Interprovincial collaboration to improve brain health
October 17, 2024
On October 15, the Québec Consortium for Drug Discovery (CQDM) and the Brain Canada Foundation announced the funding of three collaborative research projects, for a total of $7.4 million, aimed at addressing unmet medical needs in the treatment of brain disorders.
Caused by trauma or disease, functional brain deficits affect a large proportion of the working population and have a huge impact on their lives and those of their loved ones, as well as being associated with significant costs. Cognitive disorders alone accounted for $8.3 billion in healthcare costs in 2011, and these are expected to double by 2031, .
One of the three funded projects is co-led by Jocelyn Faubert of the Université de Montréal with UVic's Brian Christie, professor in the Division of Medical Sciences, and Jodie Gawryluk, associate professor in the Department of Psychology and acting director of the Institute on Aging and Lifelong Health.
Awarded through the CQDM-Brain Canada Joint Call for Collaborative Research Projects on the Brain program, the total grant of close to $2.1 million is made possible by $559,312 in funding from the government of Québec via CQDM, alongside $771,500 in funding from Brain Canada and a commitment of $860,816 from NeuroTracker Athletics Inc.
Their goal is to establish that people with a history of concussion can significantly recover by using NeuroTracker Athletics Inc’s cognitive training platform.
“We both have graduate students involved in the research,” Gawryluk adds. “Taylor Snowden-Richardson, in Brian’s lab, has been a leader on this work and in my lab, Colleen Lacey has been carrying out the neuropsychological assessments.”
“This project,” says Christie, “will help us understand how those head injuries from our youth are impacting our cognitive capacity as we age, and it is also using NeuroTracker software as an innovative therapy for an aging population. The results in both healthy control participants, and those with a prior concussion history, are very promising, so this funding will allow us to use more advanced imaging and biomarker analysis to better understand brain changes in all of our participants.”