Now with the new Healthy Pregnancy Hub, finding out what’s safe for mom and baby just got a whole lot easier.

The hub, launched November 19, is an innovative online resource developed by a team of over 70 researchers, including Dr. Sherif Eltonsy, an assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy.

“You shouldn’t rely on Dr. Google,” warns Eltonsy, “But that’s what we do – we look things up online.”

As a pharmacoepidemiologist who has spent nearly a decade researching drug safety and effectiveness, the new platform marks a major milestone for Eltonsy. “For years, pregnant women have had to rely on piecemeal information that may be outdated – or worse, turn to Google searches,” he said. “Now, we’re providing a centralized, evidence-based resource that they can trust.”

The hub, part of the Canadian Mother-Child Initiative on Drug Safety in Pregnancy – Outreach (CAMCCO-Outreach), offers bilingual fact sheets, infographics, podcasts and videos. It also includes a chatbot for fast, personalized answers. The site is extensive, covering everything from common medications like acetaminophen to managing chronic conditions like depression, epilepsy and asthma during pregnancy.

“Three out of four pregnant women take medication, yet accessing reliable information has been a challenge,” said Eltonsy. “We’ve designed this resource to empower women and health-care providers to make informed decisions for the safety of both mother and fetus.”

By collaborating with Indigenous groups and culturally diverse communities, the team has also worked to ensure the content is inclusive and sensitive to the needs of underrepresented groups. “Our goal is to provide information that resonates with all Canadians, no matter their background,” Eltonsy said.

“This project has been years in the making. To see it come to fruition – and to know it will make a real difference  –  is incredibly rewarding,” he said. “It’s about empowering families with knowledge and filling a gap that’s existed for far too long.”

For more information, visit the Healthy Pregnancy Hub at healthypregnancyhub.ca.

Dr. Allan Garland, professor of internal medicine in the Max Rady College of Medicine, and Dr. Sherif Eltonsy, assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy, each received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for projects they are collaborating on with colleagues at American universities.  

Intensive care unit staffing 

Garland is a co-investigator on a research project studying the staffing of adult intensive care units (ICUs) in the United States and how it influences patient outcomes. 

He is working on the study – that received $324,000 in NIH funding over five years – with colleagues from the University of Miami, Cornell University and Yale University.  

Dr. Allan Garland

The first aim of the project, which they have now completed, surveyed about 500 ICUs. The goal was to understand the mix of health-care practitioners working in ICUs, including physicians, nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists, respiratory therapists, social workers, physical and occupational therapists, speech pathologists and pastoral care.  

“There are huge staffing differences in ICUs across the United States,” Garland said. “Within states, between hospitals, and even between different ICUs within hospitals there are major differences in the type and number of staff.”  

While a previous study, conducted in 1992, looked at physician staffing, Garland said his research is the broadest ever to examine the details of ICU staffing.  

The second aim of the study is to observe the patterns of staffing found in the first part of the project and see if, and how, they relate to mortality.  

“The hope is that we can better understand the relationship between how ICUs are structured from a staffing standpoint,” Garland said. “If there is a relationship between the way staffing is structured and outcomes that would give ICUs a way to improve outcomes for their patients by optimal staffing.”  

The research team has also received Canadian Institutes of Health Research funding to explore the structure of ICU care in Canada.  

HIV health challenges 

Eltonsy is a co-investigator on a project focused on understanding and addressing the health challenges faced by people living with HIV who come from underserved and marginalized communities, including racial and ethnic minorities, transgender individuals and those facing unstable housing or recent incarceration.  

Eltonsy is working on the project – that received $3.4 million in NIH funding over five years – with colleagues from the University of Washington.  

Dr. Sherif Eltonsy

“People from underserved and marginalized communities often experience higher rates of substance use and worse outcomes when it comes to HIV care,” Eltonsy said.  

“Our goal is to investigate the reasons behind these disparities, such as social and structural factors, and use this knowledge to develop better treatment and prevention programs to meet their unique needs.”  

The research team is collecting data from about 20 HIV clinics and care facilities across the United States. Eltonsy said the long-term plan is to bring the study to Canada.  

“Addressing health disparities is not just about medical treatment – it’s about understanding the social, cultural, and structural factors that impact people’s lives,” Eltonsy said.  

“By focusing on underserved and marginalized communities, we aim to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to live a healthy life, regardless of their background or circumstances.” 

Eltonsy said the project is important at this moment because of the rising concerns about opioid use and other substance-related issues.  

