Grant: Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

By the year 2050, over 15% of the world's population will be older than 65. The leading cause of illness and death for these individuals will be blood clots (thrombosis). In fact by that time, over 1 million people in North America annually will suffer from life-threatening thrombosis in their veins. In addition, many more will have heart attacks and strokes that are due to excess blood clotting in the arteries (atherothrombosis). There is thus an urgent need to develop new strategies to prevent and/or treat these thrombotic diseases. In spite of advances in our understanding of why blood clots form, there is still much to learn. Recently, work from Dr. Conway's lab revealed that the blood clotting system interacts very closely with another system in the blood, called the complement system. Together, these two systems appear to amplify each other, possibly increasing the risk of blood clots. If we understand how these systems interact, new treatments or preventative strategies might be developed for diseases associated with excess blood clots. The goal of this proposal is to increase our understanding of how the complement and coagulation systems interact. This will be accomplished by using components (proteins) of one system to see how they affect the function of the other system. Using modern biochemical approaches, we will also be able to create sensitive ways of measuring the changes in the activity of each system under different conditions. By these techniques, we expect to find new pathways and new proteins that control complement and coagulation. This information will be valuable in developing new tests to predict the risk of thrombosis and new drugs to prevent or treat thrombosis.