OLD OLD Life Sciences Institute

Drs. Martin Dawes and Pieter Cullis

The Life Sciences Institute (LSI), led by Dr. Pieter Cullis (Professor & Director of the Life Sciences Institute, UBC), is playing a pivotal role in enabling personalized medicine in BC. Personalized medicine is using a tailored approach to preventative and curative healthcare based on the unique molecular profiling of the individual and their disease.  Molecular profiling, or “Omics,” includes the detail recording and annotating of one’s genome, proteins, metabolites, and microbial fauna that together provides highly predictive and accurate insight into the individual’s health status and disease mechanism.  Personalized medicine has many benefits over current health care practice by using better methods to predict, diagnose, treat and prevent disease.  It will improve health care delivery, efficiency, and reduce per capital healthcare costs by improving preventative care and reducing adverse drug reactions.  The demand for increased safety and drug efficacy, where 50% of prescribed drugs don’t work because of patients’ genetic diversity, coupled with the potential healthcare savings and increasingly inexpensive molecular profiling are driving the need for personalized medicine.

The LSI conducts fundamental research into the biological understanding of various diseases and engages clinicians to translate this molecular understanding into bedside solutions for patients.  As such, Dr. Cullis is collaborating with Dr. Martin Dawes (Professor & Head of Department of Family Practice, UBC), the Lead on a BC personalized medicine project named GeneRx that aims to change family practice by introducing genetic tests to guide drug prescription.  Affordable genetic tests for commonly prescribed drugs (78 total) will revolutionize the efficiency and quality of care by enabling family medicine practitioners to predict whether a patient responds to certain drugs or not, so that the correct drug is given immediately instead of trial-and-error therapy that commonly leads to adverse drug reactions.  Furthermore, the GeneRx program will use an intuitive graphical interface to report the synthesis of information from the patient’s genetic tests and their electronic medical record to guide clinicians and support their decision-making process. This system is now applied to a cohort of patients who are over the age of 65 and are taking over 10 drugs; the savings from this study will amount to $25 million per year. In the future, Dr. Dawes hopes to implement the GeneRx program to any clinical setting, especially emergency wards, and to expand the system to include more drugs and groups of patients (i.e. those with chronic diseases).

Photos of the event are available on our facebook page.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

On January 26, 2010, the University of British Columbia Life Sciences Institute hosted the inaugural LSI Café Scientifique. Over 40 students, faculty, and interested community members gathered for an informal and participatory dialogue with UBC experts on the topic of “Diabetes: Causes, Consequences and Cures?” The venue, Café Perugia, provided the perfect setting for an opportunity to learn about the latest ideas and breakthroughs in life sciences research and technology in a relaxed and casual setting.

The Café featured members of the LSI Diabetes Research Group, who are studying both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Professors Timothy Keefer and Suzanne Clee, both from the Department of Cellular & Physiological Sciences, provided an overview of current challenges and strategies that are being used to determine what causes diabetes and new treatments that are being explored. Professor Roger Brownsey, Head of the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, served as moderator.

Upcoming Café topics include Flu Pandemic and Cancer. The LSI Café Scientifique is co-sponsored by the Life Sciences Institute, CIHR, MSFHR, Faculty of Medicine Research Office and Café Perugia (UBC Food Services).

On May 25, 2010, the University of British Columbia Life Sciences Institute (LSI) hosted the third LSI Café Scientifique. Over 40 students, faculty, and interested community members gathered for an informal and participatory dialogue with UBC experts on the topic of “Electrical Signaling in the Heart and Body: Understanding Cardiac Disease”.

The Café featured members of the Cardiovascular Research Group who are studying how the heart operates and how heart contraction is controlled. The interactive session was presented by Dr. Christopher Ahern, Assistant Professor in the Dept of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics and the Dept of Cellular and Physiological Sciences. An additional presentation was given by Dr. Sebastian Brauchi who has been awarded the 2010-2011 LSI Visiting Scientist Award to work in the laboratory of Dr. Ahern in the Cardiovascular Research Group. Dr. Brauchi comes from Universidad Austrade de Chile and performed his post-doctoral studies at Harvard in the laboratory of Dr. David Clapham, a world leader in the field of ion channels. As the population ages, cardiac arrhythmias are on the rise, with a predicted doubling in the next 50 years. Drs. Ahern and Brauchi showed images of their research, discussed their findings and answered questions about the mechanisms governing electrical signaling in the body and how research at the LSI is helping understand and treat this growing health problem. An artist’s rendition of the “Ryanodine Receptor”, the largest ion channel currently known, was supplied by Dr. Filip Van Petegem, another researcher in the Cardiovascular group and this image was given away as a door prize to one member of the audience. Dr. Van Petegem also provided an overview of his ion channel research in a poster presentation.