“Now is the time to address these problems comprehensively,” he said. “This research is timely because it brings a much-needed focus to the most vulnerable groups who are often left behind in broader health initiatives.”

It’s a question that doctors should be able to answer for pregnant patients, says Dr. Sherif Eltonsy, assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy.

But for many prescription drugs, there’s a lack of research on the risks of prenatal exposure.

“When new medications are tested through clinical trials, pregnant people are excluded,” Eltonsy says. “That’s why it’s so important that we study health-care databases to observe real-world effects.

“By examining anonymized data for hundreds of thousands of pregnancies, we can detect any associations between a particular drug and adverse outcomes such as congenital malformations, preterm birth or low birth weight.”

There are always new medications that could pose risks, the professor adds. “A recent example is Ozempic, which is popular as a weight-loss drug. What is the safety of Ozempic in pregnancy? Right now, there’s zero data.”

Eltonsy is a pharmacoepidemiologist – a scientist who studies the use, safety and effectiveness of drugs in large populations. “This is my lab,” he says, gesturing at his computer.

Raised in Cairo, Egypt, Eltonsy earned his first degree in pharmaceutical sciences in his home country. Fluent in French, he completed his master’s and PhD at Université de Montréal and did postdoctoral work in New Brunswick. He joined UM in 2019 and is also a researcher with the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba.

Eltonsy studies drug effects in many patient groups, such as people with HIV or Parkinson’s disease. But he has a particular interest in the pregnant population, and in adverse health effects in children that may be traceable to drug exposure in the womb.

One of his studies, published in 2015 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, looked at data for more than 4,600 asthmatic mothers in Quebec who used different types and doses of asthma medication during their first trimester.

The results showed that either corticosteroids with long-acting beta agonists or higher doses of corticosteroids were similarly safe for mother and fetus.

In 2021, a team co-led by Eltonsy received $2.9 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to create a national harmonized database for this kind of research. The project, the Canadian Mother-Child Cohort Active Surveillance Initiative, aims to quantify the risks and benefits of prescription drug use during pregnancy on short- and long-term maternal and child health.

“This project is one of a handful of its kind in the world. It’s expected to provide insights that were not possible before in Canada,” Eltonsy says.

“We’re currently combining data from Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Alberta into a massive data set representing more than four million mother-child pairs. This much larger cohort will allow us to spot red flags faster.”  

The first results, reflecting four provinces’ data, revealed that 61 per cent of pregnant women took prescription medication. The most commonly taken drugs were antibiotics for infections, anti-nausea drugs, asthma medications and antidepressants.

“We want to investigate more medications that we know little about, but pregnant women use frequently,” Eltonsy says. “I’m interested in studying drugs for neurological conditions, such as epilepsy.

“Believing that our research can improve the health and quality of life of mothers and children is our big motive.”

Dr. Tito Daodu, a UM medical alum and pediatric surgeon, is featured on the cover as the emcee of last fall’s 140th anniversary gala, attended by 400 supporters of the medical college. A UM fund established to mark the anniversary has raised $96,000 in support of bursaries for medical and graduate students.

The twice-yearly magazine, published in print and online, brings you the latest news and student, faculty and alumni accomplishments from the five colleges of the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences: the Dr. Gerald Niznick College of Dentistry, Max Rady College of Medicine, College of Nursing, College of Pharmacy and College of Rehabilitation Sciences.

Rady researchers profiled in the Winter 2023/24 issue include Dr. Sherif Eltonsy, an assistant professor of pharmacy who studies data on prescription drug use during pregnancy; Dr. Mandy Archibald, an assistant professor of nursing who is passionate about arts-based health research; and Margaret Hart, Ininiw (Cree) scholar in the College of Rehabilitation Sciences, who has researched the Indigenization of post-secondary curricula by Indigenous scholars.

Rady alumni showcased in this issue include Dr. Hoda Hosseini, a periodontist who feels compelled to give back to her profession; Peri Venkatesh, a master’s alum in nursing who became an educator with a special interest in men’s health; Cenzina Caligiuri, a pharmacy alum whose work focuses on pharmacy services in hospitals; and Marnie Courage, an occupational therapy alum who is dedicated to improving the quality of life of people with disabilities.    

Other features highlight the Dr. Gerald Niznick College of Dentistry’s $10-million fundraising campaign to fully equip its future dental clinics, planned for a new building on Bannatyne campus; the appointment of the first endowed chair based in the College of Rehabilitation Sciences; and the wisdom shared by champions for Indigenous health and social justice at an event centred on cultural safety in Indigenous health.

