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Growing up in Columbia had a profound impact on Dr. Juan-Nicolas Pẽna-Sànchez. In this episode, hear why the former family physician pivoted, becoming Saskatchewan's lead in finding the best ways to treat Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis in rural and Indigenous patients.
Even as a teenager, Juan-Nicolás Peña-Sánchez could see stark differences in health for those who had medical coverage — and those without, thanks to his stepfather, an emergency department physician.
“I used to go with him sometimes on shifts to learn and shadow him,” said Peña-Sánchez said. “The healthcare system was quite fragmented and most of the population was not covered.”
In the 1990s, the Colombian healthcare system was reformed within the context of “neoliberal health reforms” promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, integrating privatization of the care delivery system, individual health insurance as the mechanism for receiving healthcare, the development of basic benefit plans, among other reforms.
“It changed the way to practice medicine,” said Peña-Sánchez, who observed among his stepfather and his medical school instructors’ grew dissatisfied with limits imposed under the new tiered coverage system.
Peña-Sánchez went on to work for non-governmental organizations in Bogotá, providing healthcare to individuals living in marginalized communities and with limited resources. After witnessing the inequities amplified by healthcare reforms, Peña-Sánchez began to analyze health systems themselves. He moved to Spain, Poland, and France to continue his graduate studies, and then to the University of Saskatchewan, where he joined the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology as an associate professor after researching physician satisfaction and alternatives to ‘fee-for-service’ payment models.
Still, Peña-Sánchez missed interacting directly with patients, and hearing their stories. Through the College of Medicine, he began learning about inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and moved his focus to innovative models of care for IBD.
Canada’s high prevalence of IBD, particularly Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, stood in stark contrast to his experiences in Colombia.
Dr. Peña-Sánchez formed the IBD among Indigenous Peoples Research Team after realizing in 2017 there was virtually no data on the incidence, prevalence or treatment of IBD for First Nations and Metis people.
“We learned that IBD is increasing among First Nations in Saskatchewan,” said Peña-Sánchez, who started zeroing in on disparities in those patients’ healthcare access and outcomes. Peña-Sánchez and his team explain their findings in this episode.
“Having that regular access is critical,” he said, advocating for innovative approaches to healthcare delivery.
Dr. Peña-Sánchez also explored the potential of virtual care, particularly telephone consultations, to improve healthcare access for rural populations. He found rural residents were more satisfied with telephone care compared to urban dwellers, an insight that underscores the need for adaptable healthcare models.
Currently, Dr. Peña-Sánchez is focused on patient navigation interventions to support individuals with chronic gastrointestinal conditions, particularly in rural Saskatchewan and for Indigenous community members. His research aims to improve access to specialized IBD care and patient outcomes through peer support and patient navigators.
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"When I got into medical school, the last thing in the world I wanted to be was a surgeon because I couldn't stand the sight of blood," said Dr. Mike Moser.
Fast-forward to the present day, where Moser is now one of Saskatchewan's top kidney transplant surgeons, winning last year's Golden Scalpel Award for Pre-clerkship Education, the 2022 Logan Boulet Humanitarian of the Year Award, and numerous teaching awards.
In this episode, the professor of general surgery at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Medicine takes us back to one pivotal day where everything changed, propelling forward his career in Hepato-pancreato-biliary (HPB) surgery and organ transplants
Moser’s research has pushed forward transplant science, and led to safer kidney biopsies. Along with interventional radiologist Dr. Chris Wall, Moser led the charge to bring NanoKnife technology to Saskatchewan. His team has now spent a decade using the tool to treat otherwise inoperable tumors.
The NanoKnife relies on irreversible electroporation (IRE) — using electrical pulses to create tiny holes in tumor cells, causing them to die without harming surrounding structures.
"I love making those little, elegant, tiny connections," said Moser, whose work focuses on destroying cancer cells, while preserving delicate tissue.
Those two interests led to collaborations with various departments, including biomedical engineering, as well as chemistry, immunology, and pharmacology.
Moser is most excited today to see IRE combined with immunotherapy, to enhance the body's immune response against cancer.
"It's like a killed cell vaccine situation because we've got these dead, helpless cancer cells. They're still exposing their proteins," said Moser.
Although the research is still in its early stages, Moser said the results so far show "great potential" in treating metastatic cancers.
"One could actually treat the area where the tumor started without directly treating it,” he said.
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As an undergrad, Daniel Fuller didn’t have a car, nor was he keen on taking the bus. “I rode my bike to university every day in the fall and then just kept on going and never stopped,” said Fuller, a former national and international canoe/kayak athlete. As he pedaled, Fuller watched the way people used trails, sidewalks and roads. “I really started to get into active transportation, how people move around cities and how we can get people active -- outside of the sport environment,” said Fuller, now an associate professor in Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan. Fuller moved to Montreal for his doctorate as the city launched its bicycle-taxi program. After the widespread installation of shared-use bicycles, Fuller observed no changes in collisions or crashes. However, a significant number of people started to combine biking with walking, and public transit. Fuller said Montreal succeeded because the city went big, launching more than 5,000 rental bicycles at 405 docking stations. “They work on network effects: people being able to find them, people being able to use them, and integrate them with their mobility,” said Fuller. His goal is to link active transportation in urban planning to measurable gains in public health outcomes. “If we implement a bike lane, how much health benefit is there? Or how many health dollars might we save? Because health care is our biggest expenditure provincially, and if we can save money on health, then that's really, really important.” For almost everyone, Fuller said five to ten more minutes of walking each day would be “extremely beneficial.” “It improves mental health, reduces depression, improves type 2 diabetes, improves chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and prevents certain forms of cancer,” he said. Technology plays a big role in Fuller’s work. From 2016-2022, he was a Canada Research Chair in Population Physical Activity at Memorial University, and he remains a Principal Investigator on the INTERventions, Research, and Action in Cities (INTERACT) team. He’s studied wearable devices to assess their accuracy, and how much they motivate people to stay physically active. “The jury's kind of out on that," said Fuller, who noted Fitbits and Apple Watches tend to give users an initial activity boost, which fades after a year or two. Instead, he said population density is far more effective in raising the number of minutes people move each day. Fuller said city planners rely on traffic counts to decide whether or not an intersection should be expanded or changed — but there’s virtually no information to accurately quantify sidewalk use, or the health costs of urban sprawl. As the co-principal investigator of the CapaCITY/É Healthy Cities Implementation Science Team, he’s trying to get a detailed handle on why some cities succeed with active transportation, while others struggle. "There’s a whole political hierarchy,” said Fuller. “Who's paying, how much are they paying, how fast does it have to happen, all these kinds of questions that we don't have good generalized kind of science about yet.”
