Informing Decision Making
Part of SHRF's mandate is to help share the knowledge that is learned from health research within the research and health care communities, as well as with the general public. SHRF encourages researchers and research organizations to build knowledge transfer into all of their health research projects.
Following are indicators designed to measure the sharing and use of health research.
Definition: Percent of SHRF Establishment grant holders participating in three or more KT activities five-years post SHRF award
Source: SHRF Five-year follow-up study
Definition: Intersectorial collaboration - This is an indicator of collaboration between the university and non-academic sectors. Number of papers with an academic and non-academic address.
Source: Calculated by Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST) and Science Metrix using Thompson Scientific data
Story
Dr. Ali Honaramooz
Human Testing Made Ethical
What if you could test the effects of environmental toxicants on humans? You would be right to question the legalities and ethics of such testing. After all, you wouldn’t offer to expose a pregnant woman to high levels of a potentially dangerous substance, only to study the effects on her child some 20 years later.
“There is another way,” says Dr. Ali Honaramooz, “and it’s an entirely unique system that only we’ve developed. It exposes those potential environmental toxicants to human tissue without using humans.”
Honaramooz is waiting to see if his application will be accepted for a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He proposes to conduct his research on human tissue, but in an animal’s body.
It started years ago when Honaramooz pioneered the development of a model to study the biology of testes cells. He was able to graft small pieces of testis tissue from farm animals onto mice. In time, the grafts developed complete spermatogenesis; that is, they produced viable sperm that came from that original donor.
The achievement was groundbreaking and it wasn’t long before the results were published in Nature, and newspapers in several countries.
An establishment grant from SHRF in 2005-06 made it possible for Honaramooz to go further. He moved to grafting human testis biopsies. Donors were limited to adult males who were either undergoing a sex change or being biopsied in the course of infertility treatments. As it turned out, the adult human donors did not get the same results as the younger farm animals.
“This was actually a good thing,” says Honaramooz, “because it provided the means to study spermatogenesis from the very beginning and opened up the possibility to overcome infertility issues in children undergoing cancer treatments.”
When an adult male is treated for cancer, semen samples are often frozen in case he is unable to produce sperm later in life. For young males not yet producing sperm, there has never been an option. With Honoramooz’s system, a testis biopsy could be frozen. Viable sperm could then be produced years later. The next step for Honaramooz is to use his system to test the effects of environmental toxicants on humans. “We know the concentration of sperm now in most males is almost half of what it was in the forties or fifties,” he says. “One possible reason is because of the plastics we use.” He proposes to graft testis samples from aborted fetuses. By exposing each sample to various levels of toxicants, he will be able to determine the effect they have on sperm count.
If Honaramooz is successful, the potential for his system could be far-reaching. In addition to identifying harmful substances, it could pave the way for the development of life-saving drugs. It could provide a short cut to test the safety of these drugs on humans – tests that would otherwise require years of clinical trials.
