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I am pleased to welcome you to the launch of the first issue of our newsletter.
Although past the halfway mark in my term as Scientific Director, I am still amazed how much things have changed since I started in December 2000. From an institute that was little more than an idea, without staff or a place to work, we have grown into a team with broad expertise, much experience under our belt and lots of energy still left to tackle new challenges and projects. We spent the first few years focused on the tasks needed to develop strategic and operational plans including hiring staff, conducting environmental scans, developing strategies, and identifying actions and performance indicators.
During this past year the INMD Advisory Board reaffirmed that our sole strategic priority will remain obesity and healthy body weight research through to December 2006 when my term as Scientific Director ends. We have already committed more than $15 million dollars to innovative new research projects tackling the problem of obesity. These projects range from efforts aimed at unraveling the complex mechanisms regulating body weight to projects examining marketing strategies to reduce over consumption. Significant additional dollars will be committed to obesity and healthy body weight research over the next couple of years.
To achieve our goals we had the good fortune of working with a variety of other organizations including many of the other 12 CIHR Institutes, as well as health charities such as the Canadian Diabetes Association, the Kidney Foundation of Canada and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada (HSFC). With HSFC and others we launched the Target Obesity health research training initiative which attracted more than 50 applications from across Canada and resulted in14 new awards.
INMD is also breaking new ground for CIHR and Canada with its Canada on the Move (COTM) project. Together with multiple partners and many engaged scientists from across Canada, the US and Australia, INMD launched COTM in December 2003. This web-based research platform is designed to enhance data collection, research and evaluation of health promotion and disease prevention programs aimed at increasing physical activity by encouraging Canadians are to "donate their steps" to health research at http://www.canadaonthemove.ca/.
Looking ahead, we can now turn our sights on new efforts to improve our communication with researchers and other INMD stakeholders. We are also engaged in a significant effort to measure and evaluate our performance over the past four years and we are looking at new ways to enhance research and create more opportunities for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and the general public to come together to tackle the problem of obesity and to support other areas of research within the INMD mandate.
I hope you find this newsletter informative. Please e-mail inmd_communications@sfu.ca with your comments and suggestions for INMD Update. We look forward to hearing from you.
A pilot project grant from INMD is leading scientist Patricia Brubaker in new directions.
A professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto, Brubaker has spent the past 15 years studying how certain hormones from the intestine affect food digestion, absorption and regulation in the blood. Much of her work has centered on glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), an important hormone that stimulates insulin release and that is now undergoing clinical trials in patients with type 2 diabetes.
"What's being found in these tests is that not only does GLP-1 improve blood sugars, it also reduces body weight," says Brubaker.
Brubaker and her lab team have used the INMD pilot project grant to try to discover more about how GLP-1 and several other intestinal hormones exert their effect on body weight and satiety, signaling the body to stop eating. There are several ways that these hormones might do their work, says Brubaker, including traveling through the blood directly to the brain or perhaps acting on the Vagus nerve which runs through the intestines, stomach and liver and then into the brain. Ultimately, she hopes to discover the answer in order to find new and better ways to deliver hormone treatments therapeutically.
"If hormones have to get directly into the brain to exert their effect then we might want to deliver therapeutic hormones using a nasal spray, for example," she says, "but if they act through the Vagus, then other methods of delivery can be used, such as injections or pills."
INMD pilot project grants were established to encourage scientists to embark on new research in the field of obesity. Using this grant, Brubaker has tested the feasibility of researching GLP-1's affect on obesity and she is now applying for funding from the Canadian Diabetes Association to continue the project.
Brubaker earned her PhD in biochemistry at McGill University in 1982, and she has been a member of the Department of Physiology at the University of Toronto since then. In 1998 she received the Canadian Diabetes Association's Young Scientist Award and in 2000 she became a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair. In addition to her research, she teaches endocrinology to first-year medical students and body weight regulation to third-year physiology students in the University of Toronto's Departments of Physiology and Medicine. Brubaker is also an INMD advisory board member.
Congratulations to Dr. Patrick S. Parfrey, O.C., on being appointed to the Order of Canada, a well-deserved honour.
INMD funded Research Scientist, Memorial University Professor and Director of the Patient Research Centre at St. John's general hospital, Parfrey is an internationally renowned scientist and clinical epidemiologist. A leading expert on cardiac disease in kidney patients, he is also known for his innovative research on end-stage renal disease. An advocate of multidisciplinary research, he has been involved in important collaborative studies including CANPREVENT. In addition, he has provided outstanding leadership to the sport of rugby, coaching teams at the local, provincial and national levels and serving as president of Rugby Canada.