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From the laboratory to saving lives, this episode brings together three outstanding researchers from the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of Anatomy, Physiology, and Pharmacology (APP) as they discuss their work and its implications for cardiac care. Dr. Michelle Collins, Dr. Scott Widenmaier, and Dr. Changting Xiao are all recent recipients of research grants from Heart & Stroke (formerly the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada). In Canada, one per cent of newborns have congenital heart defects. Thanks to advances in cardiac care, up to 85 per cent of these infants now survive to adulthood. Meredith Rhinas is one of those survivors. Diagnosed with aortic stenosis as an infant, by her thirties, she received conflicting guidance from cardiologists, and risked congestive heart failure giving birth. She underwent open-heart surgery to replace her aortic valve after delivering her fourth and final child, surgery that led to further complications caused by an oversized replacement valve. “That’s a piece that is missing,” said Rhinas, who said most heart attack protocols still skew toward older men -- often overlooking younger patients and women of childbearing age. “I want the research to catch up." In this episode Dr. Michelle Collins, an expert in the molecular basis of cardiac development and function, discusses her work on congenital heart defects, seeking to understand what makes a heart beat. With her lab’s focus on the movement of calcium ions and their role in heart function, Collins emphasizes the importance of understanding cardiac arrhythmias, particularly atrial fibrillation, which has traditionally been viewed as an electrical disease. “There’s a significant contribution from genes that are really early transcription factors that build the heart during development,” Collins said. Dr. Scott Widenmaier's work looks at the liver, an organ he has dubbed "the Amazon of our body", as it presents our first line of defence against stressors, which often are a precursor to heart disease. In this episode, Widenmaier explains how and why those stress defense mechanisms can be harnessed to prevent the conditions that lead to heart disease and stroke. "Things are happening way quicker, way faster, and the technology's there. The ability to find the genetic variants is there," Widenmaier said. "There's hope in that.” Dr. Changting Xiao, known for his innovative work on gut physiology and metabolism, explores the gut’s role in lipid processing and its implications for heart disease. "We want to understand how these enterocytes process the fat inside the cells," said Xiao. His research aims to identify druggable targets within the gut to correct lipid disorders and combat heart disease. Xiao passionately believes in the ancient wisdom that "all disease starts in the gut," asserting that a deeper understanding of gut functions can lead to breakthroughs in preventing and treating heart conditions. "Every small step we move forward looks small, but in the long run we build knowledge and we move forward," said Xiao. His laboratory is now one of only a handful worldwide specializing in being able to see both sides of nutrients entering and leaving the gut. With awards being administered through a rigorous national peer-review process, Carolyn Cyr praised Saskatchewan's researchers for rising to the top. She’s the province’s Director of Health Policy and Systems for Heart & Stroke. "It’s definitely something to celebrate,” said Cyr. "It's a testament to the excellent research they're doing and the high calibre of their applications that we have three researchers from the same department who are able to be funded.”
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"Pushing politicians to do what is good for the health of the people, there's no way around it," said Dr Jacob Alhassan.
Born and raised in a rural Ghanaian village, Alhassan grew up without electricty and paved roads. He watched women die in childbirth. He grew resentful of health systems that left the poorest people to fend for themselves, while the rich thrived.
Alhassan decided to take action.
At first, he thought he would study hard to become a local hospital administrator. Partway through his university years, Alhassan began to dream even bigger.
In this episode, he looks back at his arrival in Saskatoon, and how his trajectory to becoming an assistant professor of Community Health and Epidemiology was forever changed by provincial austerity measures that wiped out the Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC).
Billed as a cut that would save taxpayers $85 million dollars over five years, Alhassan studied Hansard and the full debate around the public transit network's closure. He found little evidence supporting the decision to cut it.
"We have a political system that is not necessarily arranged for the well-being of average people," said Alhassan, who still remembers travelling to towns and cities across Saskatchewan to interview people devastated by the closure of the intercity bus service.
He said the cuts "radically changed" some people's lives, in some cases shortening them. Losing the parcel service also cost the provincial health care system more, with patients delaying medical care, and pharmacists throwing out delayed and weather-damaged medication and vaccines.
"It's literally a might-makes-right sort of thing, where the most powerful people make decisions that deeply impact the lives of people who don't really have the voice to raise their concerns or to be heard," Alhassan said.
Today, Alhassan's looking more closely at health outcomes tied to public transportation, and their financial impact on taxpayers. He's also one of the academic co-leads of the University of Saskatchewan's Certificate in Global Health.
"You cannot do this type of work to improve people's health if you disconnect yourself from the politics," said Alhassan. "That's not going to happen if I kind of sit in the ivory tower and kind of disconnect myself from the political aspect of this. I strongly believe in that."
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Dr. Sabira Valiani was one of the frontline physicians working inside Saskatoon’s critical care units four years ago, during the initial lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It was really weird,” said Valiani.
Valiani said ‘a lot of light bulbs went off in my head’ amid the automated stillness of the unit, as she watched ventilators breathing for heavily sedated patients.
Covered in head-to-toe personal protective equipment, staff in the intensive care unit struggled to simultaneously treat patients, communicate with family members, and enforce hospital policies.
“Those patients aren’t talking to us,” Valiani said. “It was empty, it was overwhelming and it was disconnected all at the same time.”
Valiani has now spent seven years in critical care, a move that started with her enrolling in a critical care and ICU elective in Ottawa.
“I loved it. I loved on the medical side, how you could see the life support that you were giving a patient immediately have a physiologic effect and stabilize that patient,” she said.
Driven by her experiences during the pandemic, Dr. Valiani delved into research focused on improving patient and family experiences in the ICU. She collaborated with a multidisciplinary team and patient partners to understand the challenges faced by healthcare providers and families alike.
In this article for the Canadian Association of Critical Care Nurses, she and her colleagues examined the effect of visitor restrictions during the pandemic.
Valiani remembers tearful goodbyes, families gathered around screens, unable to hug or touch loved ones infected and dying with Covid-19.
"The family's role becomes significantly diminished,” she said. “So much of that was disrupted during that time."
In the months and years that followed, visitor restrictions relaxed, but Valiani noticed communication between families, patients and staff still felt awkward.
Valiani and her colleagues turned their lens last year to key moments for Canadians of diverse ethnicities during the critical care journey, in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia. The findings revealed the strain on healthcare providers playing multiple roles and families feeling disconnected from crucial information.
