The UBC Health Awards recognize the academic and research excellence of faculty from various health disciplines at UBC, as well as the achievements of health educators, professionals, and community partners across British Columbia.
Faculty, staff and community members are invited to submit nominations for the following awards by November 8, 2024.
John McNeill Excellence in Health Research Mentorship Award recognizes outstanding mentorship by a faculty member in a UBC health-related discipline who exemplifies a deep commitment to fostering the professional and personal development of faculty colleagues, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.
John F. McCreary Prize for Interprofessional Teamwork recognizes and promotes interprofessional teamwork in the health and human service professions.
Award for Excellence in Interprofessional Teaching and Learning recognizes two outstanding educators who demonstrate excellence in facilitating interprofessional groups of learners at UBC Vancouver or UBC Okanagan.
Practice Education Team Award honours a healthcare team that provides outstanding interprofessional collaborative patient-centred education in the practice setting for UBC pre-entry to practice level students.
R. Paul Kerston Community Educator Award honours outstanding community educators who have made a difference to student learning at UBC.
Applications are now open for Michael Smith Health Research BC’s Scholar and Health Professional-Investigator (HP-I) awards 2025 competitions.
The programs provide funding to support BC’s health researchers in advancing science and improving the health of British Columbians. Fifteen Faculty of Medicine researchers were awarded funding to advance transformational health research through the 2024 competitions.
The Scholar program helps BC researchers build leading-edge health research programs, train the next generation of scientists and make significant contributions to their field. The award provides salary support to early-career researchers, allowing them to dedicate 75 percent of their time to health research activities.
The HP-I program supports health professionals actively involved in patient care to build their health research programs, train the next generation of scientists, and make significant contributions to their field. The competition invites a broad range of health professionals to apply. Previous recipients include psychologists, nurses, physicians, physical therapists and pharmacists.
Both programs provide a maximum of $90,000 per year for up to five years. Submit a letter of intent by 4:30 pm on Tuesday, November 19, 2024.
Nominations are now open for the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) Awards for 2025.
The CMA Awards recognize the dedication, successes and talents of Canadians who are making significant contributions to our health and health care.
We invite you to consider colleagues who could be eligible for these distinctions. Contact fom.recognition@ubc.ca to declare your intent to nominate before submitting nominations directly per the nomination instructions on the CMA website. The submission deadline is November 30, 2024.
As influenza (flu) season approaches, protect yourself by taking the flu vaccine. UBC Vancouver and UBC Okanagan are offering free, appointment-based flu immunization clinics this fall.
Flu season generally occurs in the fall and winter but can occur as early as October and as late as May. Even healthy people can get very sick from the flu and spread it to others. Getting the flu shot is your best protection.
At UBC Vancouver, immunizations for flu and COVID-19 will run from November 5 to 12. Book your appointment through the provincial government’s Get Vaccinated system.
At UBC Okanagan, immunizations for flu and COVID-19 will be available from October 30 to November 6. Book an appointment
You can also get a flu shot at a public clinic off campus or through a community pharmacy.
Drs. Rachel Murphy (pictured) and Andrew Roth (not pictured) are recipients of the 2022/2023 Precision Health Catalyst Grant award for their project entitled “Improving Breast Cancer Screening Efficiency with Administrative Health Data”
“This project aims to use administrative health data to a) develop individualized risk assessment models that improve the ability to estimate a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer, and b) tailor risk models to breast cancers: pre- vs post-menopausal, hormone receptor negative vs positive, triple negative and early vs advanced stage.”
1. Can you tell us about the precision health research work you’re collaborating on?
Early detection of breast cancer via mammographic screening saves lives. For most women, recommendations for breast cancer screening are a one-size-fits all approach, with recommendations to engage in screening at given intervals (1 to 2 years) and within a defined age range (50-74). However, some women will develop breast cancer that is not be detected because they do not meet criteria for screening, while others may undergo unnecessary screening. Our proposal applies machine learning methods to administrative health data to estimate an individuals’ risk of developing breast cancer. This individualized approach has the potential to better predict and prevent breast cancer by identifying those most likely to benefit from mammographic screening and/or prevention.
2. What results have you seen so far?
Our results to date have confirmed that the individual risk assessment methods can be applied to predict personalized breast cancer risk, including time until breast cancer onset, and the probability of breast cancer onset within a defined period (e.g. 5-years). We have also identified several factors that were strongly predictive of breast cancer, and may help inform prevention approaches for an individual.
3. From your perspective, what do you think is exciting about the future direction of precision health?
I am an epidemiologist and population health researcher. So, naturally I am excited about the interplay and expansion of precision health to public health. Individualized prevention and health care are central to precision health, which seems at odds with traditional public health approaches. However, increasingly, precision is being integrated into public health interventions. Ensuring a strong evidence base to inform precision public health interventions is critical, and I’m looking forward to leading part of this effort, and learning along side others.
