Researchers Under the Scope

Researchers in Robert Laprairie's laboratory are hard to miss, wearing tie-dyed lab coats as they oversee mice and lab rats in iPad-sized chambers filled with cannabis smoke. An associate professor in the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, Dr. Laprairie and his team are trying to unravel the mysteries of human neurotransmitters and cannabinoid receptors, and their role in neurodegenerative disease...

Dr. Ivar Mendez is one of the world's leading experts in neuroscience and robotics, neuromodulation, and remote medicine. But nine years ago, the award-winning neuroscientist who founded Dalhousie's Brain Repair Centre faced a career dilemma. Would he accept a senior clinician's position at Harvard University, or would he move to Saskatchewan, to oversee surgery for an entire province? Today, Dr....

From insects and birds, to the underwater world, Juan Ianowski's fascination with the natural world began early.   As a biologist, he was drawn to physiological processes, later scrutinizing the kidneys of insects, whose epithelial cells behave in similar ways to those in human lungs.   By 2015, Ianowski's research was focused on the pathophysiology of lung cells, and the nerve channels controllin...

Dr. Deborah Anderson has spent her career as a biochemist and cancer cell biologist pinning down elusive targets.  Now she's made a breakthrough in one of the world's most swift-moving and aggressive cancers: triple negative breast cancer.   This form of the disease affects 15 to 20 per cent of women diagnosed with breast cancer. It's , and is often more prevalent in young women, with a disproport...

Chandra Dattani's smile lit up the room, and her laughter was contagious. But when the beloved Saskatoon businesswoman and volunteer was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, even her husband, a physician, found very little information about therapies or drugs that could heal her. "There was very scant literature on triple negative, and I was asking them, why?" said Dr. Dan Dattani. Typica...

When Veronica McKinney was little, she made trip after trip to the Saskatoon Public Library, to keep borrowing a  Time-Life book about the human body. "I loved that book and I would read it. I would copy the cover. I can picture it even to this day, all the different little cells," said McKinney, now an assistant professor at the College of Medicine. "I was just fascinated by how our body works an...

Most patients at a hospital or a clinic walk in sick. Doctors do their best to treat their ailments. Dr. Neils Koehncke's patients aren't necessarily sick. In fact, most are reasonably healthy and still on the job. But their duties at work often lead to a plethora of risky situations and occupational hazards.  "It's the flip side of healthy, or at least people healthy enough to work suddenly being...

To spread hope and cheer in our city, the Office of the Vice-Dean of Research typically runs a charitable donation campaign at the end of each year, during the Christmas break. Again, distancing, masks and video conferencing dominated the College of Medicine's second pandemic holiday season. That prompted graduate students Stefany Cornea and Nayoung Kim to issue a departmental challenge. Help an e...

From his time as captain of the Saskatoon Blades, to a career with the Saskatoon Police Service and the law -- Bruce Gordon was the kind of father, athlete and coach who inspired everyone around him. After he was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in 2017, his wife Chris joined family and friends to start a wave of 'Be Like Bruce' fundraisers. "We were stunned and to be given a diagnosis of...

As Saskatchewan drops its proof-of-vaccine requirements and masking orders, doctors and nurses are angry and frustrated, as they care for record numbers of Covid patients. "There's this tension of how to manage all of this going forward so that we don't have surge after surge and wave after wave continue to basically crush our healthcare system," said Dr. Alex Wong. The infectious disease speciali...

Audrey Zucker-Levin estimates it's been more than 30 years since she first poked her head into a researcher's office at New York City's Hospital for Special Surgery. Back then, the clinical therapist spent her days treating hospital patients, stopping by the laboratory after her shifts. "I was very intrigued by the prosthesis, by the mechanical and the physiologic connection," said Zucker-Levin. "...

Dr. Ayisha Kurji first noticed the uptick in children and teens admitted to hospital in the spring of 2020. Some had cardiovascular damage. Some had gastrointestinal issues. But it wasn't because of Covid-19. Instead, she kept seeing children and adolescents hospitalized with eating disorders. "They were so sick, so medically unwell," said Kurji. "We started to track it." As familiar routines evap...