She estimates 30 per cent of Saskatoon’s ICU patients travel from remote communities, making it crucial to find ways to keep family members informed in a language they understand well.
“People kind of naturally turned towards communication technology in the pandemic,” said Valiani, noting a number of families cannot be present in-person during the day, as intensivists attend rounds.
Clear and open communication between patients, care providers and families is the key, Valiani said.
“What if we could use artificial intelligence or AI to just translate a medical progress note into an understandable family update?” Valiani asked.
“It doesn't have to be high tech, right? Like it can be a phone call.”
Together with the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation, Dr. Valiani now works at enhancing patient-family engagement through practical solutions. She emphasizes the importance of involving families in care decisions, acknowledging their unique expertise in understanding patients' wishes.
Her team presented its findings in 2022 at Toronto’s Critical Care Canada Forum.
“We have this cohesive approach to defining the problems,” said Valiani. “Now we can take this to decision makers and say….these are the things people living this experience actually want.”
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Daphne Yau can trace her interest in endocrinology back to a beta-cell physiology experiment during her master’s degree, working with laboratory mice with Type 2 Diabetes.
“It was the part of the pancreas that makes insulin,” she said. “It was fascinating. It also made me realize that maybe pure laboratory research wasn't quite for me."
From there, her interest in hormones and fluctuating blood sugar levels grew.
Yau is no stranger to medicine. Her mother was a pharmacist, while her father and aunt both worked as physicians. Following in their footsteps, Lou completed her pediatrics residency at Queen’s University, with fellowship training at McGill. She then focused on congenital hyperinsulinism at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital.
She still remembers her residency, and meeting a premature baby with a rare genetic disorder in neonatal intensive care.
“The blood sugars were horrendously low right from the start,” Yau said. “Their brain uses most of that glucose, so that's why it's so critical in that period that they get a steady supply.”
Together with an endocrinologist and a multi-disciplinary team, Yau and her colleagues traced back the root of the hyperinsulinism — the infant’s mother and grandmother also suffered from rare forms of diabetes.
Unregulated, plummeting blood sugar levels in infants can cause brain injuries and permanent neurological damage, Yau said.
“Your brain can't really store much in the way of glucose and it can't make it on its own the way some other tissues and organs in the body can,” said Yau.
“If you test a child who's had hypoglycemia when they're two or four, you may not actually pick up on this. Not till maybe later on, when they're in school and they're struggling.”
Yau joined the College of Medicine five years ago as a pediatric endocrinologist and assistant professor of pediatrics. Today, she’s based at the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital. Her research focuses on understanding and addressing congenital hyperinsulinism, as well as screening for diabetes and other metabolic disorders.
In this episode, Dr. Yau pointed to recent success with a project inspired by Dr. Mark Inman. Together, their team is trying to improve diabetes screening and education in northern Saskatchewan, particularly for Indigenous children and teenagers.
She said the heel prick hospitals often perform on newborns inspired them.
“Could someone at home prick their finger, put some few drops of blood on this card and have their A1C measured that way as opposed to having to go to the lab?” Yau said.
The results to date show promise, which could make it easier to screen young patients in remote communities for diabetes.
Yau is also working with researchers in the United Kingdom who study blood sugar dysregulation in infants, exploring alternative treatments and lower doses of medications such as diazoxide, to mitigate side effects.
“What are the levels we really should be targeting to minimize the potential for long-term harms?”
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Haissam Haddad inadvertently horrified his family when he signed up for engineering courses in his first year of university.
The teenager returned the next day to change his major to medicine -- a move he's glad he made.
Dr. Haddad practiced family medicine in Syria for three years, then arrived in Canada in 1986 to visit his wife's family, who urged him to stay.
Haddad faced an uphill battle when he investigated the possibility of becoming a Canadian doctor. One colleague even told him he’d be better off opening a Syrian grocery store.
“This gave me a lot of energy to prove him wrong,” said Haddad.
His early years in Canada were characterized by relentless perseverance, as Haddad confronted the arduous process of certification and integration into the medical system. He focused on learning English every weekday, picking up back-to-back twelve-hour shifts at a Halifax laundromat every weekend, to support his family.
“The first day it took me, like, almost 16 hours to read one page,” Haddad said. “I had no option to fail.”
After three years of English lessons and intensive studying, Dr. Sam Haddad earned a passing score on Canada’s medical licensing exam.
In this episode, Dr. Haddad recounts pivotal moments that steered him towards cardiology, including formative experiences in cardiac surgery during his residency at Dalhousie, which took place during the HIV epidemic.
“I’ve always liked the heart,” said Haddad. "I decided to do cardiology because it has less blood and less risk.”
Haddad’s dedication to improving patient outcomes through research soon became evident, as he tackled clinical gaps and treatment efficacy in heart failure management and heart transplant protocols.
“Almost on a weekly basis, you have a patient who did not respond to the usual treatment,” said Haddad. “This is the research question. How come this patient is not getting better?”
As his expertise grew, Haddad became one of only two Canadian cardiologists who were part of the National Institutes of Health Heart Failure Network. His patients took part in clinical trials that led to significant advancements.
“A lot of our patients didn't have private insurance,” Haddad said. “We can do a lot of work to help patients who are not able to buy their own medication."
Haddad led the cardiac transplant and heart failure programs at the University of Ottawa’s Heart Institute, exponentially increasing the number of transplants performed. At the same time, he said at cardiovascular medicine was making revolutionary strides with artificial hearts and improved anti-rejection medications.
When he began, half of heart failure patients died within a year. Now, over 90 per cent survive.
After moving to Saskatoon to become Saskatchewan’s Provincial Head of Medicine in 2016, Haddad continued his clinical practice, taking on leadership roles in medical education and research.
Instrumental in recruiting almost half of the specialists practicing in Saskatchewan today, Haddad also established the University of Saskatchewan Cardiovascular Research Group, fostering a collaborative environment for innovative research initiatives.
Last year, Dr. Haddad was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada..
“Nothing comes easy,” said Haddad. “You have to work hard. You have to fail multiple times before you're successful.”
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In this episode, we meet Dr. Stacey Love, Director of Virtual Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation at Saskatchewan's Virtual Health Hub, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan's School of Rehabilitation. She's also involved with the Saskatchewan Centre for Patient Oriented Research.
