Sherbrooke researcher gets grant from Crohn’s and Colitis Canada
According to Dr. Fernand-pierre Gendron, who works at the Pavillon de recherche appliquée sur le cancer (PRAC) on the health campus of the University of Sherbrooke, the Eastern Townships is a hotbed in Canada for Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD): a group of conditions that that inflame the lining of the gastrointestinal tract and disrupt the body's ability to digest food, absorb nutrition, and eliminate waste in a healthy manner. Gendron recently received a three year research grant from Crohn’s and Colitis Canada to help continue a project he has been working on for the last eight years.
“We are developing a new molecule to regulate the activity of a receptor called P2Y6 on immune cells,” Gendron told The Record, explaining that although the root cause of IBD is unknown, the inflammation it causes in the gut attracts bacteria that then cause the body to initiate an immune response. The work that he and his partner, Dr. Bilha Fishcer of Bar-ilan University in Israel, are engaged in seeks to control that response by developing new molecules that can help block inflammation and promote healing of the intestine that will push IBD sufferers into remission.
Gendron said that roughly 0.7 per cent of the Canadian population lives with some form of IBD, and although that sounds small, he noted that Canada has a higher rate of IBD sufferers than many other places on Earth, for reasons no one is entirely sure of.
Despite having been at work for years, the researcher said that their project is still at a fairly early stage in part because of the challenges his team has faced in finding funding in the past.
“It has always been bits of money here or there on the end of one grant or another, so the grant from Crohn’s and Colitis Canada will be very helpful,” Gendron said. “With this money we’ll be able to move forward much, much faster.”
With added staff and resources, the researcher said that he hopes to see the molecules move out of computer and laboratory testing stages.
“At the end of the three years we hope to have achieved the animal model with our expected outcomes,” Gendron said, explaining that animal testing will be followed by human trials if all goes according to plan, although at that point, he said, they would need to get back to grant seeking again. “Three years goes by pretty fast,” he added.