Encouraging Early-Career Health Researchers: SHRF's 2024-25 Establishment Grant Recipients

"Inflammatory Bowel Disease includes Crohn’s Disease, Ulcerative Colitis, and Indeterminate Colitis. Patients diagnosed with these chronic intestinal conditions endure pain, weight loss, bleeding, infections, and cancers. Treatment often includes multiple medications, hospitalizations, and procedures. Unfortunately, the prevalence of Inflammatory Bowel Disease is rapidly growing in Saskatchewan. For this project, we will be focusing on Crohn’s Disease.

Mental health disorders, particularly depression and anxiety, frequently co-exist with Crohn’s Disease, and they may be linked through a common inflammatory mechanism. The brain and intestine communicate through a two-way flow of chemical signals known as the gut-brain axis. The effects of inflammation on the gut-brain axis are well studied in animal models of Crohn's, but not in humans due to a lack of appropriate laboratory models.

Our proposed model uses stem cells to create miniature multi-cellular models of the brain and intestine. The stem cells will be collected from intestinal biopsies and blood samples of patients with Crohn’s Disease. We will compare two versions of this model to find the best representative of Crohn’s Disease. We will then study the effects of inflammation on the gut-brain axis in Crohn’s.

In summary, the lack of an appropriate human-based cellular model hinders the development of treatments to address both intestinal and neurologic aspects of Crohn’s Disease. Our project will create a human tissue-based model and provide information about the inflammatory effects on the brain and intestine in this disease. Development of this model would be the foundation of a multi-disciplinary Inflammatory Bowel Disease research program."

"The Problem: Communication is vital to building trusting relationships between the healthcare team, the patient, and their loved ones in the ICU. Trusting relationships and open communication lead to care that supports the patient and their loved ones and is centered on the patient and their family. Communication is challenging in the ICU due to the complexity of care, demands on time (for both loved ones and the healthcare team), and the emotional toll of having a loved one in the ICU. The power of communication technology has not yet been fully explored in the ICU space.

Aim: This project aims to improve communication and patient—and family-centered care by using communication technology.

Plan: We will bring together national experts to help define the characteristics of an ideal communication technology solution to facilitate communication and patient and family-centred care in the ICU. Then, we will look at existing technologies and compare them to these ideal characteristics. Finally, we will modify existing technologies or create new ones to exemplify the ideal characteristics of a communication technology solution that would facilitate patient and family-centred care in the ICU. This will result in a paper-based map and presentation of key features of a communication technology solution that can be further developed in the future.

Impact: By using communication technology as a tool, this project will improve patient—and family-centered care among Saskatchewan ICU patients, their loved ones, and their healthcare team.

The health of the people of Saskatchewan lags behind other provinces, prompting efforts to improve care through regional health networks. However, obstacles like fragmented data systems hinder evidence-based progress. Drs. Plante and Neudorf lead a team funded by CIHR to create a research platform integrating various databases for health research to study the social drivers of health in Canada’s cities. Our study, funded by SHRF, aims to expand this platform to rural areas, develop methods for more accurately measuring local health, identify key regional factors determining health, and, ultimately, better inform regional health network decision-making in Saskatchewan.

"In 2017 Saskatchewan’s main inter-community public transportation source, the Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) was eliminated. The bus was a key mobility link for over 200,000 people each year, facilitating travel to see family and access healthcare services. It also helped vulnerable people like seniors, youth and people with disabilities.

Unavailability of transportation leads to transportation poverty, a multidimensional concept characterized by an inability to travel for important activities due to inaccessibility, unavailability, or unaffordability of transportation options. While some existing measures of transportation poverty exist, all of them are focused on transportation within the same city as opposed to inter-community transportation.

The proposed research will use existing transportation poverty questionnaires to calculate transportation poverty rates in Saskatchewan and how this translates to poor mental health and reduced access to healthcare. It will also calculate who -men, women, Indigenous people etc.- is the most affected by transportation poverty. Recognizing the limitations of the existing transportation poverty questionnaires, mostly based on urban transportation, the research team will interview community leaders and transportation experts to develop a new questionnaire that is more appropriate for Saskatchewan. The developed questionnaire will be applied to calculate transportation poverty, who is affected the most and how it translates to poor health. The research team will create an online tool with data from the two surveys and other information to help policymakers understand who is affected the most by transportation poverty and how different policy scenarios can affect the well-being of people who experience transportation poverty."