You can see more of her recent publications here, along with links to her labs:
Musculoskeletal Health and Access to Care: https://cchsa-ccssma.usask.ca/mhac/
Virtual Care and Remote Presence: https://research-groups.usask.ca/remote-presence/index.php#Healthcare
Stacey Lovo remembers the bitterly cold day in December 2012, when two Indigenous women from northern Saskatchewan stepped off the bus in Saskatoon. One had traveled 12 hours, the other seven, both to see physiotherapist Stacey Lovo for back pain.“It was a big undertaking for them,” said Lovo. She said one woman was forced cut her appointment short, to catch the last bus returning north.
The other woman stayed in Saskatoon to treat spinal pain stemming from what Lovo characterized as a ‘very difficult and scary problem.’
“This was devastating for many reasons,” said Lovo who remembered her patient was distraught, unable to return home to care for her young children.
That glaring disparity in healthcare access propelled Dr. Lovo into action. She returned to the classroom, and earned her PhD in Rehabilitation Science, specializing in low back disorders.
“If you're rural and remote resident or if you're Indigenous, your chances of having back pain are 30 percent higher than an urban person who's non-Indigenous,” said Lovo.
Lovo said long waits for care and spending up to twelve hours in a vehicle to attend a one-hour physiotherapy consultation often aggravate spinal damage — rather than healing it.
“When we're traveling that distance, we're undoing everything that's done in the session,” she said.
Working closely with people in Pelican Narrows and the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, Dr. Lovo began testing virtual consultations and in-person treatments, advocating for a hybrid model of healthcare.
"These projects are all community driven,” she said. “They’re led and driven by the strengths and knowledges from the communities."
Her team’s innovative use of Remote Presence Robotics in partnership with local nurse practitioners in Pelican Narrows demonstrated a successful model of team-based virtual physiotherapy, connecting patients hundreds of kilometres away from health providers with care.
Local health providers are the key, Lovo said.
“Taking reflexes and testing for sensation and muscle strength are done by the nurse on the other side,” said Lovo. “They have incredible rapport with the patients. They know their families.”
When the pandemic amplified the need for virtual care, Dr. Lovo, Dr. Brenna Bath and Dr. Lovo's graduate students met the challenge with innovation.
Participants in her back pain study reported their outcomes were noticeably better. Many asked to continue with more treatments.
Dr. Lovo's work goes beyond healthcare delivery; it is a commitment to fulfilling treaty obligations and ensuring equitable healthcare access for Indigenous Peoples.
“Canada's promise to First Nations peoples was that medical care would be taken care of, and so we are working with communities to try things out that will allow us to provide it,” she said.
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Dr. Angelica Lang knows most of the people she sees have to keep working, even if they have shoulder pain.
As an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan and director of the Musculoskeletal and Ergonomics Lab at the Canadian Centre for Rural and Agricultural Health, Lang’s goal is to reduce that pain — keeping patients on the job.
“A lot of daily life has to be done with your hands,” she said. “The base of that is your shoulder. It allows you to position your hand in all these different ways.”
Lang knows the importance of movement. She grew up in Melfort, Sask., playing hockey, soccer, volleyball, along with track and field. A Huskies track athlete, she found her calling in kinesiology, leading her to a specialization in the clinical biomechanics of the shoulder.
Her passion for understanding the shoulder, a joint unique in its movement and demands, drove her towards an MSc in Biomechanics under Dr. Clark Dickerson, a shoulder expert.
"This combines math, which I already liked, with movement, which I'm really getting into," she said. “How you perform your work, how you get injured at work, or how a different disorder might influence your movement, and then cause a functional problem.”
Lang said at least 40 per cent of people who suffer from a rotator cuff injury still endure shoulder pain up to a year later. That pain can cause sleep issues, and eventually it becomes unsustainable.
“My question is, does it matter how long you’ve had pain?” she said. “Is it the way that they move that’s setting them up to not necessarily get better?”
Her laboratory is one of the first to look at the time elapsed since an initial injury, and the role of ongoing shoulder pain as a confounding or influencing factor in that patient’s recovery.
“Once the pain happens, there's some sort of compensation to avoid these painful positions,” said Lang, whose research team is studying 60 people from Saskatoon and rural Saskatchewan, to assess differences in shoulder pain.
A significant part of Lang's work involves the musculoskeletal health of breast cancer survivors, particularly those who’ve undergone mastectomies and reconstructions.
"It's fairly well documented that breast cancer survivors have upper limb dysfunction after their treatment,” Lang said. “I’m interested in what that means for their functional abilities.”
Participants in those studies often make periodic trips to Saskatoon, for assessments at the Musculoskeletal and Ergonomics Lab at the Canadian Centre for Rural and Agricultural Health.
In this episode, Lang shows us the “Rotopod” farm equipment simulator, designed to simulate the seated position farmers often stay in for long hours during seeding, spraying and harvest.
Her team examines movement and biomechanics in agricultural settings, particularly how whole body vibrations from machinery affect farmers. They use advanced motion tracking systems, like the Vicon motion capture system and Inertial Measurement Units, to study body movement in various scenarios, both in the lab and when research crews drive to farms and mines across Saskatchewan, to observe work duties in the field.
Last summer, her team visited farmers on the job near Aylesbury, Biggar, Clavet, and Debden, Saskatchewan. They tracked their movement as they performed five tasks, including using an overhead drill, lifting a shovel, climbing and dumping a heavy bag, and pruning a shrub. Lang and a pair of graduate students watched farmers put cattle through a squeeze chute — a task that can be challenging for both the operator and the animal.
“It’s something we never would have been able to measure had we only had them come to the lab,” said Lang. “By being able to be specific to their job and make the recommendations specific to farming demands, hopefully that will help.”
Throughout the conversation, Dr. Lang credited her team and colleagues for their contributions and stressed the significance of combining different fields of study to advance understanding and treatment of musculoskeletal disorders.
“That’s motivating to me as a researcher," said Lang. "The people that we're working with, they see the value in what we're doing, they support us."
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Dr. Munier Nour said osteoporosis is often seen as a disease that affects older adults. But compared to their peers, kids with Type 1 diabetes grow into adults eight times as likely to suffer bone fractures.
“Osteoporosis may actually have its origins during pediatric years,” he said. “Because Type 1 diabetes occurs so early in life ….. it influences that bone development that occurs during your peak growth.”
Now, Nour is a co-lead on a national team trying to figure out why.
The pediatric endocrinologist has always taken a logical approach to problem-solving. When he first enrolled at the University of Calgary, he took engineering courses, in case medicine didn’t work out.
Nour was accepted to medical school, where he found himself drawn to both pediatric intensive care and internal medicine, until one last-minute elective.
In this episode, Nour credits his supervisor, retired University of Calgary professor Dr. David Stephure, with changing his mind.
