Grant: Team Grant - Clinical Imaging

Smoking related lung disease is a serious medical condition in Canada. While lung cancer related to tobacco smoking is still the leading cause of cancer death in Canadians, the greatest source of death and disability stems from heart disease and complications of the lung condition known as COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). COPD is the only major illness for which the mortality rate is increasing worldwide. Over one million Canadians have COPD and every year 60,000 are hospitalized for major lung or heart problems and 10,000 die from their disease. To put this in context, lung and heart side-effects to COPD are the single greatest source of patient admissions from emergency departments in the province of British Columbia. While there have been dramatic advances in the diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of heart disease there is a lack of new tools for the early diagnosis and treatment of COPD. Our collective vision is to develop and implement imaging strategies that will accelerate the understanding and treatment of lung and heart disease caused by smoking and to provide better methods to test new treatments. We will realize this vision through a research program that combines established and cutting edge imaging tools. While many of these imaging tools are well established in Canadian medical institutions standard imaging applications that help understand smoking related diseases are not well used. Finally, some of the approaches we will develop and implement are still in the development phase but hold great potential for the future. Our team consists of basic research scientists (providing discoveries), clinician-scientists (providing the framework of translation), epidemiologists and outcome scientists (providing observations about the burden & progression of disease), who will work together to stimulate new opportunities for advances in basic and clinical investigations.