As of mid-October 2004, Canadians have donated more than 450 million steps to health research through Canada on the Move.
INMD is breaking new ground for CIHR and Canada with its Canada on the Move (COTM) project. COTM is a unique research platform that works in tandem with the efforts of health promotion initiatives to provide valuable data on physical activity and healthy eating to Canadian researchers.
The COTM project is unique in many respects:
Project participants provide basic demographic information and then complete a survey of their walking and other physical activity behaviours, confidence in their ability to increase their activity level, and characteristics of their neighborhood environment. Those who have pedometers are also asked to provide information on their use of the device.
Early on, INMD developed a range of unique, multi-sector, collaborative relationships with organizations interested in furthering health research:
"Our initial partners have been essential in getting this project off the ground on a very short timeline, but they represent the 'tip of the iceberg' of groups interested in participating in this unique multi-sector initiative," says Dr. Diane Finegood, Scientific Director of INMD. "We are keen to develop many more partnerships that will help us bring together the necessary research expertise, financial support, and services needed to expand Canada on the Move and encourage even more Canadians to get involved."
Now that the foundation for COTM is firmly established, additional work is required to achieve its vision of improving health through health research that identifies effective approaches to health promotion and disease prevention. To achieve this vision, COTM seeks to further enrich the database by adding information from organizations and groups promoting physical activity.
A series of papers based on the work completed and results obtained during this first phase of COTM are now in preparation.
We would like to thank retiring board members Dr. Heather Beanlands of Ryerson Polytechnic University, Dr. Karen Dodds of Health Canada, Dr. Glenville Jones of Queen's University and Cytochroma Inc., Ms. Anne Kennedy of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and Dr. Bernard Zinman of the University of Toronto and Mount Sinai Hospital for their dedication and contributions.
We are pleased to welcome our new IAB members Ms. Naana Afua Jumah of Oxford University, Dr. Murray Huff of the University of Western Ontario, Dr. Sylvie Robichaud-Ekstrand of the Université de Montréal, Dr. Gregory Taylor of Health Canada and Dr. Dilys Williams of AstraZeneca Canada.
For details on the full IAB membership for 2004 - 2005 visit the advisory board homepage.
CIHR is pleased to announce that an updated version of Tips for Writing a Successful CIHR Grant Application or Request for Renewal is now posted on the CIHR website.
Also, effective January 1, 2005, CIHR will no longer accept PDF format funding applications (electronic or handwritten) when a web form exists for that application. PDF forms will remain on the site only to serve as visual examples of the information required.
| CDPAC Conference | Nov 6-9, 2004 |
| CAPHC Annual Meeting | Nov 7-10, 2004 |
| NAASO Annual Meeting | Nov 14-18, 2004 |
| Sixth Annual International Symposium on Obesity | Nov 20, 2004 |
| Canadian Physiological Society Winter Meeting | Feb 3-6, 2005 |
| 14th European Congress on Obesity | June 1-4, 2005 |
| Partnerships for Health System Improvement | Regist: Full: |
Nov 22, 2004 May 1, 2005 |
| Excellence, Innovation and Advancement in the Study of Obesity and Healthy Body Weight - General | Regist: Full: |
Feb 1, 2005 Mar 1, 2005 |
| Excellence, Innovation and Advancement in the Study of Obesity and Healthy Body Weight - Pilot Project Grants under the Childhood Obesity Theme | Regist: Full: |
April 1, 2005 May 2, 2005 |
Obesity: Seeking Solutions. In a nutshell, that's the research priority for INMD. It's also the title of a half-hour television program INMD produced in partnership with BTV and a host of sponsor organizations including the Dairy Farmers of Canada.
Featured in the program are a number of Canadian obesity researchers, including INMD Scientific Director Diane Finegood, a professor of Kinesiology at Simon Fraser University and a diabetes researcher.
Several key messages are expressed throughout the program: that because obesity rates have tripled in the last 20 years, multiple causes are at play; that there is no single fix to resolve the obesity epidemic; that it's a complex problem affecting an increasing number of people and Canadian researchers are aggressively working towards an equal variety of solutions.
You can order your copy for only $12.90 by contacting: inmd@sfu.ca.
INMD welcomes partnerships with governmental, non-governmental, private sector or volunteer sector agencies in joint research initiatives, training programs and workshops in any area of the Institute's mandate.
If you are interested in exploring partnerships with INMD, please contact:
Paul Blanger
613-941-6465
CIHR - Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes
