Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

The acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a devastating inflammatory clinical condition in the intensive care unit. Serious infection often causes ARDS 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 which makes this research difficult is the lack of standardized procedures to run these studies and analyze the results. We propose a meeting to help standardize some of the ways we study this disease. This will establish a Canadian group of researchers that can test therapies in a number of labs at the same time. We believe this will test the "reproducibility" of findings, and increase confidence in the results of these studies. This type of collaborative approach is very common in clinical trials with patients, but it has not been established in laboratory research. In fact, the study we will begin to plan at this meeting will be Canada's first multicenter preclinical study. Our meeting will bring together a diverse group of scientists, trainees, and veterinarians needed to make this type of collaborative work possible. Ultimately, we believe this will lead to results from animal research being 'translated' more readily to clinical therapies for patients with ARDS.