Health researchers at Western were awarded more than $8 million in funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in the latest Project Grant competition, announced this week.
In total, 10 Western research projects were funded at Schulich Medicine & Dentistry and the Faculty of Health Sciences ranging from evaluating new ways of looking at spinal cord injury to understanding how neuroimaging can improve diagnostics for Parkinson's disease. More than half of the projects included teams of researchers working together.
Overall, the Project Grant: Spring 2019 competition approved 382 research grants, plus an additional 21 bridge grants, for a total investment of approximately $275 million nationwide.
The program is designed to capture ideas with the greatest potential to advance health-related fundamental or applied knowledge, health research, health care, health systems, or health outcomes.
Funded projects included:
- Arthur Brown, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Evaluating inhibitors of CSPG synthesis in models of spinal cord injury, $986,850 over five years;
- Murray Junop, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Molecular Mechanisms of Non-homologous DNA End-joining Biochemistry, $845,326 over five years;
- Penny Macdonald and Ali Khan, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Advancing Clinically-Useful Diagnostic and Progression Markers of PD with Neuroimaging, $493,426 over five years;
- Jamie Mann, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Engineering HIV virus-like-particles (VLPs) for improved Env antigenicity and neutralizing antibody responses, $539,326 over five years;
- Carrie Anne Marshall, Abe Oudshoorn, Debbie Laliberte Rudman and Fiona Webster, Health Sciences, Designing a Model to Address the Needs of Persons with Mental Illness Following Homelessness in Two Urban Contexts: A Community Engagement Study, $175,951 over two years;
- John McCormick and Tina Mele, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Staphylococcus aureus at the commensalpathogen interface: the superantigen paradox, $1,090,126 over five years;
- Patrick O'Donoghue, Christopher Brandl, Amanda Moehring, and Martin Duennwald, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Pathways to neurodegeneration from natural human tRNA variation, $865,980 over five years;
- Christopher Pin, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Defining the role for ATF3 in recurrent pancreatic injury and PDAC, $761,176 over five years;
- Gary Shaw and Martin Duennwald, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Mechanisms of Ubiquitination in Neurodegeneration, $1,123,594 over five years; and
- Bradley Urquhart, Michael Zappitelli, Tom Blydt-Hansen and co-applicants, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Metabolomics for prediction of cisplatin mediated acute kidney injury: a Canadian multi-centre adult and pediatric study, $1,373, 176 over five years.
