Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Over 3000 Canadian patients being treated for thrombosis will suffer from bleeding in the brain every year. Patients with thrombosis and thrombotic events, such as stroke and heart attack, are treated with "clot-busters" to reopen blocked blood vessels. This is an important and vital therapy that needs to be administered in a critical window of opportunity for high efficacy, but there is a dreaded side-effect: one-percent of these patients will suffer bleeding in the brain, which can drastically decrease their quality of life. We have recently discovered that these "clot-busters" can also degrade a protein required for normal blood coagulation, factor XIIIa (FXIIIa). Interestingly, patients who lack functional FXIIIa also show signs of bleeding in the brain. Thus, our hypothesis is that "clot-buster" treatments result in the destruction of FXIIIa, which causes this bleeding. My goal is to understand what causes this bleeding in the brain, by collecting and analyzing blood samples from patients who have been treated for thrombosis with these "clot busters". Then, we will use this information to improve "clot-busting" therapies by testing a new therapeutic approach to prevent this bleeding.