CBR Summer Students Tour the CBS
Our 2012 CBR Summer Students had the chance to visit the Oak Street location of Canadian Blood Services on June 12. Dr. Gerry Growe gave an amazing tour through the donation process including eligibility and safety practices. The students were then taken through packaging, storage and shipment processes. We would like to thank Dr. Growe […]
Drs. Sheldon Naiman & Linda Vickars Honoured for Dedicated Service to Medical Care, Research and Education
The husband and wife team of Shelly Naiman and Linda Vickars devoted their careers to solving the puzzles of hematology, including bleeding and clotting disorders. So when the time came for the couple to plan their giving, they decided to enable such sleuthing by others. Drs. Naiman and Vickars created an endowment with a $30,000 […]
Hancock lab tackles malaria by modulating innate immunity
Severe malaria is a blood borne parasitic disease that afflicts more than 200 million individuals annually. Even in the best clinical settings, case fatality rates remain high since anti-malarial drugs are directed against the parasite but do not reduce life-threatening (brain) inflammation. CBR member Dr. Bob Hancock, Director of the Centre for Microbial Diseases and […]
Louis Wadsworth Receives Award for Career Excellence
We are pleased to announce that longtime CBR member and renowned UBC hematopathologist, Dr. Louis Wadsworth, received the prestigious Clinical Faculty Award for Career Excellence in Clinical Teaching. Louis is well known in the medical community at UBC as a caring and astute clinician and investigator who has a magical and enthusiastic approach to teaching, […]
2012 Summer Students Arrive at the CBR!
As the undergraduate and medical students wind up their studies this May, the CBR is happy to welcome them into our labs and clinics. These opportunities, available through unrestricted educational grants from Bayer Inc., CSL Behring, Nikon, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer and Roche provide these future scientists and clinicians with valuable experiences that will guide […]
McNagny and colleagues uncover antibiotic link to asthma
Asthma is a common, increasingly frequent, chronic inflammatory disease of the airways that affects over 100 million people worldwide. It is associated with shortness of breath, coughing and wheezing, and necessitates the use of puffers by millions of children. This treatment is required to prevent considerable short- and long-term morbidity and mortality. Although the cause […]
Hi-Definition HIV Sequencing in the Harrigan Lab
Low levels of drug resistant HIV can emerge when exposed to drugs. Researchers at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS have developed a “deep” sequencing approach that gives an in-depth cross-section of the HIV envelope profile in patients. HIV is extracted from patient blood samples and a portion of the envelope gene (which mediates […]
Multiple PI’s “Platelet Investigators” in the Devine Lab
Canadian Blood Services (CBS) investigators Elena Levin, Craig Jenkins, Brankica Culibrk and Katherine Serrano in the lab of Dr. Dana Devine, and Maria Gyongyossy-Issa from the Dept. of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine have been studying the quality of platelets, a key blood transfusion component that is essential to prevent bleeding. These CBR scientists designed a […]
Aging in HIV/AIDS: Hélène Côté makes breakthroughs in understanding the risks of HIV therapies
Approximately 3 million HIV-infected women become pregnant every year and approximately 90% of HIV-infected children acquire HIV through mother-to-child transmission. To prevent transmission and/or for their own health, HIV-infected women can receive highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) during pregnancy. This greatly decreases the risk of mother-to-child transmission, from 20-25% to <2%. Although the benefits of […]
Kizhakkedathu’s polymer lab is on the road to generating universal donor red blood cells
Red blood cell (RBC) transfusions are vital for the treatment of a number of acute and chronic medical problems. Identification of donor RBCs that match the prospective recipient who requires transfusion is occasionally difficult, placing the patient at risk if a match is not available. At present no method is available for the generation of […]