The purpose of this research is to map community needle prevalence and respond with HIV and syphilis prevention interventions. This project will evaluate health outcomes (linkage to clinical care and knowledge of pre-and post-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP and PEP)) of these interventions, alongside the feasibility and acceptability of this rapid assessment and response strategy. A technology-driven, real-time, web-based community needle reporting application gathers data on community needle prevalence in public spaces in Regina, Saskatchewan. These map visualizations will be used to deploy and study the impact of pop-up HIV and syphilis point-of-care testing, HIV self-test distribution, and PrEP and PEP education in hotspot areas. This is an evidence-based, objective, and innovative approach to HIV and syphilis prevention reduction with the potential to significantly influence the well-being of people struggling with addictions.

We are a community-based, transdisciplinary team of knowledge users and researchers, including people with lived experience of HIV, syphilis, substance use, and addictions. We are developing a pragmatic solution to identify geographical areas of need via community needle data. This research project will evaluate whether geo-mapping needle report data can be used to focus on HIV and syphilis prevention interventions to improve connection to clinical care and increase knowledge. This is an 'out of the box' community-based research initiative, the first of its kind in Canada. By evaluating this approach, our team aims to generate the evidence necessary for a sustained response of this nature in Saskatchewan and to share knowledge for adaptation and implementation of similar strategies elsewhere.

Immunization protection levels have decreased for children in Saskatoon, SK and the surrounding area. It is essential to explore the reasons why immunization rates have dropped, how immunization rates can be improved, and ways to improve immunization services in the Saskatchewan context. This study will explore the perspectives of families of children 0-6 years of age and frontline healthcare workers, i.e., public health nurses, community program builders, and office administrative assistants in and around Saskatoon, SK, to: (1) identify key elements that support or create challenges to immunization uptake; (2) develop specific strategies to modify and improve immunization health services. This study is being developed in partnership with the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA), First Nations and Métis Health services, families of children 0-6 years of age, and frontline healthcare workers. The research activities will include collecting information online and in-person from families and frontline healthcare workers to gain a more in-depth understanding of the research goals. The information gathered will be analyzed online and in-person in collaboration with participants. A software program called Group Concept Mapping will be used to collect and analyze the gathered information. The SHA can use the findings from this research to help inform immunization services and programming, potentially improving current immunization protection levels. In addition, there may be an opportunity to expand this study to other health networks within Saskatchewan to generate additional community-specific information to help inform immunization services.

Timely assessment and diagnosis of dementia allow earlier access to treatment and services and time to plan future care. Rural residents living with dementia may face challenges accessing appropriate dementia-specific services and support; therefore, it is vital to ensure rural primary care providers, including family physicians and nurse practitioners, are ready to fill the gap.

The overall aim of the proposed research is to identify opportunities to improve the readiness of rural primary care organizations to deliver high-quality dementia care in Saskatchewan. The first objective is to identify opportunities to increase dementia detection in rural primary care by using administrative health data to examine rural-urban differences in dementia diagnosis rates, and variations between rural areas. The second objective is to use a provincial survey of family physicians and primary care nurse practitioners to examine rural-urban differences in dementia care resources (e.g., alignment with national recommendations). The survey will help identify opportunities to improve dementia care resources in primary care. The third objective is to assess the potential of a primary care intervention to increase the availability of collaborative models of dementia care. This will involve evaluating a memory clinic model adapted into a hybrid format (in-person and virtual). Findings from the proposed research will inform recommendations for practices, policies, and services to improve rural primary care readiness for the purpose of supporting people with dementia to receive quality care in their local communities.

Vaccines based on messenger RNA (mRNA) have recently been shown to provide effective and safe protection against infectious diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines have been shown to be extremely safe and effective against SARS-CoV-2, and hundreds of millions of doses of mRNA vaccines have been administered worldwide. Although mRNA vaccines provide effective protection against serious illness and death, it is also clear that first-generation mRNA vaccine technology has some limitations, e.g., they provide little protection against infection and transmission, vaccine efficacy wanes over time, and vaccine formulations are not stable during handling and storage requiring cold chain maintenance. This represents a great opportunity for the development of novel inhalable mRNA vaccines that induce a localized immune response targeting the mucosal surfaces where pathogens enter and have minimal storage requirements for mass vaccination. However, inhalable mRNA vaccines must be stable during the process of vaccine delivery and should navigate through biological barriers in the lungs before successful production of such vaccines can be realized. The overall purpose of this proposal is to investigate and improve the delivery of inhalable mRNA vaccines and evaluate their safety and ability to stimulate an immune response and protective efficacy, which in the short term will generate new knowledge on how to design and administer inhalable mRNA vaccines to induce both systemic (i.e., whole body) and mucosal (i.e., local) immunity. In the long run, it will result in the development of new and improved mucosal mRNA vaccines against a range of respiratory pathogens.