Molecular Biomedicine - Program Director: Dr. Martin Holcik
The Apoptosis Research Centre and the Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research Centre are part of the Molecular Biomedicine program at the CHEO RI, which strives to identify therapeutic approaches for the treatment of disorders such as cancer, diabetes, neuromuscular disorders, infectious diseases, and others. Apoptosis (or programmed cell death) is being recognized as central to many diseases and conditions. The Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research Centre looks at the pathogenesis and treatment of chronic viral infections including HIV, Hepatitis C Virus (HCV), and bacterial sepsis. They each boast strong “bench-to-bedside” translational value to their experimental approaches and provide an exciting research setting for students as well as to postdoctoral fellows.
Clinical Research - Program Director: Dr. Martin Osmond
The Clinical Research Unit (CRU) provides support and assistance to health professionals interested in doing research in areas as varied as study design/methodology, statistical analysis, sample size calculation, data management, budget preparation, and logistics,. It was launched in 2007 and has quickly become an integral part of the CHEO RI since world class clinical research requires a strong research infrastructure.
Last October, the CHEO RI’s Clinical Research Unit hosted its second Clinical Research Day at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. Some of the best and brightest medical and investigative minds gathered to make oral presentations, showcase poster presentations, discuss their ongoing research, present their findings, and answer questions from their peers.
Mental Health - Program Director: Dr. Mario Cappelli
The mental health research program focuses on three main research areas: the identification of predictors, causes and treatment of mental disorders in children and youth; the study of psychological factors associated with health and pediatric illnesses; and evidence-based program development, implementation and evaluation. Together, these fully integrate the three pillars of clinical work, research and training/teaching. In 2008, we provided education sessions to our investigators; collaborated with various mental health stakeholders; joined forces with the Regional Specialized Mental Health Services, which created additional research opportunities across developmental age and diagnostic categories; and published a number of journal articles. This past year, they also received funding from RBC to study mental health needs, make recommendations during and after discharge, develop interventions, influence clinical decision making, and recommend standards for measuring mental health concerns in children and youth.
HALO – Director: Dr. Mark Tremblay
The Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group (HALO) was created 2006 with the goal to become a multidisciplinary centre of excellence in healthy active living and obesity research in children and youth. Highlights for the HALO group in 2008 include the recruitment of additional staff, the release of the 2008 Active Healthy Kids Canada Report Card, the expansion of the KIDS-CAN Research Alliance with a trip to Kenya to gather analytics, and the creation of a number of health promotion outreach activities.
HALO has quickly become a well-respected centre of excellence that provides national and international leadership in the prevention of pediatric obesity and the promotion of healthy active living.
eHealth – Director: Dr. Khaled El Emam
The Electronic Health Information Lab (EHIL) is an internationally recognized forerunner in the field of data anonymization research. EHIL is part of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa and is based at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute.
Headed by the Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information, this multi-disciplinary team includes computer scientists, software engineers, mathematicians and statisticians.
With the implementation of electronic health records and the growing use of the “cloud” for storage and sharing of data, it is more important than ever to ensure that records containing sensitive information cannot be used to personally identify individuals. With the loss, theft, or accidental distribution of health information being reported on a regular basis, it is becoming increasingly evident that current methods to prevent privacy breaches are falling short.
Our team conducts research on re-identification risk assessment, text data mining and natural language processing; we develop re-identification risk measures, evaluate anonymized databases that others have produced, and advance new methods to de-identify health data.