Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a devastating clinical condition in the intensive care unit. It is usually caused by a serious infection and it results in death of up to 60% of people who develop it. There are currently limited treatments for this disease, and ongoing research is the only way to discover new treatments for ARDS. Using animals to perform research on ARDS is currently the best way to represent the complex processes that underlie it. Many researchers across Canada use animal models of this disease in order to study it. One aspect that makes this research difficult is the lack of a standardized way to assess the sickness of individual animals with ARDS. Our group of scientists, physicians, and veterinarians would like to make a national, standardized way to assess how sick individual animals are. We believe that a consensus on how these assessments should be performed will allow scientists from different institutions to work with each other more easily, and also preserve animal life while minimizing animal distress. Ultimately, we believe this will lead to results from animal research being translated more readily to clinical therapies for patients with ARDS.