The recently announced grants from the Fall 2022 funding round went to faculty members in medicine, nursing and pharmacy.

“This outstanding result reflects the high calibre of our health researchers,” said UM Vice-President (Research and International) Dr. Mario Pinto.

“This funding will enable UM laboratory scientists to advance knowledge in areas such as cardiovascular health, spinal cord injury, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Rett syndrome. Rady Faculty investigators will also conduct cutting-edge data research, as well as vital studies aimed at supporting mental health and well-being.”

The largest grant of more than $1.4 million went to a team led by Dr. Linda Larcombe, an associate professor of internal medicine, community health sciences and medical microbiology/infectious diseases.

Larcombe is an anthropologist whose research focuses on First Nations history, health and collaborative research. Her grant will fund a three-year project called “Connecting with cultural heritage: Land-based learning and healing through archeology in northern Manitoba.”

The study team will create and evaluate a land-based healing and cultural heritage program that will enable youth to explore archeological sites and artifacts reflecting the thousands of years of Inuit, Dene and Cree presence along the coast of Hudson Bay at Churchill, Man.

“We will determine if cultural heritage in land-based healing programming can contribute to wellness and leadership development of Inuit, Dene and Cree youth,” the researchers wrote.

Here’s a look at the other funded projects. More information on the studies and research teams is available here.

Dr. Harvey Max Chochinov, distinguished professor, psychiatry, Max Rady College of Medicine

Grant: $100,000 (one year)

In Chochinov’s study, health-care professionals will hold conversations with cancer patients, guided by the Patient Dignity Question: “What do I need to know about you as a person to take the best care of you possible?” The study will measure how this affects the experiences of both patients and care providers.

Dr. Ian Dixon, professor, physiology and pathophysiology, Max Rady College of Medicine; principal investigator, Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, St. Boniface Hospital

Grant: $1,040,400 (five years)

Dixon’s project centres on proteins and processes involved in skin wound healing, with the goal of developing treatments to speed wound closure and reduce scarring. The study will investigate how age and sex affect dermal healing. It will also examine the healing of skin damage caused by chemotherapy and radiation.

Dr. Soheila Karimi, professor, physiology and pathophysiology, Max Rady College of Medicine; researcher, Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba (CHRIM)

Grant: $1,136,025 (five years)

Neural stem cell therapy has exciting potential for patients with spinal cord injury, but it currently faces the challenge that the cells die after they are transplanted. Karimi’s project will test an experimental treatment aimed at optimizing the use of neural stem cells for repairing spinal cord injury.

Dr. Jason Kindrachuk, assistant professor, medical microbiology and infectious diseases, Max Rady College of Medicine; Canada Research Chair in molecular pathogenesis of emerging viruses; researcher, CHRIM

Grant: $750,000 (five years)

Kindrachuk’s team will investigate the circulation and transmission of the monkeypox virus in wildlife in regions of Africa where the virus is endemic, as well as surrounding areas. They will also assess the potential impact of the virus on Canadian wildlife.

Dr. Lorrie Kirshenbaum, professor, physiology and pathophysiology, Max Rady College of Medicine; Canada Research Chair in molecular cardiology; director, Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, St. Boniface Hospital Albrechtsen Research Centre

Grant: $853,931 (five years)

Kirshenbaum’s project builds on the growing evidence of a link between body-clock disruptions – like those experienced by shift workers and people with health issues such as sleep apnea – and cardiac dysfunction. He will investigate the relationship between circadian disruption and heart attack.

Dr. Lisa Lix, professor, community health sciences, Max Rady College of Medicine; Canada Research Chair in methods for electronic health data quality

Grant: $508,725 (three and a half years)

Lix’s study focuses on using anonymized health-care databases to construct personal and family disease histories for chronic illnesses, such as heart disease. Researchers will compare two methods for creating disease histories, using data from Manitoba and Denmark, and assess their value for predicting disease risk.

Dr. Suresh Mishra, professor, internal medicine, Max Rady College of Medicine

Grant: $100,000 (one year)

Mishra will explore the role of cholesterol in the body’s production of steroid hormones. He aims to develop new ways to treat altered steroid hormone levels, which can lead to infertility and illnesses such as inflammatory diseases.

Dr. Neeloffer Mookherjee, professor, internal medicine; researcher, CHRIM

Grant: $100,000 (one year)

Mookherjee’s team will look at differences in how rheumatoid arthritis (RA) develops in males and females. In addition to using a mouse model, her team will study human samples from close relatives of RA patients, who may show changes in their blood before the appearance of clinical RA symptoms.