About Dr. Rachel Murphy
Dr. Rachel Murphy is a Senior Scientist in Cancer Control Research at BC Cancer, an Associate Professor and the Associate Director, Research in the School of Population and Public Health at UBC. She holds a PhD in Nutrition and Metabolism and completed postdoctoral training in epidemiology at the National Institutes of Health. Her research program is focused on the intersections of nutrition, human health, and public health challenges. Dr. Murphy has received a number of awards recognizing her contributions, including a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar award and a Canadian Cancer Society Early Career Development award in Cancer Prevention.
Drs. Ying Wang (left) and Joshua Dubland (right) are recipients of the 2022/2023 Precision Health Catalyst Grant award for their project entitled “Who will benefit from colchicine to reduce heart attacks? Characterizing the baseline inflammation status of patients with coronary atherosclerosis”
“This project aims to provide molecular insights on the baseline inflammation present in the coronary lesions (local) and plasma (systemic) of patients with chronic and acute coronary syndrome. This project will fill knowledge gaps to enable personalizing the use of colchicine and all the future anti-inflammatory therapies.”
1. Can you tell us about the precision health research work you’re collaborating on?
Our team aims to answer the question: Who will benefit from the anti-inflammatory drug colchicine to reduce heart attacks?
Heart attack, mostly caused by the buildup of lesions in the coronary arteries, is the 2nd leading cause of death in Canada. Inflammation was recently confirmed to be an independent risk factor and therapeutic target for patients with established lesions. To prevent heart attack in these patients, an anti-inflammatory drug, colchicine, was approved by Health Canada in 2021. However, clinical trials have shown that some patients benefit from colchicine and some don’t. Currently, clinical symptoms are used to decide who will benefit from colchicine. There is no blood-derived biomarker to guide the use of colchicine in patients with established coronary lesions.
Our team will fill this knowledge gap in precision medicine by:
1. Characterizing inflammation in coronary lesions: are the therapeutic targets of colchicine present in the diseased vessels
2. Exploring blood biomarkers that are correlated with high inflammation in coronary lesions
2. What results have you seen so far?
Leveraging existing resources at the Bruce McManus Cardiovascular Biobank, where coronary lesions from heart transplant patients along with the clinical information have been archived in the past 30 years, we used high-throughput RNA sequencing to find inflammatory targets in diseased tissues. Among patients that seem to be similar in clinical symptoms, the inflammatory targets in diseased vessels vary a lot. This may explain why some patients respond well to colchicine and some don’t. We’ve also found some common inflammatory targets that different patients share.
Collaborating with the Prevention of Organ Failure Centre of Excellence, we collected pre-transplant blood samples from the same patients whose coronary lesions were sequenced for inflammatory targets. We have developed a mass spectrometry-based method to characterize promising blood biomarkers related to inflammation in coronary lesions. We are now positioned to correlate blood profiles with inflammatory status in diseased vessels.
3. From your perspective, what do you think is exciting about the future direction of precision health?
Our preliminary data suggested that clinical symptoms may not precisely predict who will benefit from colchicine treatment. Therefore, clinical guidelines need a better biomarker to assess the inflammation status in the diseased vessels for decision-making. These data generated with the help of the Precision Health Catalyst Grant award, has scaled up to three years of Heart and Stroke Foundation Grant-in-Aid research project. To advance precision health in patients with a high risk of heart attack, we will continue our correlation analysis and expand our patient cohort to find blood-derived biomarkers correlated with inflammation in the diseased vessels.
About Drs. Ying Wang and Joshua Dubland
Dr. Ying Wang is a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar and a Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada New Investigator at Centre for Heart Lung Innovation, St. Paul’s Hospital. Her research program integrates cutting-edge ‘Omics’ technologies, biobank resources, and mechanistic studies to improve treatment outcomes of ischemic heart disease. In 2022, Dr. Wang was appointed as the Director of Bruce McManus Cardiovascular Biobank, which has the largest collection of explanted hearts in Canada.
Dr. Joshua Dubland is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia, an investigator at the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, and a scientist in the Newborn Screening and Biochemical Genetics Laboratories at BC Children’s Hospital. His current research interests and expertise are in utilizing mass spectrometry for biomarker discovery, assay development, and implementation of novel testing strategies in the clinical laboratory.
Drs. Eric McGinnis (left) and Ryan Stubbins (right) are recipients of the 2022/2023 Precision Health Catalyst Grant award for their project entitled “Rapid targeted gene sequencing and high-resolution optical genome mapping to optimize selection of targeted therapies in acute myeloid leukemia”
“This project aims to: 1) Evaluate the feasibility, in a clinical laboratory, of high resolution rapid genomic testing using nanopore LRS and OGM in AML and 2) Evaluate the increase in clinical yield of combined OGM and LRS relative to current standard-of-care methods for timely identification of therapeutically actionable or diagnostic entity-defining genetic abnormalities.”