Explore the Awards and Honours earned by faculty members and stay current on recent happenings in the Rady Faculty by checking out the Notable News section.

Read the latest issue of RadyUM now.

“I’m extremely happy to win this prestigious award,” she said. “It’s an achievement.”

Research Day, which took place earlier this month, gave participants the opportunity to show off the projects they’ve been working tirelessly on. Aboulatta was one of four learners who took part in the invited oral presentation, and 18 participants in the poster competition.

Aboulatta, who received her doctor of pharmacy from Alexandria University in Egypt, is examining the impact that COVID-19 measures and restrictions in Manitoba had on pregnant individuals and perinatal care. She’s working to determine whether adverse perinatal outcomes, like preterm births and stillbirths, can be caused by factors exaggerated by the pandemic measures – like stress, anxiety and socioeconomic factors.

“The actual causes of preterm births and stillbirths have puzzled researchers for decades,” she said. “With the measures that took place during the pandemic, it gives us an opportunity to dig more and find the real causes.”

Aboulatta’s advisors are College of Pharmacy assistant professors Dr. Sherif Eltonsy and Dr. Kaarina Kowalec.

Dr. Luis Perez Davalos won the poster competition at the College of Pharmacy’s Research Day.

For College of Pharmacy master’s student Dr. Luis Perez Davalos, winning the poster competition was unexpected.

“I was trying to really tell a story that portrayed the work we’re doing,” he said. “It went well, and that led to winning the award. I wasn’t aiming for that.”

What Perez Davalos is aiming at is the development of a placenta-on-a-chip model to test nanodrugs to treat preeclampsia, a high blood pressure disorder that can occur during pregnancy. Perez Davalos, who received his medical degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is working to replicate the conditions that happen in preeclampsia in the placenta, but on a chip.

“By creating a placenta-on-a-chip it will possibly accelerate the development of an intervention and instead of taking us 15 years to develop a new drug, maybe we can do it in a third of the time,” he said.

Perez Davalos’ advisor is Dr. Hagar Labouta, an assistant professor at the College of Pharmacy.

“I wish to congratulate the winners of the College of Pharmacy Research Day Presentation competition,” said Kowalec, who chaired Research Day and helped organize the event. “I would also like to say a warm congratulations to all the students, trainees and postdocs who contributed to an engaging and high level of scholarship during the day’s presentations.”

Research Day was combined with the College of Pharmacy’s annual graduate studies celebration and the Morris D. Faiman Lectureship. Dr. Christine Allen, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, gave the lecture on the technological approaches to accelerate development of advanced drug delivery strategies. Allen is an expert in drug formulation and the co-founder of Nanovista Inc., a company focused on high-precision, image-guided cancer therapy.

The Canadian Mother-Child Collaborative Training Platform (CAMCCO-L) received more than $2.5 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to launch the project. CAMCCO-L is one of 13 interdisciplinary teams from across the country to receive CIHR funding through its new initiative called the Health Research Training Platform.

“It’s very exciting,” said Dr. Sherif Eltonsy, assistant professor at the College of Pharmacy, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, and one of CAMCCO-L’s principal applicants and the Manitoba site lead. “It’s something we’ve worked hard to get and we’re thrilled to be one of the teams that were funded. I’m excited for the next steps.”

The training platform is led by Anick Berard from the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine, which is affiliated with the University of Montreal.

CAMCCO-L will provide year-long training in the areas of pharmacogenomics, pharmacoepidemiology, toxicology and artificial intelligence. The initiative will offer 10 bursaries each year for its four-month summer school. The bursaries are in collaboration with universities in Montreal, France, Spain and Brazil, and will cover travel costs to those locations.  

CAMCCO-L will include a standardized curriculum with modules in equity, diversity and inclusion, sex and gender, hands-on virtual and in-person training, and professional development.

“The main goal is to provide early career researchers and trainees with new skills to make them experts in their fields. It will also help us retain qualified researchers,” Eltonsy said. “You could be a pharmacoepidemiologist who is interested in machine learning, but also would love to learn more about how pharmacogenomics can help.”

In addition to the summer school, online training will be provided to even more early career researchers and trainees than the 10 bursary recipients.

“Mentors will be able to link with mentees,” Eltonsy said. “This experience wouldn’t have been possible without this program.”

