Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Local delivery of therapeutic agents remains one of the major challenges in medicine, particularly in cardiovascular disease and the treatment of atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis can cause excessive blood clotting, leading to heart attack and stroke. These are two of the three major causes of death in Canada; nearly 14,000 Canadians die each year from strokes and over 16,000 Canadians die each year from heart attacks. In atherosclerosis only small areas of the blood vessels are diseased, and it is from these plaques that blood clotting can initiate. Local delivery of agents is required to prevent clotting and prevent harmful off-target effects. The goal of my research is to utilize platelets, small cells found within the bloodstream, to help overcome this challenge. Platelets naturally release biomolecules and genetic material at sites of inflammation and disease, making them ideal delivery vehicles for gene-based therapeutics. My research will be focused on manipulating platelets to release and deliver gene-based therapeutics to sites of injury within the bloodstream, utilizing naturally occurring processes. My preliminary work on this project has already developed a technology for delivering non-native genetic materials to platelets and has demonstrated that these materials can be controllably released. My aim is to optimize this technology to allow for the delivery of therapeutically-relevant material, and show delivery and utilization of the gene in target cells in the laboratory. One potential use of this technology is to modify platelets such that they deliver materials that suppress harmful inflammatory processes at atherosclerotic plaques, which would promote healing and prevent unwanted blood clotting in these regions. This platelet delivery system has the potential to reduce the number of heart attacks and strokes each year and would be a completely new approach for treating atherosclerosis, providing a major benefit to the health of Canadians.