Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Food allergy is an increasing problem in Canada, which is often a major burden on families, schools and the health care system. In order to address potential therapies for food allergy, more must be learned about the basic differences between individuals who do not have food allergies and those that do. In trying to develop treatments that can lead to Food Tolerance rather than Food allergy, we have built a strong multi-university, multi-disciplinary team who will investigate the differences in genetic profiles for food-allergic and food-tolerant individuals to help predict future food allergy patients within families. This has led to the development of a research initiative funded by CHIR, known as GET-FACTS: Genes, Environment and Therapeutics: Food Allergy Clinical Tolerance Studies. This Planning and Dissemination Grant has two primary objectives. It will support the annual investigators workshop that reviews the progress of the GET-FACTS team and the associated projects. The second objective is to support an educational dissemination event, a half day Food Allergy Symposium at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. This event will be held in Vancouver BC on October 21 and 22, 2015. The GET-FACTS investigators will serve as faculty and share their cutting edge findings to an audience of physicians, nurses and student trainees. Combining the GET-FACTS investigators workshop with the CSACI annual meeting provides a unique and exciting knowledge translation opportunity for an important user-group for the research being generated by the GET-FACTS team.