1. Can you tell us about the precision health research work you’re collaborating on?
In acute myeloid leukemia (AML), the genetic abnormalities we are able to identify in a clinical laboratory in cancer cells play a central role in how we diagnose these cancers and how patients are treated – in many cases determining what type of chemotherapy a patient receives and whether they will undergo bone marrow transplant. In addition to this, identifying genetic drivers in AML often results in patients being eligible for targeted, precision therapies that have been demonstrated to significantly improve outcomes. In many clinical laboratories the bulk of this work is done using decades-old technologies (mainly banded karyotyping) which have limited ability to resolve small or subtle changes in combination with highly targeted sequencing covering a small portion of the genome, and many genetic changes in cancer cells which could potentially inform diagnosis and treatment are not detectable as a result. Up to 25% of patients can have additional genetic drivers identified by newer technologies, and this can also identify targetable lesions. Our research explores applications of two newer technologies, optical genome mapping (OGM) and nanopore-based whole-genome long read sequencing (LRS) using adaptive sampling-based enrichment to clinical testing for patients with AML to determine the potential added benefit of applying these higher resolution tests as well as their feasibility of use in a clinical laboratory setting.
2. What results have you seen so far?
We observed that applying OGM and LRS to detection of genetic abnormalities in AML identifies an enormous number of abnormalities not detected by established standard-of-care testing – in the case of OGM often hundreds to thousands of such changes and in the case of LRS (in preliminary results) several orders of magnitude higher as this technology detects sequence abnormalities. These technologies have inherent advantages (for example the ease of translation of OGM for detection of structural variants and the higher overall resolving power of LRS to incorporate sequence-level variants) and disadvantages, including technical hurdles to implementation still being evaluated to enable us to fully understand the potential strengths of these tests separately and in combination. As we identify more of these previously hidden genetic changes in AML, we are also increasingly realizing that more clinical research is needed to understand how we apply these changes in clinical practice. A key focus of our research is now to understand how the additional genetic variation now detectable can inform treatment of patients with AML and other diseases to inform a precision medicine approach to diagnosis and therapy selection.
3. From your perspective, what do you think is exciting about the future direction of precision health?
It is clear from results of this and other similar studies that we are only beginning to scratch the surface with our understanding of diseases like AML, and with the rapid evolution of genomics technologies such as OGM and LRS (among many others) and their translation to clinical applications the potential for refinement in our approaches to diagnosing and treating these diseases is enormous – diseases we now think of as relatively homogenous entities in the context of our limited understanding may be meaningfully picked apart based on their underlying biology, and patients may derive substantial benefit. The use of these technologies has already started to change how we think about patients with AML and is now starting to change how we treat. With the availability, wider application, and improving understanding of these tools, we are excited at the emerging prospect of truly personalized and precision cancer medicine, in which understanding of the biology of a patient’s malignancy, developed through genomics and related techniques, can be exploited to meaningfully improve outcomes.
About Drs. Eric McGinnis and Ryan Stubbins
Dr. Eric McGinnis is a Hematopathologist at Vancouver General Hospital with subspecialty expertise in cancer cytogenetics and molecular genetics and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. His main research interests are in improving evaluation and classification of chronic myeloid neoplasms and acute leukemias through clinical applications of novel genomics technologies, particularly optical genome mapping and long read sequencing.
Dr. Ryan Stubbins is a Hematologist and Transplant/Cell Therapy physician in the Leukemia/BMT program of BC. He previously did his medical school, residency training, a MSc, and hematology/BMT training at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. He has performed additional research training at the BC Cancer Genome Sciences Center and the University of Chicago. He has clinical and research interests are focused on cell therapy, transplantation, and its application to hematologic malignancies.
A message from Dermot Kelleher, Dean, Faculty of Medicine and Vice-President, Health and Roger Wong, Vice Dean, Education.
The UBC Faculty of Medicine is incredibly grateful for your immense contributions as clinical faculty members, helping to teach and inspire the next generation of healthcare professionals. As part of the Faculty’s ongoing commitment to develop resources to improve your teaching experience, we invite you to complete a short survey.
By completing this five-minute survey, you will help us identify the areas that you would find most valuable in enhancing your teaching experience.
Please kindly complete the survey by Thursday, November 7, 2024.
Your responses will help direct the Faculty’s efforts moving forward as we work to design and implement resources and systems to enable your engagement in clinical education. We will be working closely with clinical faculty representatives to ensure the resources that are developed meet your needs.