“It certainly wasn’t on my radar at all,” said Nour. “He was just a wonderful mentor. I think he really kind of sparked quite an interest and passion to pursue pediatric endocrinology.”
Nour completed his fellowship at the University of Calgary, along with his medical doctorate and master's degree in biomedical sciences. He completed his pediatric residency at Queen’s University, then joined the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine in 2014. He spent his first year as the province’s lone pediatric endocrinologist.
Since then, the associate professor has embarked on a mission to understand why children with Type 1 diabetes exhibit a higher risk of impaired bone health and osteoporosis than their peers.
Nour said although it’s often overlooked as an endocrine organ, bone is ‘quite dynamic’, playing a crucial role in hormonal regulation.
“Some hormones produced by bone include things like fibroblast growth factor-23 (FGF23), which has a lot to do with our phosphate metabolism. As well, there's another hormone called osteocalcin, which actually has quite a role in diabetes as well,” said Nour.
Today, he and Dr. Saija Kontulainen are overseeing the Canadian Bone Strength Development in Children with Type 1 Diabetes Study: a national longitudinal study.
Using a grant of $1,352,140 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and with help from Diabetes Canada, they’re evaluating differences in bone development between children with Type 1 diabetes and their peers.
Dr. Nour said they’ll recruit up to 210 boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 12, tracking them over three years with annual bone health assessments. The study includes Saskatchewan patients, along with pre-teens in Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa.
Using high-resolution peripheral quantitative CT scans (HR-pQCT), hormonal measurements, muscle strength testing, bone density scans, and force plate tests, his team will assess key markers and differences in bone micro-architecture as the preteens’ radius and tibia grow.
“There's even fairly advanced engineering techniques that can be used to kind of simulate a fracture load and see when that bone would actually fail," said Nour.
Dr. Nour hopes this research will lead to interventions for children with type 1 diabetes that potentially strengthen their long-term bone health.
“So little is understood right now about what is different and why,” said Nour. “What can we do to prevent it?”
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In the heart of the Health Sciences Building, Dr. Amanda Hall studies a tray of organoids under a microscope.
“They do need a lot of attention and a lot of feeding,” she said, pointing to dot-like points in a gel solution.
The pediatric surgeon and assistant professor of pediatric general surgery will use those dots to identify factors that help infants overcome short gut syndrome.
The rare condition affects roughly 24 in every 100,000 babies born in Canada, presenting a profound challenge for infants born with insufficient intestinal length or compromised absorptive capacity.
“It’s a very, very long, difficult road,” said Hall. “Often they’re stuck in hospital and there’s no progress happening, so definitely [families] want another option.”
Hall’s interest in medicine dates back to the late 1990s in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, and a family TV with three channels. In elementary school, she remembered faithfully recording the reality show Life’s Little Miracles, where a camera crew followed patients at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.
“They’d actually go into the operating room and film the surgeries, which was amazing,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to do.”
After she was accepted to the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine, Hall met Dr. Grant Miller and Dr. Gordon Zello during her second year of residency. To become a pediatric surgeon, she had to earn her master’s degree, and Miller took the graduate student under his wing, focusing on parenteral nutrition-associated liver disease in infants.
“I just loved research,” said Hall. “I loved the struggle, the unending nights of work, then finally that amazing feeling when you see numbers that make sense.”
It was the beginning of Hall’s deep-dive into the intricacies of the human gut.
Right now, half of infants diagnosed with short gut syndrome get better on their own, with the help of intravenous nutrition. A few undergo complex bowel transplants, but close to 38 per cent succumb to the disease.
“They would have what we call failure to thrive,” said Hall. “They don’t gain weight, they have uncontrollable diarrhea, they might have vomiting.”
In this episode, Hall takes us inside her lab to meet her miniature, spherical organs, cultivated from stem cells, mimicking the intricate structure of the human intestine.
“Definitely you become attached to them. They require a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of expense,” Hall said.
Hall is exploring the potential benefits of breast milk and probiotics in encouraging growth inside these mini intestines. From there, she hopes to identify specific components that could accelerate the recovery of infants suffering from short gut syndrome.
“We know that breast milk …. helps with our immune function, helps with the actual integrity of the bowel. I’m curious to know does it actually help the bowel grow faster?”
For families grappling with the challenges of short gut syndrome, Hall's work offers a beacon of hope.
“The idea of finding a universal cure is not very realistic,” said Hall. “But if we can start identifying different factors to help and improve the process, that’ll be very important.”
She says a multitude of factors affect short gut syndrome, and some drugs are already in development.
“There’s definitely hope on the horizon,” she said.
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Valerie Verge was in her early twenties when she landed her first job, doing neuroscience research and she loved it. But 43 years ago, her research journey began to take a twist.
"I developed an allergy to rats and mice,” she said. “I was using a box of Kleenex a day.”
She reluctantly had to admit that this may not be her career path, and spent her evenings earning a ‘back-up plan’ degree in computer programming at McGill. She refused to give up laboratory work, and went on with her colleagues to code and create an in house computerized image analysis system that was not readily available commercially or affordable.
“That was huge back then,” she said. “It came in very, very handy because we were able to integrate images on our microscope with computers and quantitatively analyze them.”
As her allergies gradually lessened, Verge stayed in the lab and earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill in 1990, then moved to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm for post-doctoral studies. By 1992, she followed her heart to the prairies, and found ‘wonderful opportunities’ for research at University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine and soon after in a new UofS MS focussed research centre in Saskatoon City Hospital.
Today, she’s a professor of anatomy, physiology and pharmacology, and the director of the Cameco MS Neuroscience Research Centre, with expertise converging on a singular goal — finding innovative ways to repair the nervous system.
Her recent peripheral nerve repair collaboration with Dr. Ming Chan from the University of Alberta Department of Medicine and Dr. Gillian Muir, Dean of the UofS Western College of Veterinary Medicine explores acute intermittent hypoxia (AIH) This non-invasive therapy involves breathing controlled alternating cycles of regular air and air with reduced oxygen levels.
"It sounds horrible! But it’s not like having a stroke, where you can have zero oxygen,” said Verge. “This is more like just taking it down by a percentage to a level that induces a beneficial stress response.”
The rationale behind AIH lies in its ability to trigger repair responses. By subjecting the body to a mild, controlled stressor, the therapy aims to activate repair mechanisms that can be beneficial for nervous system repair. Dr. Verge's work involves investigating the impact of AIH on repairing peripheral nerves, outside of the brain and spinal cord and more recently, extending this therapy to investigate repair and neuroprotection in a model of multiple sclerosis.
