CRISPR/Cas9-Mediated Gene Therapy to Correct Aniridia in a Mouse Model
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Principal Investigator:
- Seyedeh Zeinab Mohanna, BCCHR
Our directory of funded grants
343 result(s) found
Crosstalk between immune response and metabolic signaling: targeting leptin/AMPK axis to restore metabolic homeostasis in ALS
Project Overview
Increased metabolism (hypermetabolism) is a characteristic often associated with more aggressive, faster progressing cases of ALS. Recently, after studying blood plasma samples from people with more rapidly progressing disease, Dr. Jasna Kriz discovered that fast progressing individuals often have d…
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Principal Investigator:
- Jasna Kriz, Université Laval
Team Members:
- Nicolas Dupré, CRCHUQ-Enfant-Jesus, University Laval
- Angela Genge, McGill University
Cyto-iGluSnFR: A glutamate biosensor platform for brain diseases
Project Overview
In the human brain and retina, the chemical glutamate is a very important messenger that carries information from one neuron to another. The levels of glutamate transmitted between neurons must be tightly controlled: too high and neurons die, too low and information is not communicated properly. In …
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Principal Investigator:
- Don van Meyel, Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre
Team Members:
- Keith Murai, Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre
- Adriana Di Polo, CHUM Research Centre, University of Montréal
- Tim Murphy, University of British Columbia
Cytosolic DNA sensing in ALS-related neuroinflammation
Project Overview
Recently, Dr. Honglin Luo, in collaboration with Dr. Neil Cashman, discovered that mutations in the ALS-linked SOD1 gene result in activation of a specific neuroinflammatory pathway called cGAS-STING. Neuroinflammation is thought to play an important role in the progression of ALS and activation of …
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Principal Investigator:
- Honglin Luo, University of British Columbia
Team Members:
- Neil Cashman, University of British Columbia
Deciphering eEF2K biological functions for therapeutic targeting of neural tumours
Project Overview
In childhood, medulloblastoma (a form of brain cancer) and neuroblastoma (a cancer that starts in the nerve cells) can be aggressive and hard to treat. Dr Poul Sorensen’s group is targeting what he believes is the Achilles heel of tumour cells: namely, how they adapt and survive under stress. He h…
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Principal Investigator:
- Poul Sorensen, University of British Columbia
Decoding motor cortex circuit abnormalities at ALS onset through combined two-photon imaging in vivo and pharmacogenetics
Project Overview
ALS is a disease that is characterized by degeneration of both upper and lower motor neurons, and while a significant proportion of work has focused on motor neurons in the spinal cord, the motor cortex in the brain, where electrical signals to your muscles originate have clear, but poorly understoo…
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Principal Investigator:
- Lisa Topolnik,
CHUL, Université Laval
Decoding the RNA stability programs that determine cell identity and function in human brain and neurodegenerative disorders
Project Overview
The brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease patients differ extensively from healthy brain cells at the molecular level: there are hundreds of genes that are normally active in the brain, but become inactive in Alzheimer’s. Similarly, Alzheimer’s disease appears to turn on hundreds of genes that ar…
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Principal Investigator:
- Hamed Najafabadi, McGill University
Defining conserved functions of RNA binding proteins in stress-granule biogenesis
Project Overview
RNA is a mobile form of genetic information that is made from our DNA and its complex regulation is extremely important to the proper functioning of our cells. Since the discovery of TDP-43 in 2006 as a substance that plays a major role in ALS, the hypothesis that abnormal regulation of RNA is criti…
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Principal Investigator:
- Eric Lecuyer, Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal, Université de Montréal
Defining the mechanism of inhibition of tau aggregation by the molecular chaperone, DNAJA2
Project Overview
Alzheimer’s Disease is a progressive and fatal disease that currently afflicts up to 400,000 Canadians over the age of 65. One key observation about this disease is that there is an abnormal “clumping” (aggregation) of specific proteins such as tau. Proteins normally need to keep a certain sha…
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Principal Investigator:
- Sue-Ann Mok, University of Alberta
Detection and prevention of pypermutant glioma in children and young adults
Project Overview
Need for project: Replication repair deficiency (RRD) is a genetic condition that significantly increases the risk of developing cancer, particularly early in life. Gliomas are the most common brain tumour seen in children and young adults (CAYA), and occur frequently in RRD. Currently, the prevalen…
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Principal Investigator:
- Uri Tabori, The Hospital For Sick Children
Team Members:
- Cynthia Hawkins, The Hospital For Sick Children
- Jane Barron, Memorial University
- Sunit Das, St. Michael's Hospital
- Sidney E. Croul, Dalhousie University
- Birgit Ertl-Wagner, The Hospital for Sick Children
- Andrew Gao, University Health Network
- Normand J Laperriere, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
- Julia Keith, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
- Farzad Khalvati, The Hospital for Sick Children
- Derek Tsang, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre - UHN
