Grant: Catalyst Grant: Patient-Oriented Research

Patient engagement can have many benefits, such as making sure that research results are useful to patients. While this practice is becoming more common in clinical (human) research, it is less often used in "preclinical research" (animal/cell laboratory research). Our patient partner recently participated in a preclinical research - patient engagement initiative. This experience demonstrated the need for guidance on how preclinical researchers who study sepsis (organ dysfunction caused by severe infection) and patients can work together at this very early stage of research. We think that patient engagement is important for preclinical research, and we want to develop guidance for preclinical scientists and patient partners to work together. The main objective of our project is to better understand how researchers and patient partners have worked together in laboratory studies to date and, using this information, provide suggestions on how to improve this process. To do this, our research team is completing a search to identify all preclinical papers that include patient engagement (a 'scoping review'). This will give us a general idea of what has been done so far, and how other researchers have included patients as partners in their projects. From here, we want to interview the identified researchers and patients who have experience with patient engagement in preclinical research. This will help us learn how they did it. Using this information, our team (which includes patient partners) will develop guidance for preclinical researchers and patients on how to engage each other. Finally, we will conduct focus groups to ask patients and preclinical sepsis researchers what they think of our framework, to ensure both groups agree with our guidance and to confirm that nothing is missing. This research project will create a tool to facilitate patient engagement in preclinical research, and we believe it may impact downstream clinical research.