In a female mouse model of progressive multiple sclerosis, Verge said graduate student Nataliya Tokarska observed an 80 per cent reduction in inflammation levels after just once daily treatment with the AIH protocol for one week
“They’re supposed to only get worse. Even two weeks after ending treatment, they’re still showing improvement,” said Dr. Verge, noting regions with lesions transitioned to a state of ‘advanced’ myelin repair; axons were being remyelinated and the immune response was dramatically decreased and shifted to a pro-repair state .
“It’s an extremely robust repair response like I’ve never seen in my 43 years of doing research.”
Verge said the technique has already helped patients with spinal cord injuries. In humans it does not raise their blood pressure or heart rate or induce memory loss.
Unlike invasive procedures, such as electrical nerve stimulation (ES), the entire body is exposed to AIH. Verge and her team are now building on previous ES findings, showing intermittent low oxygen therapy behaves in a similar favourable manner repairing damaged and severed nerves in animal models.
Grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and MS Canada allow the research team to transition from pre-clinical rat work to human trials in carpal tunnel syndrome, and one day even multiple sclerosis patients. This marks a crucial step toward validating the efficacy of AIH in repairing the nervous system.
“It’s a pleasure to see things come full circle,” said Verge, who said her role now is to inspire and share insight with the next generation of neuroscientists.
“We’re very, very hopeful for the future.”
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Dr. Evyn Peters has created pivotal changes for patients arriving at Royal University Hospital's mental health short stay unit, and its emergency department.
With 33 publications and interests spanning psychiatry, psychopharmacology and mood disorders, Peters is often one of the first physicians patients see when they’re experiencing a mental health crisis.
Peters was finishing his residency at RUH and the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine in 2017, when he and his colleagues first proposed ketamine for short-stay patients who had tried multiple antidepressants without success.
After studying best practices in other centres, Peters and his colleagues developed a protocol to treat patients with a ketamine nasal spray. His patients stay conscious, and don’t need an intravenous catheter or intensive cardiorespiratory monitoring.
“Not only does it work very quickly but it is twice as effective roughly as your conventional anti-depressants. And what’s more impressive is that it’s being used for patients typically who’ve failed to respond to anti-depressants in the past,” Peters said.
“It certainly is a cost-effective treatment.”
Until 2020, the only other option for hospitalized patients who didn’t respond to other drugs was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Hospitals in Saskatchewan sometimes struggle with backlogs, with patients waiting weeks for ECT. A psychiatrist and anesthetist and nurses must oversee the procedures, including treatments which typically stretch over another four weeks.
“That’s a long time in hospital,” said Peters. “You can get a similar response rate with one or three or four ketamine treatments every second day in about a week in hospital here.”
Peters was the lead author on the 2023 article Intranasal racemic ketamine for patients hospitalized with treatment-resistant depression: A retrospective analysis, published earlier this year in the journal Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, together with his University of Saskatchewan psychiatry colleagues Dr. Katelyn Halpape, Dr. Isaac Cheveldae and Dr. Annabelle Wanson.
His patients, on average, were taking 3.5 psychiatric medications when they were admitted. His team made a point of not requiring patients to wean themselves off other anti-depressants during their treatment with ketamine.
“We have a response rate in the hospital here of about 65 per cent, which is what you see in other treatment centres” said Peters. “The vast majority of those patients, about 75-80% get discharged immediately after that treatment.”
He said the rest of his patients often face other health and life circumstances complicating their discharge, such as homelessness. On top of that, ketamine is not suitable for anyone who’s recently had a heart attack, stroke, blood pressure issues, or who has schizophrenia.
“The goal was just to get it in use, because it was needed,” said Peters. “Now we can answer some of these questions about why does it work, and for whom does it work the best?”
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By the end of her Grade Eight year in Saskatoon, Wendie Marks was sure about one thing: she knew she wanted to study health and the way early-life development affected the human body.
“I spent a lot of time in the library reading books,” Marks said. “I was always kind of the nerdy type.”
Marks enrolled at the University of Saskatchewan and thrived, earning her PhD in psychology. Her interests evolved towards behavioural neuroscience, focusing on the mechanisms behind behaviour, stress, and their effects on mental and physical health.
“I wanted to make new knowledge. I wanted to be on the cutting edge of finding new pathways that might be involved in anxiety, or depression,” she said.
Under the direction of Dr. Lisa Kalanchuk, Marks looked at stress and depression, during her graduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan. From there, her post-doctoral research veered into epilepsy models at the University of Calgary. Still, Marks’ passion for understanding stress and its intergenerational effects never wavered.
When she returned to the University of Saskatchewan last year as an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Marks steered her research toward investigating stress's effects on health and chronic disease.
This summer, she was appointed as a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Origins of Health and Disease in Indigenous People. Over the next five years, she plans to study the way life experiences, particularly stress and nutrition during pregnancy and early years, can have long-term effects on an individual's health and well-being.
This research isn't just academic for Dr. Marks; it's deeply personal.
Marks is a member of the Asnishinabe of Wauzhushk Onigum First Nation, near Lake of the Woods, Ontario, but she was born and raised in Saskatoon. Her mother and her siblings survived both residential school and the “60s Scoop”.
“The whole family was split up. There are aunts and uncles I’ve never even met,” said Marks. "I've seen within my family firsthand the effects that those stressors have played on people, and the effects those things can have on families.”
Today, Marks credits her academic and research career to her mother’s unwavering support, encouragement and resilience.
"She's one of the strongest people I know,” said Marks.
In this episode, Marks explained she’ll study stress in two different ways. First, she plans to use a multi-generational rat model to study the consequences of early-life stress by separating mothers from their pups. She’ll also model malnutrition by reducing the mother’s protein intake.
Her goal is to measure each set of stressors separately, then assess whether they have a deeper effect combined.
“Being hungry or exposed to stress when you're younger, chronically, it's possible that it can rewire your stress circuitry,” said Marks, who noted that is the case in numerous animal models.
Her team will investigate how these factors can lead to physiological and cognitive changes, particularly in obesity and brain circuitry.
In the second stage of her research, Marks will observe health conditions in those rats’ descendants, and propose potential treatments.
‘There's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that stress and the gut microbiome are linked together and affect our health later on in life,” Marks said.
Ultimately, Marks hopes to apply the findings from animal studies to real-world situations within Indigenous communities, and help them come up with preventive strategies.
She hopes to bridge the gap between knowledge and action, ultimately improving the health and well-being of Indigenous communities for generations to come.