Dr. Erique Lukong grins, pointing to two bracelets on his wrist. One inscribed with the word 'focus'; the other 'believe'. "I'm passionate about what I do,' he said, describing his journey through medicine as a series of 'lucky breaks'. In his home country of Cameroon, Lukong was identified early as a promising scholar. Upon graduating from high school, he won an eight-year government scholarship...

Without a car, without childcare, without a grocery store, a pharmacy, or a place to get blood work done, how is a person with diabetes in rural Saskatchewan supposed to keep their disease in check? Those are the questions Dr. Stu Skinner and his Wellness Wheel team members face each day, as they treat Cree and Saulteaux patients on the Day Star, George Gordon, Kawacatoose and Muskowekwan First Na...

For senior citizens, fracturing a hip is more often than not a life-changing injury. One in three of those patients will die within a year. The second will recover and return home. The third often needs to move to a long-term care facility, to cope with reduced mobility.   Dr. Cathy Arnold makes it her mission to stop those falls and fractures in the first place. On this episode of the podcast, sh...

Dr. Marek Radomski says research pays off, in attracting dollars to post-secondary institutions, in creating healthier citizens, and in lowering health costs. He's the vice-dean of research at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Medicine, a member of Canada's U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities, But in a province that will spend $6.5 billion on health care this year to fight a ragi...

Julia Boughner knows primates carry a deep-seated instinct to gather together.   An associate professor of anatomy with the College of Medicine, Boughner is a biologist who specializes in evolutionary development.    On the last Tuesday of the month, she also hosts Café Scientifique Saskatoon . The gathering is essentially a pub night where a scientists talk about their research, mingle with membe...

Dr Michael Levin is a neuroscientist unravelling the mysteries of nerve degeneration in Multiple Sclerosis patients.  He's also Saskatchewan's inaugural MS Clinical Research Chair, whose team recently won a New Frontiers in Research Fund award.  "In my lifetime, there's been a dramatic change in how we treat MS," said Levin. "There's a lot of hope when people come into the clinic." But after takin...

One of the trickiest parts of treating patients with neuromuscular diseases such as Parkinson's and Multiple Sclerosis is figuring out how to keep them active and moving. Fourth-year medical student Kyra Ives dove in, spending one summer studying the effect of deep brain stimulators on patients with Parkinson's disease. She and her team watched participants experience major differences in tasks in...

Taking a daily puffer with inhaled corticosteroids is a mainstay for millions of people who have eosinophilic asthma. But doctors don't always know what dosage will be most effective for their patients, in preventing inflammation. Up to now, studies of different corticosteroids have been hit and miss, with a patchwork of different approaches to brochoprovocation, subject groupings, and wash-out ti...

Our podcast host, Jen Quesnel, has undergone two Caesarian sections -- lifesaving interventions that deliver babies safely. She's not alone. In Saskatchewan, roughly one quarter of mothers giving birth are doing it via abdominal surgery. More than one in three births in British Columbia are C-sections.  After avoiding driving, stairs, and lifting anything heavy for a month or so, most mothers reco...

One patient Shivani Tauh interviewed had to remove his ventilator tube to speak with her. Another told her it felt 'disingenuous' when able-bodied health care providers looked at his spinal cord injury and assured him 'this will pass'. Shivani Tauh kicks off our undergraduate summer research series in this episode, discussing her work on spinal cord injuries, and how they change a person's outlook...

For doctors in Saskatchewan, depression and anxiety have skyrocketed during the pandemic. We check in with Dr. Camelia Adams, an associate professor of psychiatry, who's been tracking physicians' mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic. Just one of the 118 physicians she surveyed reported asking for help with mental health issues.  That's no surprise to Angie Wiebe, one of the psychologists wor...

When Dr. Katherine Knox first arrived in Saskatchewan more than two decades ago, the province covered one prescription drug for patients with Multiple Sclerosis. Beyond that, patients had to pay for drugs out-of-pocket.   Today, Knox said the province reimburses MS patients for 14 different drugs.   "MS is an expensive disease on many levels," said Knox, noting Saskatchewan's coverage is now the m...

Dr. Alexander Wong remembers forcing himself to hide his fear last year, as he treated his first Covid-19 patients. "It kind of felt like we were staring down the bottom of a big gun barrel," said Wong, an assistant professor in the College of Medicine's Department of Infectious Diseases. The virus has killed 546 people in Saskatchewan. In this episode, Wong looks at public health, at politics, an...