Dr. Christopher Pascoe, assistant professor, physiology and pathophysiology; researcher, CHRIM

Grant: $100,000 (one year)

Pascoe’s project aims to better understand how diabetes in pregnancy increases the risk of asthma in offspring. He will examine how maternal diabetes increases the twitchiness of airway smooth muscle in the lungs of offspring, and whether a specific enzyme co-ordinates changes in this muscle.

Dr. Mojgan Rastegar, professor, biochemistry and medical genetics, Max Rady College of Medicine; researcher, CHRIM

Grant: $990,675 (five years)

Rastegar has been working for more than 10 years to understand the pathobiology of Rett syndrome, a severe neurodevelopmental disorder in young children. This study will investigate the molecular and cellular abnormalities of the brain in this syndrome. The goal is to pave the way for therapeutic strategies.

Dr. Emily Rimmer, assistant professor, internal medicine, Max Rady College of Medicine

Grant: $307,530 (three years)

Rimmer’s project is a pilot study in preparation for an international randomized controlled trial of therapeutic plasma exchange as a treatment for septic shock. The researchers see potential for this treatment to save lives by removing harmful substances from the blood and replacing missing blood components.

Dr. Zulma Rueda, associate professor, medical microbiology and infectious diseases, Max Rady College of Medicine; Canada Research Chair in sexually transmitted infection – resistance and control

Grant: $100,000 (one year)

Rueda’s team will look at the incidence and impact of methamphetamine use and concurrent sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections in people living with HIV in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. One of the study’s goals is effective knowledge-sharing among people living with HIV, service providers and communities.

Dr. Geoffrey Tranmer, associate professor, College of Pharmacy

Grant: $100,000 (one year)

Tranmer will focus on edaravone, one of the few drugs approved to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In its current form, this medication has many limitations. Tranmer’s team plans to develop improved versions of edaravone and test them in order to optimize the drug and prepare it for advanced clinical trials.

Dr. Sonia Udod, associate professor, College of Nursing

Grant: $450,000 (three years)

Udod’s research will examine how health system leaders have adapted in response to the pandemic. She aims to determine how leaders can build their own and nurses’ psychological health and well-being to ensure a healthy workforce and organizational resilience at hospitals during and after the COVID-19 crisis.

Dr. Roberta Woodgate, distinguished professor, College of Nursing; Canada Research Chair in child and family engagement in health research and healthcare; researcher, CHRIM

Grant: $776,475 (five years)

Woodgate’s youth-centred, mixed-methods study aims to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on the mental health and well-being of Manitoba youth who have come of age during the pandemic. The findings will inform recommendations to improve services and supports for this population.

Grant: $100,000 (one year)

Woodgate’s team will also conduct a youth-centered, arts-based longitudinal study that will result in the creation and evaluation of a toolkit. This toolkit, co-created by youth, will be designed for use in schools to foster social connectedness and optimize youth mental health and well-being.

“This excellent showing by our faculty members and their partners in receiving this funding is a testament to the outstanding quality of research conducted at the University of Manitoba,” said Dr. Mario Pinto, UM’s vice-president (research and international). “I congratulate these research leaders, whose work continues to improve the quality of health and patient care here in Manitoba and around the world.”

Project: Anti-Thrombotic Therapy to Ameliorate Clinical Complications in Community Acquired Pneumonia (ATTACC-CAP)

Dr. Ryan Zarychanski and Dr. Sylvain Lother

Dr. Ryan Zarychanski, associate professor of internal medicine, Max Rady College of Medicine and senior scientist at CancerCare Manitoba, and his team received more than $3.9 million over five years.

Building on the knowledge the trial team gained while studying the blood thinner heparin in COVID-19 patients, the Manitoba-led team will conduct a large international adaptive randomized trial that will evaluate whether therapeutic-dose heparin reduces critical illness and mortality in hospitalized patients with non-COVID pneumonia.

“This is the first large international trial to be wholly managed by the University of Manitoba and will provide unique training opportunities to junior faculty like co-principal investigator Dr. Sylvain Lother,” said Zarychanski, UM Lyonel G. Israels Research Chair in Hematology. “It will also showcase UM’s clinical trial management and data coordination capacity at the George and Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation.”

Project: Regulation of Programmed Necrosis in the Heart

Dr. Lorrie Kirshenbaum

Dr. Lorrie Kirshenbaum, UM Canada Research Chair in molecular cardiology and professor of physiology & pathophysiology and pharmacology & therapeutics, Max Rady College of Medicine, and his team received $1.1 million over five years.

