Events

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Past Events 

Friday, February 9, 2024

Building Bridges: Connecting Foundational Science and Clinical Practice in Precision Health and Translational Medicine

Building Bridges: Connecting Foundational Science and Clinical Practice in Precision Health and Translational Medicine

Meeting and Networking co-hosted by UBC Faculty of Medicine Precision Health, Life Sciences Institute, and the Academy of Translational Medicine

Are you a foundational scientist wanting to collaborate on a research project with a clinician?

In this meeting and networking session, you will learn from researchers who have achieved successful partnerships between foundational scientists and clinicians, on how to initiate new collaborations to advance your precision health and translational medicine research.

The meeting will consist of presentations from our invited speakers, a Q&A session, followed by refreshments and networking. This is a hybrid meeting, in person attendance is limited and requires registration. 

Meeting Details

Date: Friday, February 9th, 2024

Time: 12:00-1:30pm (Networking for in-person attendees 1:00-1:30pm)

Location: Room 3, Life Sciences Centre, 2350 Health Sciences Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3 and Zoom

Meet the Speakers:

Dr. Deborah Money, CM, BSc, MD, FRCSC, FCAHS

Dr. Deborah Money is a Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, an associate member in the Department of Medicine and the School of Population and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, an Associate Member of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Faculty of Science, at the University of British Columbia. Following a BSc, and MD, she completed residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology, at UBC and then did a Fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington, becoming Canada’s first dual specialist in Obstetrics & Gynecology and Infectious Diseases. 

She became the first woman Department Head in October 2023 and was recently appointed to the Order of Canada for her contributions to women’s health, notably in the field of reproductive infectious diseases, as a researcher, clinician, teacher and mentor.

She is an active clinician scientist in Reproductive Infectious Diseases, based at the Women’s Health Research Institute, leading several large multicentered research projects on HPV and prevention of cervical cancer, the maternal/infant microbiome and HIV in women. She is the lead for CANCOVID-Preg, a Canada-wide surveillance program studying the outcome following COVID-19 for pregnant women and their infants; the lead for a pan-Canadian SARS-CoV-2 serosurveillance study using antenatal sera, and the lead for COVERED, a national study of the safety, effectiveness, and acceptability of the COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant and lactating persons.

Dr. Alexander Wyatt, BSc, PhD

Dr. Wyatt is an Associate Professor in Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a senior research scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and also cross-appointed at BC Cancer. Dr. Wyatt has a DPhil in genetics from the University of Oxford. His research goals are to dissect the clinical relevance of genomic alterations in metastatic genitourinary cancers, and develop minimally-invasive biomarkers for guiding therapy selection.

Dr. Wyatt’s lab has established a variety of custom sequencing techniques and novel bioinformatics approaches to interrogate tissue and liquid biopsies from patients enrolled in a series of ongoing clinical trials and biobanks. His lab team works very closely with Dr. Kim Chi and other senior oncologists and urologists, and together have demonstrated that plasma circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is highly representative of metastatic lesions in prostate and bladder cancer, and that somatic alterations detected in ctDNA can help predict therapy resistance or response.

Dr. Wyatt’s research is funded through peer-reviewed grants from the NIH, CIHR, Prostate Cancer Foundation, and CCS. He works closely with the Canadian Cancer Trial Group (CCTG) via the Genitourinary Disease Site Trial Development (as Correlative Science Chair), and the executive committee for the Investigational New Drug Program. Dr. Wyatt directs ctDNA screening and the molecular tumor board for CCTG trial IND.223/234, a multi-center phII umbrella trial in mCRPC (NCT03385655, NCT02905318). His current research leverages a biobank of >4500 clinically-annotated plasma samples from patients with metastatic prostate and urothelial carcinoma to address questions of cancer evolution in the context of different classes of therapeutic agents. This work includes using cell-free DNA fragment patterns to identify real-time changes in transcriptomic features (Herberts et al., Nature 2022).

Including:

Dr. Stuart Turvey, Lead, UBC Faculty of Medicine Precision Health

Dr. James Johnson, Interim Director, Life Sciences Institute

Dr. Poul Sorensen, Director, Academy of Translational Medicine

February 2, 2023: Precision Health Symposium

The first ever Precision Health Symposium was held on February 2, 2023 bringing together faculty, clinicians, researchers, learners and staff across precision-health related disciplines. The Symposium highlighted important research in the precision health through presentation from the keynote speakers and PH Catalyst Grant award recipients, a poster session, and breakout sessions showcasing resources and tools available to support PH research.   

Read more about the event here