporting disease around the world that is useful for predicting global health trends and for use in population health studies. Eastwood was also involved in creating ICD-11. The three-year study received a CIHR grant of $283,051 for the project, which involves interviewing directors of health information departments, members of Canadian Institute for Health Information, information technology companies and other stakeholders from across the country. In addition to developing a framework and formula for estimating transition costs of transitioning from the International, an outcome of the project will be a cost estimator tool that will be made available to other provinces and countries for planning purposes.

Dr. Leslie Skeith, MD, who specializes in women’s health and thrombosis, received a CIHR Early Career Investigator award for a study evaluating the complement system (part of the immune system) in pregnant women with antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). This rare disorder causes an increased risk of blood clots and is linked to miscarriages, pre-term deliveries and other serious pregnancy complications like pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome. Skeith says research has shown that the complement system is important in APS, but it is not known how this causes APS-related complications or how we can predict the variability we see in patient outcomes. Her multi-centre, multi-discipline study will compare pregnant women with and without APS with the goal of answering these questions. Skeith received a total of $210,000 from the CIHR, the Libin Cardiovascular Institute and the Dept. of Medicine at the Cumming School of Medicine for the three-year study, entitled “A prospective study evaluating complement activation among pregnant patients with obstetrical antiphospholipid syndrome.”

Dr. Sarah Childs, PhD, received a five-year, $795,600 CIHR project for “Probing molecular and mechanical signals that shape blood vessel growth.”