The study will focus on the role of mitochondrial-regulated cell death programs and how they integrate at the cellular level to cause heart failure. The study will look at the mechanisms underlying doxorubicin (a chemotherapy drug) cardiotoxicity. It will also explore the relationship between cell death and other cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attack, known to cause heart failure.

“The studies are highly innovative and clinically relevant, as many of the concepts and avenues of research have not been previously explored,” said Kirshenbaum, director of the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, St. Boniface Hospital Albrechtsen Research Centre. “I am particularly excited about commencing this research and hopeful it will be translated into new drug discoveries that will reduce the incidence of heart failure and improve the quality of life of cancer patients and individuals following heart attack or other human diseases where cell death is known to play a major role.”

Project: Understanding the cellular mechanisms that drive clonal T cell expansion of the HIV reservoir

Dr. Thomas Murooka

Dr. Thomas Murooka, associate professor of immunology, Max Rady College of Medicine, and his team received more than $719,000 over five years.

The study aligns with emerging data that a distinct subset of T cells seems to harbour the majority of residual HIV. By understanding why some T cells contain virus and others don’t, it may lead to a more targeted approach to purge this HIV reservoir in T cells. Murooka and his team will use new imaging tools and animal models to identify, track and kill these rare, infected T cells, so that daily drug regimens are no longer required for people living with HIV.

“So far, the HIV cure field has used a sledgehammer approach to eliminate residual HIV infection, with limited success,” Murooka said. “We are developing a more targeted, immunological approach to specifically identify and destroy rare T cells that harbour HIV as a new approach to achieve HIV cure.”

Project: Mechanisms and consequences of senescent beta cell accumulation in Type 1 Diabetes

Dr. Peter Thompson

Dr. Peter Thompson, assistant professor of physiology & pathophysiology, Max Rady College of Medicine, and his team received more than $589,000 over five years.

Thompson’s recent research has discovered that beta cells are not entirely innocent in the process that leads to Type 1 diabetes and some of them may aid and abet the immune attack. In this study, he will explore the “nuts and bolts” of these sick beta cells to determine how and why they arise, and how they may be restored. The research will take him closer to establishing a new early clinical intervention to prevent Type 1 diabetes in people who are at risk.

“Our study is unique in that it is working from a completely different concept of how Type 1 diabetes occurs as compared with conventional wisdom,” Thompson said. “It has generally been assumed that Type 1 diabetes is just an autoimmune disease, where the beta cells are just targets of the immune attack and thus the vast majority of interventional efforts are aimed at restoring the immune system. Until recently, very little attention was paid to processes operating in beta cells that might contribute. So our work is operating from a different point of view – which is that some beta cells actually promote the immune attack, leading to Type 1 diabetes. This is a major paradigm shift in how we understand the disease with implications for developing new therapies and we are now poised to make exciting progress in this area.”

Project: Confronting Homophobia in Anal Health: Community-based Program Science and HPV among MSM in Nairobi, Kenya

Dr. Rob Lorway

Dr. Rob Lorway, UM Canada Research Chair in global intervention politics and social transformation and professor of community health sciences, Max Rady College of Medicine, and his team received more than $512,000 over three years.

Lorway’s project builds on the University of Manitoba’s extensive Kenyan-Canadian collaboration that has been studying sexually transmitted infections since the 1980s. His team will employ new community-based participatory strategies to identify the risk factors that underlie HPV-related anal diseases among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men in Kenya. Lorway aims to generate new scientific knowledge related to the clinical, social and epidemiological aspects of HPV infection to inform local sexual health services delivery.

“Although HPV immunization programs in Kenya tend to focus on cervical cancer among adolescent girls and young women, the evidence from this study will enable community health activists and their allied health care providers to advocate for the urgent need to expand immunization to include gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men,” Lorway said.    

Project: Investigating the molecular and cellular abnormalities of the brain in Rett syndrome

Dr. Mojgan Rastegar

Dr. Mojgan Rastegar, professor of biochemistry & medical genetics, Max Rady College of Medicine, and her team received $100,000 over one year.

The study focuses on the molecular and cellular abnormalities of the brain in a neurodevelopmental disorder known as Rett syndrome. Rastegar and her team will perform side-by-side molecular and cellular research studies to determine the shared anomalies of the human and murine Rett syndrome brains. Her research will further include an investigation of rescue and recovery of the identified Rett syndrome-associated abnormalities, by the application of commonly used drugs in pre-clinical therapeutic studies in animal models of Rett syndrome. 