Two more Rady Faculty of Health Sciences professors are involved in CIHR Health Research Training Platform projects. Dr. Amine Choukou, assistant professor of occupational therapy at the College of Rehabilitation Sciences, is part of a team working on a national platform that’s focused on the delivery of technology for older Canadians with complex health needs and their caregivers. And Dr. Richard Keijzer, Thorlakson Chair in Surgical Research and director of research for the surgery department of the Max Rady College of Medicine, belongs to a team that’s developing a platform that will offer dedicated training, personalized mentorship and experiential opportunities for Canadian research trainees and early career researchers focused on improving the health and well-being of parents, children and families.

What are the consequences — for both mom and baby — if a woman decides to stop her medication? And are there safe alternatives if she does?

Enter Dr. Sherif Eltonsy (College of Pharmcy, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences and Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba), who co-leads the project with Dr. Anick Bérard (Université de Montréal and Montréal’s Centre hospitalier universitaire Ste-Justine).

“We know pregnant women with epilepsy for example will sometimes stop their medication because they’re afraid for their baby, says Bérard.

The duo recently received $2.9 million in funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to build a country-wide database out of 17 years worth of existing data from Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Alberta. They will create province-specific databases for a total of over four million mothers and children with up to 22 years of follow-up.

The Canadian Mother-Child Cohort (CaMCCo) Active Surveillance Initiative project aims to quantify the risks and benefits of prescription drug use during pregnancy on short- and long-term maternal and child health outcomes, in order to have meaningful impacts on how medications are used and prescribed during pregnancy and childhood, and on how health policies are implemented. To achieve this goal, large harmonized cohorts are needed. CaMCCo will fill this gap with a state-of-the-art infrastructure that will collect administrative, hospital and birth data.

Adverse drug events are very rare in pregnancy and might happen well after the child is born, so the team needs a big data set. Currently, that data is siloed in each province, says Eltonsy.

“You could have records of 100 pregnant women using a particular medication in Manitoba, 200 in Quebec and different numbers in other provinces,” he says. “If we bring those data together, we can see the signal (about adverse reactions) much faster.”

The multi-disciplinary team will operate the large provincial health databases requires for the study. The use of multi-provincial health data will also provide access to diverse populations and result in the development of a world-class active research and surveillance program in perinatal pharmaco-epidemiology.

The funding will also allow the research team to ensure that information is accurate. Provincial records are designed to help governments keep track of payments to doctors and pharmacists, so Eltonsy and Bérard must fine tune that data to analyze drug outcomes. That requires careful validation. For example, a database may show that a pregnant woman filled a drug prescription at the pharmacy, but not whether she took it. The team will validate those details. The same holds true for records of birth defects, which must be crossed-checked with hospital and medical charts.

When complete, the Canadian Mother-Child Cohort Active Surveillance Program, as the project is known, will be unique not only for its validated data, but also for its decades worth of information

CaMCCo is a collaboration between five organizations across Canada: University of Manitoba, Centre hospitalier universitaire Sainte-Justine in Montréal, University of Alberta, University of Ottawa and the University of Saskatchewan.

This story was edited from a story that originally appeared on Innovation.ca, the website of the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

And before the Eastland even left the wharf, the lifeboats caused it to list, and then it capsized so quickly that one reporter said it rolled over like “a dead jungle monster shot through the heart.” Eight hundred and forty-four passengers died, a passenger death toll higher than the Titanic’s.

What was meant to save lives, ended up harming and killing many others. Indeed, in 1638, scientist Galileo Galilei warned in his final book that cautionary measures can in turn cause disaster.

When the COVID-19 virus first moved across the globe, governments quickly implemented lockdowns and social distancing rules. As supply chains broke, they worried about material shortages, including prescriptions drugs, and so enacted precautionary measures. In Canada, for instance, some patients received a one-month refill rather than the usual three-month extension. Factors such as this, and the general fear people have of contracting the virus in medical facilities, has changed how people are using the health care system, but we don’t know exactly who is being affected, or how. That, however, is about to change.

“A UM team led by assistant professor Christine Leong in the College of Pharmacy is starting a novel study to see if our cautionary measures are enabling a disaster somewhere else.”

Thanks to the anonymized administrative health data held in the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) at the University of Manitoba (UM), a UM team led by assistant professor Christine Leong in the College of Pharmacy, is starting a novel study to see if our cautionary measures are enabling a disaster somewhere else. We need to know because more pandemics are inevitable.