"Knowledge itself is powerful," Marks said. “The hope is that with this research we begin to find some of the answers and some of the solutions to decolonize Indigenous communities.”
Her work is a testament to resilience, hope, and the profound impact of science in healing intergenerational trauma.
“It’s a significant motivator for my research,” Marks said. “What can I contribute to try to make our world a better place?”This summer, she was appointed as a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Origins of Health and Disease in Indigenous People. Over the next five years, she plans to study the way life experiences, particularly stress and nutrition during pregnancy and early years, can have long-term effects on an individual's health and well-being.
This research isn't just academic for Dr. Marks; it's deeply personal.
Marks is a member of the Asnishinabe of Wauzhushk Onigum First Nation, near Lake of the Woods, Ontario, but she was born and raised in Saskatoon. Her mother and her siblings survived both residential school and the “60s Scoop”.
“The whole family was split up. There are aunts and uncles I’ve never even met,” said Marks. "I've seen within my family firsthand the effects that those stressors have played on people, and the effects those things can have on families.”
Today, Marks credits her academic and research career to her mother’s unwavering support, encouragement and resilience.
"She's one of the strongest people I know,” said Marks.
In this episode, Marks explained she’ll study stress in two different ways. First, she plans to use a multi-generational rat model to study the consequences of early-life stress by separating mothers from their pups. She’ll also model malnutrition by reducing the mother’s protein intake.
Her goal is to measure each set of stressors separately, then assess whether they have a deeper effect combined.
“Being hungry or exposed to stress when you're younger, chronically, it's possible that it can rewire your stress circuitry,” said Marks, who noted that is the case in numerous animal models.
Her team will investigate how these factors can lead to physiological and cognitive changes, particularly in obesity and brain circuitry.
In the second stage of her research, Marks will observe health conditions in those rats’ descendants, and propose potential treatments.
‘There's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that stress and the gut microbiome are linked together and affect our health later on in life,” Marks said.
Ultimately, Marks hopes to apply the findings from animal studies to real-world situations within Indigenous communities, and help them come up with preventive strategies.
She hopes to bridge the gap between knowledge and action, ultimately improving the health and well-being of Indigenous communities for generations to come.
"Knowledge itself is powerful," Marks said. “The hope is that with this research we begin to find some of the answers and some of the solutions to decolonize Indigenous communities.”
Her work is a testament to resilience, hope, and the profound impact of science in healing intergenerational trauma.
“It’s a significant motivator for my research,” Marks said. “What can I contribute to try to make our world a better place?”
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When Justin Botterill first arrived at the University of Saskatchewan, he took what he described as a 'shotgun approach' to choosing classes.
Midway through his second year, his psychology professors introduced him to neuropsychology, and to psychiatric and neurological disorders.
He was hooked.
Botterill soon began working with rodent models, later focusing on the hippocampus and pathways involved in forming memories and spatial navigation.
"The hippocampus is widely implicated in a variety of neurological as well as psychiatric disorders," said Botterill. "It's a really important and critical structure."
After completing his PhD in cognition and neuroscience at the University of Saskatchewan, Botterill went on to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Dementia Research at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in New York, then at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
In January, he was hired as an assistant professor at Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Medicine.
Today, he's setting up his laboratory and hiring researchers to help examine the dentate gyrus, its granule cells and the diverse roles mossy cells play across the hippocampus.
"Several lines of research over the last five or ten years have really shown that [mossy cells] contribute to a lot of important functions. That's why they're very exciting to study," said Botterill. "It's a really interesting feedback loop."
He said mossy cells are not a single homogenous group of neurons.
"Although historically mossy cells have been treated as a single class of neurons in the hippocampus, several lines of research suggest they differ in their gene expression, morphology, physiological properties, and anatomy," he said.
"No one's really investigated these potential subcategories of mossy cells at a deep level yet."
In this episode, Botterill explains the role mossy cells in the dorsal hippocampus play in spatial and cognitive functions. He said those in the ventral hippocampus show strong links to emotions such as anxiety.
He also is looking at the role these excitatory cells play in Temporal lobe epilepsy, a disease characterized by seizures, along with debilitating cognitive and behavioural effects.
"One in three people with epilepsy don't respond to medication," said Botterill, who said he's hoping to focus on translational research in this area.
Botterill hopes to better identify the cells, circuits and proteins inside the dentate gyrus that generate seizures. Alongside researchers including John Howland and Robert Laprairie, he's hoping to eventually test new therapeutics on these target areas, to see which ones best prevent or reduce seizure activity.
"Can we develop treatments that would improve care for individuals, reduce the severity of their seizures, and allow them to lead healthier lives?"
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When Bruce Gordon's relatives descend on Saskatoon this month, his wife will put them to work.
Bruce Gordon was a police officer and a lawyer, who competed as a triathlete and in the Crossfit Games. He was a fierce competitor until he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer at age 54.
Hear his story in Episode 43.
After Bruce died in 2017, Chris Gordon became one of the chief organizers of the 'Be Like Bruce' fitness festival -- an athletics-driven fundraiser for pancreatic cancer research that's now raised more than $60,000 dollars in his memory.
"A lot of Bruce's family are coming this year to help out. I will have a house full of wonderful guests and I have jobs for them," said Gordon. "I even have a niece that lives in Vancouver who just started triathlon and she's coming to do it."
The festival is also recruiting dozens more volunteers, to keep athletes safe during each event.
The action begins on June 16, 17 and 18 with events at both Crossfit 306, and Riversdale Pool in Saskatoon. There's also a raffle, and merchandise available online.
In this episode, Chris explains why she chose to funnel donations from the fitness festival to the University of Saskatchewan's College of Medicine.
"100% of our donations go to the research," said Gordon. "There's no administration costs, and that to me was a deciding factor."
Earlier this year, Dr. Andrew Freywald and Dr. Franco Vizeacoumar published their 'one-two punch' treatment findings in Clinical Cancer Research. They've collaborated to create a new drug—a bi-specific antibody that targets two key receptors at once.
It's effective in treating triple negative breast cancer and pancreatic cancer in mice, and its creators hope to see it advance to clinical trials over the next five years.
"I just feel like I'm part of that team," said Gordon.
She said if you're not competing at the fitness festival, making a small individual donation still pushes forward pancreatic cancer research at the University of Saskatchewan .
"It may not seem like a lot of of money, it's not millions and billions of dollars, but it makes a huge difference for these researchers," said Gordon. "This is where our money needs to be."
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Midway through his undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, a laboratory 'help wanted' poster caught Jeff Dong's eye.
