Three Concordians land $1.8 million in federal health research funding

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has announced new funding for health sector investigations at Concordia. The support reinforces the university’s ongoing efforts to double its research, as part of its nine strategic directions.

Three researchers in the Faculty of Arts and Science — Christophe Grova, Lisa Kakinami, and Michael Sacher — have been awarded a combined $1.8 million in federal funding.

They hail from the Departments of Physics, Mathematics and Statistics, and Biology respectively. Two of them (Grova and Kakinami) are also PERFORM researchers.

“This high-impact funding — earmarked for three vastly different but equally important projects — will support Concordia’s deeply innovative approach to health research,” says Christophe Guy, vice-president of Research and Graduate Studies.

“These successfully funded researchers exemplify our focus on the full continuum of health issues and interventions across disciplines.”

Using brain networks to improve the treatment of epilepsy

Grova’s research project uses different neuroimaging techniques to study the brain as a network, and more specifically the specific hubs of this network.

“The brain’s hubs are crucial entities that ensure the robustness and the reliability of the whole network,” Grova explains. “Just imagine what would happen if the JFK International Airport in New York closed for a few hours. This is the same for our brain network.”

Socio-economic status and health

Kakinami’s research aims to find the link between socio-economic status and health differences.

“Half of all Canadian adults will experience a major chronic illness such as cardiovascular disease or cancer. Those of lower socio-economic position are at a greater risk,” Kakinami explains.

Protein sorting diseases at the cellular level

Since arriving at Concordia in 2006, Sacher’s laboratory has been studying a large protein assembly called TRAPP (TRAnsport Protein Particle). For the past four years, he has focused on disease-causing mutations linked to the proteins of these complexes. Like Kakinami’s project, Sacher’s is collaborative in nature.

Sacher’s team uses cutting-edge techniques to look for proteins that interact with TRAPP complexes, including imaging the movement of proteins in live cells derived from affected individuals.

“We'll be using some of the CIHR funding to employ CRISPR technology to try and replicate the human mutations in more commonly used cell lines, making our laboratory studies easier to perform and obviating the need to obtain human skin cells," he says.
 

Learn more about research at Concordia.