Christine Leong

Leong and her collaborators received $100,000 in funding from the Research Manitoba COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant to study the changes in med­ication dispensation, health service use (physician visits, hospital visits, emergency department visits), and death rates before—and during—the COVID-19 pandemic in the general population, and in those with a history of mental illness. And in Manitoba, the latter category holds a lot of people: A past UM study found that 28 per cent of our population (or roughly 300,000 individuals) has been diagnosed with a mental disorder within the last five years. So, the potential impact of these restrictions on our society is enormous.

“Obviously a lot of things have changed since COVID happened, and the ways in which people can access in-person health care has shifted, and visits to the Crisis Response Centre for example has gone down. Where are these individuals going? I felt like these changes are a very important area that needed to be looked at,” Leong says.

“I’ve done research in the past looking at health service use and psychotropic medication use in the general population. I was also a primary care pharmacist, working at the Family Medical Centre from 2014 up until it closed in 2019. And I’ve encountered many patients struggling with mental illness, and sometimes the resources available to them are quite limited. So when COVID-19 happened, I was quite interested in studying this further,” she says.

Leong and her team will use the rich data contained within MCHP to see the real-world effects the pandemic has had on those with a psychiatric diagnosis, and the general population.

A key aspect of this study is that it focuses on data from the past five years, including the four years leading up to the pandemic. This enables the research team to establish a solid baseline pattern—which is helpful to policy-makers concerned with everyday planning—and then see how things change during the pandemic, which is key information we need to prepare for the next pandemic. We need to know where to direct resources, both during, and after pandemics: when restrictions lift, people may flood into the system again, potentially creating new resource problems.

James Bolton, a professor of psychiatry at UM, has used MCHP data in other studies and is excited to be collaborating on this specific project.

“I think there’s huge potential for this study to really uncover a lot of important information about how the pandemic is influencing mental health,” he says. “The early signs are that people with mental illnesses are facing unique challenges during the pandemic. And so I think this study is extremely important to take a look at what happens with people’s medication use and their connections with services, to really see what the impacts of COVID are on mental health. And it’s hard to anticipate which direction things will go.”

“I think there’s huge potential for this study to really uncover a lot of important information about how the pandemic is influencing mental health.”

It’s possible the distress caused by social isolation is leading to more people seeking help. Or, the opposite: Because of COVID restricting our ability to connect, people might be avoiding treatments and not renewing prescriptions.

“I think this study will give us a story as to where vulnerable people are going and how they are impacted,” Leong says. “Even before the pandemic, how were they doing? I think this study is going to give us a clearer idea of how we can better care for these patients. This data will let us dig deeper into seeing how can we actually support these patients, whether we are in a pandemic or not.”

Population-level effects

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is anticipated to have both short-and long-term effects on the mental health and wellbeing of individuals at a population level. Physical distancing, changes in financial circumstances and fears associated with the virus itself can impact mental health. Understanding the psychiatric effects of COVID-19 has become an important research priority. Many shifts in the way individuals access care have occurred.

Using health data from Manitoba, Leong and her team are studying changes in medication adherence, health service use and death rates before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the general population and in those with a history of mental illness. This study will help us under­stand how the healthcare system can help individuals living with mental illness.

Leong’s team includes collaborators at the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences: Silvia Alessi-Severini, James Bolton, Daniel Chateau, Joseph Delaney, Sherif Eltonsy, Murray Enns, Jamison Falk, Kaarina Kowalec and Jitender Sareen.

Preventing Unintended Disaster is one of the feature stories in the Winter 2021 issue of ResearchLIFE magazine.

Launched in June, the two-year project, called the Conception Study, is led by the Université de Montréal pharmacy faculty and will have input from scientists in Canada, France and the United States. The researchers intend to recruit at least 5,000 women who are or have been pregnant during COVID-19, to take part in a broad study that aims to provide a valuable tool for understanding the consequences associated with the pandemic.

“So far, we do not have any data about pregnant women and babies born in the context of COVID-19, an epidemic with unprecedented consequences that has forced public powers to take an array of measures that have been more or less burdensome for pregnant and post-partum women and newborns,” stated Dr. Anick Bérard, director of the study.

Dr. Sherif Eltonsy

Dr. Sherif Eltonsy, assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy, and Dr. Dan Chateau, assistant professor of community health sciences at the Max Rady College of Medicine, lead the Manitoba portion of the study.