Detection of misfolded TDP-43 in CSF of ALS cases: Diagnostic potential of confirmation-specific antibodies
Project Overview
A more streamlined way to diagnose ALS earlier is desperately needed as current methods can take up to two years and rely heavily on ruling out other conditions that share similar symptoms. One of the hallmarks of ALS for 97 per cent of cases is the accumulation of misfolded TDP-43 protein in motor …
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Principal Investigator:
- Yulong Sun, University Health Network (University of Toronto)
Detection of tandem repeat expansion in neurological disorders
Project Overview
In the past decade, rapid development of software has allowed detection of a wide variety of genetic risk factors in brain disorders. It has improved clinical diagnosis and gene discovery for numerous human brain disorders. However, the casual genetic risk factors identified so far generally confer …
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Principal Investigator:
- Ryan Yuen, The Hospital for Sick Children
Development and validation of reagent kits for commercial high-throughput screening of PPI s and PPI inhibitors
Project Overview
Membrane proteins, which make up approximately one-third of all proteins in a cell, are responsible for a variety of processes, making them attractive therapeutic targets for many diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, neurological disorders and cancer. Understanding membrane protein function depe…
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Principal Investigator:
- Igor Stagljar, University of Toronto
Development of a high throughput 3D microphysiologicalplatform for rapid automated assessment of human brain organoids response to drugs targeting neurological disorders
Project Overview
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) are the most common and devastating neurological diseases, with over 750,000 AD patients and over 100,000 PD patients in Canada. Drug development remains a slow, expensive and inefficient process. The biopharmaceutical industries need alterna…
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Principal Investigator:
- Thomas Durcan, Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University
Team Members:
- Edward Fon, McGill University
- Margaret Magdesian, ANANDA Devices
- Christopher Moraes, McGill University
Development of novel oligonucleotide delivery modalities for Huntington disease
Project Overview
Huntington disease (HD) is an inherited neurodegenerative disease that affects approximately 1 in 7500 individuals in the Western world. The cause of HD is a mutation in one copy of the HTT gene, which produces the toxic mutant huntingtin protein responsible for the brain cell loss associated with t…
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Principal Investigator:
- Blair Leavitt, University of British Columbia
Team Members:
- Danica Stanimirovic, National Research Council of Canada
- Abedelnasser Abulrob, National Research Council of Canada
- Jodi McBride, Oregon Health and Science University
Developmental origins of stress and self-regulation and implications for interventions to improve childhood behavior
Project Overview
Dr. Neuenschwander’s research aims to explore how exposure to stress during pregnancy affects children’s development, specifically in relation to children whose mothers were depressed and/or on antidepressants during pregnancy. She is examining whether or not these children have problems later…
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Principal Investigator:
- Regula Neuenschwander, Child & Family Research Institute
Direct microglial reprogramming to study Parkinson’s Disease
Project Overview
The human brain is a complex organ that presents many challenges for neuroscientists. For instance, tissue availability represents a major problem given that this organ does not regenerates, making it next to impossible to obtain live tissue from patients that would allow to study how cells in the b…
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Principal Investigator:
- Janelle Drouin-Ouellet, University of Montreal
Discovery of Therapeutic Targets for FUS- and TDP43-Dependent Forms of ALS
Project Overview
The four most commonly studied ALS proteins are SOD1, TDP-43, FUS and C9ORF72. Of these, TDP-43 and FUS have the most in common. Not only do they share similar functions inside cells, but in motor neurons of people with ALS, they both accumulate in clumps outside of the area where they are supposed …
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Principal Investigator:
- Peter St. George-Hyslop, University of Toronto
Team Members:
- Mei Zhen, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinani Hospital
- Peter Roy, University of Toronto
- Ben Wolozin, Boston University
- Clemens Kaminski, University of Cambridge
Discovery of transcriptomic biomarkers and epigenetic therapeutic targets for c9ALS and sALS
Project Overview
Dr. Belzil began her research career as a PhD student at the Université de Montréal under the guidance of world renowned geneticist and Director of the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, Dr. Guy Rouleau. During this time, Dr. Belzil pursued a better understanding of the genetics behind …
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Principal Investigator:
- Veronique Belzil, Mayo Clinic
Disrupted SUMOylation facilitates rogue TDP-43 in ALS
Project Overview
Proteins are large molecules that play many essential roles in the body. They do most of the work inside cells and are necessary for the structure, function and regulation of all tissues and organs. TDP-43 is a protein that is usually found inside the cell nucleus. However, in most people with ALS, …
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Principal Investigator:
- Terry Suk, University of Ottawa