The Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RIMUHC) is one of three winners in the 2011-2012 Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec competition. The RI-MUHC won a four-year grant of $1.4M for innovative strategic development in developing personalized medicine. An interdisciplinary research team will combine recent advances in bioinformatics, state-of-the-art technologies and new information about how biological systems interact, to create a new competitive program in translational research. The researchers will focus on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, two diseases that are emerging as potential health care crises. One of the project’s goals is to identify new biomarkers to allow physicians to understand and predict the progression of NAFLD and NASH — possibly leading to new diagnostic tests and treatments.
“NAFLD and NASH will serve as a model for this new approach to treating disease and will provide the tools to better diagnose and manage a patient’s disease or predisposition to it,” explains lead investigator Tommy Nilsson, director of the Proteomics and Systems Medicine Program at the RI-MUHC, and professor in McGill’s Faculty of Medicine. “This will form the basis for personalized medicine in the future.”
“If successful, this work will create the road map to building personalized medicine programs across a spectrum of diseases that could lead to changes in health care delivery,” adds Vassilios Papadopoulos, director of the RI-MUHC.
The Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec is a funding agency dedicating to supporting excellence and innovation in university- and hospital-based research into human health.