Alvin Qiu and Mihai Cirstea from the Michael Smith Laboratories have been named recipients of the 2018 Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Canada’s most prestigious scholarship for doctoral students in the social sciences and humanities, natural sciences, and/or engineering and health. The Government of Canada launched the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships program in 2008 to strengthen Canada’s ability to attract and retain world-class doctoral…
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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative disease with an autoimmune component that affects the central nervous system. Canada has one of the highest prevalence rates of MS in the world and interferon-β is a first line therapy for the treatment of MS in the country. When this biologic was first introduced, it represented a major change in MS disease management, but unfortunately around one in 50 patients develop severe liver injury as a result of this treatment...
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Qu Biologics Inc., a biopharmaceutical company developing Site Specific Immunomodulators (SSIs), a novel platform of immunotherapies designed to restore innate immune function, is pleased to announce that the first patient in the  RESTORE Phase 2 clinical trial for patients with moderate to severe Crohn’s disease has been enrolled. The first stage of this trial is actively recruiting participants at sites in Vancouver BC, New…
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Award-winning investigative journalist John Daly brings nearly 40 years of reporting to investigating what’s going on today. It’s about constructive disruption, looking at controversies, corruption, institutions, ineptitude inefficiency, and trying to see where solutions lie. In this episode, John investigates the Centre for Drug Research and Development, based right here in Vancouver, and he learns more about what specifically it is that…
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Dr. B. Brett Finlay, the Peter Wall Distinguished Professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories, and the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Microbiology and Immunology, received $5.8 million over seven years in grant funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to support his research on host microbe interactions in health and disease The work done in the Finlay Lab…
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Competitive Organelle-Specific Adaptors Recruit Vps13 to Membrane Contact Sites

At any given moment cells are performing thousands of tasks which require materials to be transported to the appropriate places. When the transportation of these materials is disrupted, disease can occur. In the Conibear lab, we study the molecular machinery required for intracellular transport and determine how defects in these pathways result in diseases such as neurodegeneration and cancer...
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July 2018 Award Winners

Dr. Lindsay Eltis, Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the UBC Life Sciences Institute, was announced as one of 39 BC researchers to be awarded CIHR Project Grants in the latest round of funding. Find our which other Vancouver researchers won grants, awards, fellowships, and scholarships in July in our monthly award summary...
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Miguel Ramirez is a PhD candidate in the laboratory of Dr. Dan Goldowitz at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at BC Children’s Hospital. Miguel’s research uses a combination of bioinformatic and molecular biology approaches to examine changes in enhancer activity throughout development of the cerebellum...
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Strains of the HIV virus have mutated in Saskatchewan, placing individuals who contract HIV in the province in danger of quickly progressing to life-threatening, AIDS-defining illnesses if they are not taking HIV antiretroviral therapy. HIV incidence rates in Saskatchewan are among the highest in North America, with 2016 rates in some regions more than tenfold higher than the Canadian national…
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