Eltonsy, who specializes in mother-infant health research, said the study will look at how social distancing, quarantines and restrictions on medical appointments resulting from the pandemic have affected mothers and their newborns in different regions around the world.

“The idea is to understand the impact of COVID-19, the restrictions and disruptive processes on the health of mothers and their babies,” he said, noting there are currently close to 4,000 women who have registered internationally, many through a social media campaign on Facebook.

Dr. Dan Chateau

One of the study’s goals is to understand pregnant women’s experience with COVID-19 and determine whether the intensity and severity of episodes of depression or stress related to the pandemic and its related restrictions are related to the stage of pregnancy.

Part of this includes a change to medical appointments and prescriptions, noted Chateau, whose research specializes in the effects of medication taken during pregnancy.

“When we’re looking at the pandemic restrictions and the impact of the limitations and services, there’s not currently an end in sight for COVID-19,” Chateau said. “Luckily in Manitoba we’ve had virtual visits, but that may not be the same thing everywhere else.”

He noted that regional differences will be able to give a full picture of the effects across Canada and other participating countries.

“Manitoba has a larger rural and remote population compared to most other provinces, and service delivery is different in different parts of the country. It’s important to play a part in the larger picture,” he said.

“I think these two projects illustrate the diversity of the kinds of projects The Winnipeg Foundation supports, which expand the spectrum of research with high-risk, high-reward initiatives,” says Dr. Peter Nickerson, Vice-Dean (Research) and Distinguished Professor, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences.

Role of endothelial NMDA receptors in glutamate-induced glioma growth

Dr. Chris Anderson, pharmacology and therapeutics professor, Max Rady College of Medicine, and director, Neuroscience Research Program, Kleysen Institute for Advanced Medicine, leads a team that will further research into glioblastomas, a deadly form of brain cancer with few treatment options and a median survival time of less than 15 months.

Along with co-leads Dr. Tanveer Sharif, department of pathology, and Dr. Ji Hyun Ko, department of human anatomy and cell science, Anderson will study whether a specific cell protein in the lining of brain blood vessels called an NMDA receptor, represents a viable new target for comprehensive therapeutic investigation.

“Dr. Sharif’s collaboration with McMaster University gives us access to patient glioblastoma samples, which we can study in Manitoba,” Anderson says. “We will culture the glioblastoma cells with brain endothelial cells to study the nature of molecular interactions between them, in detail, including the role of NMDA receptors. It’s kind of a simple approach, but it will be effective in allowing us to determine the role NMDA receptors play in glioblastoma cell movement and tumour expansion.”

The second part of the project will involve studying the development of tumours after transplanting patient-derived glioblastoma samples into live mice. 

“Using MRI and PET imaging, as well as other state-of-the-art approaches, we will look at patterns of glioblastoma cell infiltration, as well as tumour size, blood flow and metabolism. Performing these experiments in mice genetically engineered to eliminate NMDA receptors in endothelial cells will allow us to directly test the role of this intriguing host target,” says Anderson.

Big data in mother-infant health research

Dr. Sherif Eltonsy, assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy, was also awarded $100,000 grant, for a multi-site project that will create a national database on the effects of medications on mothers and their offspring.

“The idea is to use real-world data to inform mothers, policymakers and physicians on the effects of medications; which are the safest to use and which pose a risk to mother or infant health,” Eltonsy said. “Pregnant women are excluded from randomized trials, so often this becomes the only way to assess the safety of most medications in the market on mothers and infants.”

Eltonsy, a pharmacoepidemiologist with an academic focus on drug safety, leads the project with two researchers from the Max Rady College of Medicine, Dr. Marcus Ng and Dr. Chelsea Ruth, who specialize in neurology and neonatology respectively. The team is collaborating with researchers in Quebec, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

“The project aligns perfectly with The Winnipeg Foundation Innovation Fund as an interdisciplinary innovative project with short-term tangible outcomes – answers to questions mothers have about how best to keep themselves and their newborns safe – as well as a sustainable long-term platform that can be used regularly for big data analyses in mother-infant health,” Eltonsy said.

During the next year, Eltonsy’s team will focus on creating the infrastructure of the project and developing a pilot demonstration using epilepsy medications data. “We plan to create a national epilepsy and mother-infant health group covering over 1.5 million pregnancies and 20 years of follow-up,” he said.

The two grants are part of The Winnipeg Foundation’s $1-million commitment, over five years, to support cutting-edge medical research projects through the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba.