Grant: Planning Grants - PA: First Nations, Inuit or Métis Planning Activities

Improving First Nations health requires not only addressing disparities in health services, but also increasing our understanding of disease within their context, including the barriers to access of biomedical research. Research utilizing human tissue samples is vital to the understanding of etiology, diagnosis, treatment and health care outcomes for a population. The concept of personalized medicine should not be limited to mainstream populations, but needs to become a reality for all Canadians. A valid concern is that if First Peoples do not participate in the baseline research that will inform personalized medicine, they will not have opportunities to benefit from it. In the Carrier Sekani (CS) First Nations territory in northern British Columbia, community members are interested in discussing such biomedical research opportunities. To move toward an ethical framework for biomedical research with these First Nations, we will engage in a community-focused dialogue. The primary goal of our proposed meeting is to initiate the conversation about opportunities presented by biomedical research on human tissues, while learning about differences between Western and CS worldviews as they apply to this research methodology. Through this dialogue, we will articulate challenges and derive further questions to be answered in a larger scale consultation project. This meeting will provide the foundation for a qualitative research project to extend the consultation to a broad representation of CS community members and researchers to create a framework for respectful, engaging and ethical biomedical research practices with CS people. With such understanding in place, the opportunity to address the gap in access to ethical biomedical research (and the health improvements that accompany it) can be addressed for the Carrier Sekani people and potentially serve as a model for other First Nations in Canada and the researchers who partner with them.