Health

This sequencing project will help accelerate rare-disease diagnosis and discovery with the goal of ending the costly and burdensome diagnostic odyssey for thousands of Canadian families. Care4Rare EXPAND is a four-year collaborative research project to build a rare disease (RD) dataset. We will generate a diverse genomic asset of 17,650 datasets from 7,150 families with […]

This sequencing project will develop new, more effective stroke prevention, risk assessment and precision diagnostic strategies for Canadians. More than 62,000 Canadians have a stroke each year. Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death and a leading cause of disability. Survivors often face long-term challenges such as physical disabilities, cognitive impairments and emotional distress.

This sequencing project will enable improvements to drug safety and effectiveness in children by making genomic data on their responses and adverse reactions to various medications more widely accessible to researchers and health regulatory agencies. This project will leverage the existing resources of the Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety (CPNDS) to bring a pediatric

This sequencing project will identify interacting genetic and environmental risk factors for children and youth with mental health disorders, supporting earlier intervention. Mental health disorders (MHDs) typically begin early in life (75 per cent before the age of 25) affecting an estimated one in five children and youth (1.6 million Canadians). MHDs are highly heritable,

More than 100 autoimmune diseases have complex immune responses to autoantigens. Nanoparticles coated with autoimmune-disease-relevant peptide-major histocompatibility complexes (Navacims) have the potential to halt and cure autoimmune disease by restoring immune tolerance without compromising normal immunity to infections and cancer. They are currently the only technology that can activate internal generation of disease-specific regulatory T

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the urgent need for early warning surveillance systems that can provide information to public health authorities on emerging COVID-19 variants and other infectious diseases. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is a non-invasive, comprehensive, and cost-effective early warning system that enables population-level monitoring independent of clinical testing. The research team has already developed

Currently, non-urgent patients may routinely wait 1-2 years to see a metabolic geneticist, an additional 3-4 months to get approval for next generation sequencing (NGS), and an additional 4-6 months to obtain results and counseling. The project aims to establish a Canadian Prairie Metabolic Network (CPMN) and describes a unique, combined clinical and laboratory approach

Alberta patients with or suspected of having rare genetic diseases continue to face lengthy diagnostic odysseys, and clinical genome wide sequencing has emerged as a rapid and cost-effective approach to diagnosis. Large scale clinical genomics are not available in Alberta, and Alberta Precision Laboratories (APL) has relied primarily on US commercial labs to provide clinical

Asthma is now the most common chronic disease of childhood, affecting 1 in 7 Canadian children. It is also expensive with a total cost to treat estimated at over $2B per year in Canada. This research project focusses on studying the composition of microorganisms living in our intestines (gut microbiome). Using new genomic technologies to