Drs. Annie Ciernia (pictured) and Sheila Teves (not pictured) are recipients of the 2022/2023 Precision Health Catalyst Grant award for their project entitled “Human SPI1 variants alter microglial immune memory to promote neuroinflammation”
“This project aims to identify how GWAS hits in non-coding regions confer disease risk or protection. We will specifically examine a novel human variant in a microglia-specific enhancer that increases risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. Findings will allow for precision medicine therapies to ameliorate disease risk and promote healthy aging.”
1. Can you tell us about the precision health research work you’re collaborating on?
We aim to understand how genetic changes in non-coding regions of DNA can increase or decrease the risk of neurodegenerative diseases. Specifically, we are studying a new human genetic variant that affects microglia (brain immune cells) and increases the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. We are studying a specific genetic variant linked to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) in a new mouse model where the mouse genome contains the human high risk AD variant. Our research examines how this genetic variant affects microglia under normal and inflammatory conditions. We are investigating how the AD risk variant changes microglial functions, such as cleaning up brain debris and changing shape. Our findings could lead to personalized medical treatments to reduce disease risk and support healthy aging.
2. What results have you seen so far?
We have found the high AD risk variant alters microglial responses to inflammation by regulating inflammatory gene expression. We also see changes in microglial cellular shape in the mutant animals, indicative of increased inflammation in the brain. We see these changes in both sexes of mice, and future work will examine how the microglia are impacted by aging in the AD risk variant mice.
3. From your perspective, what do you think is exciting about the future direction of precision health?
I am excited about being able to tailor medical treatments to individual genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors. This means treatments can be more effective and have fewer side effects because they are specifically designed for each person’s unique biological makeup and life experience.
About Annie Ciernia
Dr. Annie Ciernia is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia and currently the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Understanding Gene Expression in the Brain. Her lab is located at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Centre for Brain Health. Dr. Ciernia’s lab focuses on understanding how our genetics and environment both influence brain development through regulation of gene expression. Much of her lab’s current focus is on understanding how events in early-life impact interactions between the developing nervous and immune systems, leading to altered brain development and function.
Drs. Anna Blakney (pictured) and Jayachandran Kizhakkedathu (not pictured) are recipients of the 2022/2023 Precision Health Catalyst Grant award for their project entitled “Next-generation anti-cancer antibody formats enabled through development of novel low immunogenic RNA delivery”
“This project will develop a low immunogenic novel delivery platform that enables the development and formulation of high-efficacy RNA-launched therapeutic anti-cancer antibodies with immense commercial potential. This platform will simultaneously circumvent existing bottlenecks in antibody development and manufacturing, whilst overcoming a key current limitation in the delivery of RNA therapeutics.”
1. Can you tell us about the precision health research work you’re collaborating on?
Our collaborative work, between the Blakney and Kizhakkedathu labs, focuses on developing next-generation lipid nanoparticle formulations for RNA cancer immunotherapies. Two of the main challenges in the field are developing more stable formulations that don’t require storage at -80C and engineering new formulations that don’t include polyethylene glycol (PEG). Many patients have antibodies against PEG, which results in faster clearance and lower efficacy of the therapy. Here, we’re aiming to develop new polymers that confer stability and eliminate the need to use PEG in LNP formulations.
2. What results have you seen so far?
We recently published a joint paper in Advanced Function Materials that shows that our new ultra-hydrating polymer is able to stabilize not only RNA and LNP formulations, but also protein therapeutics, against a variety of stressors including freezing, heat and lyophilization. This is a great first step to replacing PEG in these formulations, and we’re now using this knowledge to create further designs.
3. From your perspective, what do you think is exciting about the future direction of precision health?
We are gaining so much information about patient health, including personalized measurements for blood chemistry, genomes and microbiomes. This is highly complementary to the RNA LNP platform wherein we can design therapies for a variety of potential diseases, and manufacture them at smaller scale and lower patient cost, which will enable a new era of personalized medicine.
About Dr. Anna Blakney
Dr. Anna Blakney is an Assistant Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Nucleic Acid Bioengineering in the Michael Smith Laboratories and School of Biomedical Engineering at UBC. She received her Bachelor of Science in Chemical & Biological Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Washington. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Imperial College London on the development of molecular and biomaterial engineering strategies for delivery of self-amplifying RNA. Her lab uses bioengineering, molecular biology and immunology approaches to develop the next generation of RNA vaccines and therapies. Her research has been published in a variety of top tier journals including ACS Nano, Nature Communications, Molecular Therapy, Biomaterials, Journal of Controlled Release, and Advanced Materials. She is also a passionate science communicator and runs a TikTok channel dedicated to educating the public about RNA biotechnology, which now has >250,000 followers and >18M views.