The LSI Café Scientifique is co-sponsored by the Life Sciences Institute, CIHR, MSFHR, Faculty of Medicine Research Office and Café Perugia (UBC Food Services). Upcoming Café topics include one on the biology of cancer.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

On November 16, 2010, the University of British Columbia Life Sciences Institute (LSI) hosted the fifth LSI Café Scientifique at the Cafe Perugia. Over 56 interested community members, students and faculty gathered for an informal and participatory dialogue with experts on the topic of “What can be done about antibiotic resistance?”

The Café featured members of the Bacterial Adaptation & Response Networks (BARN) and Chemical Biology of Disease (CBD) Research Groups who are studying and investigating how bacteria adapt and respond to their environment. The interactive session was presented by Dr. Julian Davies and Dr. Erin Gaynor of Department of Microbiology & Immunology. An additional presentation was given by Dr. Linda Hoang, Medical Microbiologist, Program Head of Bacteriology & Mycology at the BC Centre for Disease Control, Public Health Microbiology & Reference Laboratory of Provincial Health Services Authority.

Antibiotics have been successful in curing many infectious diseases over the past 60 years. However, antibiotic resistance is increasing rapidly and there is concern that we are approaching the end of the era of antibiotic effectiveness. This impacts all bacterial diseases, from deadly infection caused by MRSA and tuberculosis to serious illness you can acquire from common foods. Drs. Davies and Gaynor highlighted and answered questions concerning the rise in multi-antibiotic resistance in recent times and the mechanisms of resistance.

Dr. Gaynor discussed the problem of human infection by Campylobacter carried in chickens and how this impacts human health, as well as tracking resistance and improving public education. Dr. Hoang gave a brief overview of how bacteria are recovered from patient samples, how susceptibility profiles are generated from the methods in place and presented a summary of provincial findings.

Two mounted photomicrographs, entitled “StreptoArt” and “Planet Microbe” were supplied by Dr. Davies of the CBD Research Group, were given away as door prizes to two members of the audience. Dr. William Mohn, Professor of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology, BARN Research Group Leader, served as moderator.

The LSI Café Scientifique is co-sponsored by the Life Sciences Institute (LSI), CIHR, MSFHR, Faculty of Medicine Research Office, and Café Perugia (UBC Food Services).

On May 17, 2011, the Life Sciences Institute (LSI) at the University of British Columbia hosted the seventh LSI Café Scientifique. Over 50 interested community members, as well as students and faculty gathered for an informal and participatory dialogue with experts on the topic of “E-natomy – How digital anatomy has changed the way we teach and practice medicine?”. The Cafes are sponsored by the LSI, The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, the Faculties of Medicine and Science and Café Perugia (UBC Food Services).

This Café featured two members of the Faculty of Medicine who use digital anatomy in teaching medical students and in clinical practice. This interactive session was presented by Dr. Claudia Krebs, a Senior Instructor in the Department of Cellular & Physiological Sciences, and Dr. Savvas Nicolaou, Associate Professor and Director of Emergency Radiology, practicing at the Vancouver General Hospital. Drs. Krebs and Nicolaou each explained how the advances in whole body imaging have changed the way students learn anatomy and how patients are treated in the ER. Real-life examples of digital anatomy’s role in teaching as well as in practice were shown and the power of CT scans, MRIs and ultrasound scans compared with traditional x-rays was explained.

New techniques in medical imaging have made it possible to look inside the human body with great precision and with less invasiveness in order to diagnose pathologies that in the past could only be seen with surgical exploration. Learning human anatomy using cadaveric dissection supplemented with x-ray, ultrasound, CT and MRI images allows the physicians of tomorrow to have a better understanding of the 3-dimensional organization of the human musculoskeletal and circulatory systems, internal organs and nervous system. Teaching these new skills in medical school is required to train the modern physician to effectively utilize imaging modalities and interpret pathologies in the clinic today.

The session was highly interactive and visually entertaining; the presentations included 3D images of the human pelvis, rotating in space which the audience was able to view with 3D glasses. The audience also viewed several staged videos where the power of CT scanning in the Emergency room could be seen as an important diagnostic tool to guide the ER staff in the timely treatment of patients, and in saving lives.

The door prize awarded to a member of the audience was a copy of the photobook created by Dr. Claudia Krebs with the assistance of Monika Fejtek. This photobook contained digitized images of the original anatomical artwork of the artist Nan Cheney. This collection of pen and ink drawings is an asset of the original Dept of Anatomy at UBC (now called the Dept of Cellular and Physiological Sciences).

Nan Gertrude Lawson Cheney (1897-1985), a contemporary of Emily Carr, was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia and moved to Vancouver in 1937 where she became a well-known portrait and landscape painter. Nan Cheney was also a medical illustrator in the Department of Anatomy at UBC from 1951 to 1956, and continued to work as a medical illustrator until her retirement in 1962. The Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences currently owns over fifty original works of art by Nan Cheney some of which are exhibited in four glass cases in the main colonnade of the Life Sciences Centre. Each of the works was created from an anatomical dissection done by a staff member in the Department of Anatomy during that time. The Nan Cheney photobook was created to highlight the collection that is displayed in the Colonnade.