Current Venture Grants

A Family-Centered Initiative to Encourage Physical Activity in Children/Youth Living with Solid Organ Transplantation

Participation in regular physical activity is important for the health of children with a solid organ transplant (SOT). Despite its known importance, participation is low in these children. Over the last few years, the team  has tried different ways to address physical inactivity in the SOT population. This included text messaging to offer support, a modifiable virtual home exercise program, and most recently, virtual reality headset. Participation in these studies has been low which is likely due to a variety of reasons. The study seeks to understand these reasons.  To drive this work the team will:

 (1) Create a patient-parent advisory committee (PPAC) to help guide the project

(2) Work with the  PPAC to create a ‘Knowledge Exchange Day (KED) to exchange knowledge about physical activity; 

(3) Use the KED to collect data from surveys and focus groups to  better understand the challenges families face. 

This study allows the team to learn from patients, to help change how they talk about physical activity, to increase support for those who find it difficult to be active and to generate new ideas from the knowledge gained. The goal is to help patients become active and to support both their immediate and long-term health goals.

Primary Investigator: Dr. Kathryn Armstrong

Co-investigators: Astrid De Souza and Dr. Jim Potts

Patient Partner: TBD

For an up-to-date list of publications by Dr. Kathryn Armstrong, please see ResearchGate

Cytokine and metabolomic urinary diagnostics to predict and monitor treatment responsiveness of acute rejection in kidney transplantation

Kidney transplantation is a renal replacement therapy which greatly improves quality and quantity of life for kids with severe kidney diseases. However, following transplantation surgery and despite medication, childrens’ immune systems can highly react against the newly transplanted organ leading to an inflammation called acute rejection. Once acute rejection is diagnosed, treatments are given to reverse the inflammation within the kidney. However, some cases of acute rejection do not respond well to initial treatment, and it transforms to chronic rejection. Chronic rejection is the leading cause of kidney loss in pediatric kidney transplant recipients. At the moment, it is impossible to predict, using kidney and blood tests,  if acute rejection will respond well to treatments.

The team is studying substances in urine called metabolites, CXCL-10 and IL-6, to see if they can predict how well  treatments will work in children with acute rejection, allowing treatment of acute rejection to occur earlier and avoid transformation to chronic rejection. This would provide better insights to improve survival of kids with kidney transplants.

Principal investigator: Dr. Tom Blydt-Hansen

Co-investigators: Dr. Camille Laroche, Dr. Li Wang, Dr. Graham Sinclair and Amy Thachil

Patient Partner: Shawn Chand

For an up-to-date list of publications by Dr. Tom Blydt-Hansen, please see ResearchGate