“Our research results from this project are expected to determine the extent of molecular and cellular damage in the brain of Rett syndrome patients and shared defects with animal models of this disease,” Rastegar said. “Our research may eventually lead to potential therapeutic solutions that are targeted towards commonly impaired characteristics of the brain in Rett syndrome. Our research results may also help to understand the unique characteristics of specific types of MeCP2 mutations for this complex and severe disease. MeCP2 is a protein that binds, reads and interprets genomic modifications.”

The projects reflect the broad range of investigation being carried out across the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, said Peter Nickerson [B.Sc.(Med.)/86, MD/86], vice-dean research of the Rady Faculty.

“One of these studies will harness nearly 50 years’ worth of health data, one will take a leading-edge approach to involving young patients and their families in research and knowledge-sharing, and the third will use the latest techniques in epigenomics, transcriptomics and proteomics to decode a rare genetic disorder,” Nickerson said.

The Rady Innovation Fund has allocated a total of $1 million over three years, supporting 10 projects. The fund was made possible by the gift of $30 million by philanthropists Ernest and Evelyn Rady.

The one-year grants have provided seed funding for collaborative projects that bring together researchers from various departments and colleges.

“We’re very grateful for the Rady investment,” Nickerson said. “All 10 of the Rady Innovation grants have fostered multidisciplinary teams to undertake truly novel research projects that can lead to transformative change in health care.”

Here are the three projects selected for funding in 2020:

Mining data to reveal inherited health risks

A cutting-edge “big data” study will link Manitobans’ electronic health records with those of their adult children. The aim is to measure, across a population, how much having a parent with a chronic disease raises a person’s risk for that disease, or related illnesses.

Manitoba is one of the few places in the world where longitudinal health records are complete enough to allow for this kind of family study.         

The researchers will mine anonymized health records stored at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) for every Manitoba adult who saw a doctor from 1970 to 2018.

They will use machine-learning algorithms to construct lifetime health histories for parents and their grown children, then use these histories to predict the risk of diabetes, heart disease and asthma in offspring.

Lisa Lix [M.Sc./91, PhD/95], professor of community health sciences, Canada Research Chair in methods for electronic health data quality and senior scientist at MCHP, leads the study.

Team members represent the departments of community health sciences, biochemistry/medical genetics and internal medicine, as well as the department of statistics in the Faculty of Science, and the College of Pharmacy.

Developing a living lab for rehabilitation research

Dr. Mandy Archibald, assistant professor of nursing, leads a team that will explore the concept of a “living laboratory” where research on pediatric rehabilitation could be carried out and communicated in innovative ways.

The proposed lab would be located at Specialized Services for Children and Youth, a Winnipeg facility that serves children with disabilities and special needs.

First, the researchers will identify research priorities through interviews and gather survey data from patients, siblings, caregivers and clinicians. Then three prototypes for the lab will be co-designed for public engagement and voting.

The aims of the lab include responding to the lived experience, needs and research priorities of children, families and clinicians; getting research findings into practice quickly; and using engaging techniques, such as arts-based methods, to gather and share knowledge.

Once the lab is established, the researchers believe it will be one of the world’s first clinically embedded living laboratories.

Archibald’s team includes a community member, as well as faculty members from the College of Nursing, College of Rehabilitation Sciences and department of pediatrics and child health.

Uncovering the mechanism of Rett syndrome

A team led by Dr. Mojgan Rastegar, associate professor of biochemistry and medical genetics, will investigate how deficiencies at the cellular level cause impaired brain function in patients with Rett syndrome.

The syndrome, which has no cure, is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder in girls, caused by the mutation of a single gene. Symptoms, which include loss of speech, mental disability and seizures, start to appear when a child is six to 18 months old.

Rastegar, a leading Rett syndrome researcher, has studied mouse models of the disorder and made progress in understanding the role of a protein, MeCP2, in the brains of those affected.

Her lab is unique in Canada in receiving donated post-mortem brain tissue from individuals with Rett syndrome. Rastegar’s study team will use leading-edge techniques to conduct a genome-wide study of DNA, RNA and proteins in this tissue, comparing it with brain samples from controls who did not have the syndrome. The goal is to identify potential target genes for treatment.

Team members are from the departments of pathology and physiology/pathophysiology.

Read more about the funded projects