He applied, gaining invaluable practical experience that summer in Stephanie Borgland's lab.
"She really supported me in understanding what research is about," said Dong, who went on to complete his PhD through UBC's Department of Microbiology and Immunology, moving to Calgary for post-doctoral work at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute. "That process was really exciting for me."
He accepted a faculty position last year as an assistant professor in the University of Saskatchewan's Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology & Immunology.
Dong is fascinated by macrophages: white blood cells that serve as the immune system's warning system and clean-up crew.
He tracks the way they work in the brain and spinal cord, focusing on how they slip into states of dysfunction with age, and with stress.
"They're the first line of defence," said Dong. "The microglia will go and say, 'okay the cell has died, let me clean this up.' Or if there's the release of something toxic, the cell will say, 'oh, there's something happening here, let me check it out."
With age though, our microglia aren't always as diligent.
"As a cell becomes older, it can forget what it's supposed to do," said Dong.
Dong recently received support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to look more closely at macrophages.
"What are the specific mechanisms or signaling that occur on the macrophages, and how does this lead to their ability to remove or to react against these oxidized lipids?"
He said patients with spinal cord damage, and diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis often endure similar breakdowns.
Dong's work, Oxidized phosphatidylcholines identified as potent drivers of neurodegeneration in Multiple sclerosis, won a Brain Star Award last year from Canada's MS Society and the Canadian Institutes of Health Information. He's also won the MS Society's Catalyst grant for early-career researchers.
"That's a pilot project where we're looking to generate some novel tools and new animal models to study a protein, a molecule we call 'osteopontin'," said Dong. "We think it may be a player in terms of making MS disease worse with age."
In this episode, he talks about macrophage longevity, as well as cellular changes caused by Multiple Sclerosis.
"How long has the cell been responding against the damage, and how old is the cell itself?" said Dong. "They both contribute to the progression."
He's also testing different models, to see whether higher levels of fitness makes cells more resilient against oxidative stress.
"Hopefully we'll have answers in a year or two," he said.
Dong admits he chose the University of Saskatchewan because of its strength in MS research, and because there are so many young biomedical scientists.
"The university is very vibrant in terms of the early career research community," he said. "These are fantastic colleagues who I can grow with and do very exciting research with over the next number of decades."
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Before we’re even born, our bodies begin to grow and train an army of spies and assassins, creating a crew of immune system fighters in the upper chest's thymus gland. While this production is dominated by T cells, other immune cells such as B cells and plasma cells can be generated within the thymus, albeit at a very low level.
After adolescence, the thymus reduces production at its 'spy and assassin' factory to a trickle. This has consequences because as we age, our immune system makes mistakes, leading to mutations in our DNA; changes in the types of antibodies we produce, and odd feedback loops.
Those glitches contribute to the generation of chronic lymphocytic leukemia or B-cell lymphomas such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. They can also contribute to the development of autoimmune diseases such as lupus and myasthenia gravis.
"We think this all has to do with a life-or-death signalling loop," said Dr. Peter Pioli, who moved to the University of Saskatchewan last year to become an assistant professor of Biochemistry, Microbiology & Immunology. In February, he published his findings in iScience.
"For autoimmune patients, you get this thymus that gets filled up with all these B-cells and plasma cells, so you no longer have this little trickle; you have a bit of a runaway train," he said.
Using mouse models, Pioli and his team are trying to piece together the triggers convincing aging B-cells to mistakenly ramp up plasma cell production. They want to know how this impacts the development of various diseases.
In this episode, Pioli explains his interest in plasma cells.
"It fascinates and confounds you all in one," said Pioli. "This one cell has to have this perfectly aligned machinery to do this. And it's kind of hard to look away when you find something like that."
A "curious troublemaker" who loved to tinker as a kid, Pioli remembers taking apart tools and objects in his parents' garage, removing pieces and trying to rebuild them. That curiosity carried him through his undergraduate, graduate studies and post-doctoral work in Wisconsin, Utah, and California.
"It's just a lot of fun," said Pioli. "You get the payoff of hopefully finding something that could actually help someone someday: understanding aging, understanding these breakdowns that lead to autoimmune diseases and tissue breakdown."
Pioli admits his scientific career has taken plenty of detours, but he's extremely grateful it unfolded the way it did.
"There's a lot you learn from that, not just in terms of experience," he said. "You also learn about yourself in terms of your potential to persevere. And maybe the potential to be supremely stubborn, to keep at it."
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Like a lot of kids, Anurag Sakharkar used to dream about being a doctor, or an astronaut. His parents, both academics, encouraged him to follow his dream.
In high school, he began spending evenings and weekends working at the University of Saskatchewan’s biomedical labs, perfecting advanced research methods, western blots and PCR analysis . He began learning about Parkinson’s disease with Dr. Changiz Taghibiglou, then started examining novel cancer treatment approaches with Dr. Franco Vizeacoumar.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought Anu’s in-person laboratory time to an abrupt halt. Undeterred, he began to spend his nights poring over gene expression data, using computational analysis to identify patterns.
“We integrated all these different methods and looked at the genome coordination as a whole,” said Anu. “What important pathways are involved, and how do they connect and interact at the DNA, protein, and RNA levels?”
His curiosity spread from analyzing biomarkers in cancer cells — to learning more about the dramatic changes occurring in an astronaut’s body during space flight.
Astronauts lose bone density and muscle mass in space. They endure neurological degeneration, renal and cardiovascular dysfunction, compromised immunity, and upon their return to earth they have a far higher risk of developing cancer. Anu noticed a more large-scale inherent change in these astronauts in his research.
“You see gene correlation and coordination breaking down all over the entire genome,” said Anu. “You have a huge systemic trauma that's occurring in these astronauts when they go into space.”
Together with Dr. Jian Yang from the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, Anu started analyzing astronaut gene expression data gathered in NASA’s open-source GeneLab. It tracked eight men and two women posted to the International Space Station for a six-month period, including pre-flight, inflight, and postflight measurements.
Anu developed a novel expression analysis method, and has now identified 32 genes with outsized effects on astronauts’ health as possible candidates for biomarkers to characterize, monitor, and even treat health issues.
In February, his research was published in Life. With support from the University of Saskatchewan President’s NSERC Research Fund, it also formed a partial basis of Anu’s honours thesis as he completes his final undergraduate year this spring, majoring in Cellular Physiology and Pharmacology.
He’s developed partnerships with universities around the world, along with NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and private space bioscience companies.
“Space is definitely humanity’s future,” Anu said. “That future is getting closer and closer."
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