Canadian Institutes of Health Research

just Cindy and Dr. Teresa Louis-Ambrose, who's at University of British Columbia, and they've been very nice because they've added me to their projects as well.

And I think that perimenopausal project that Teresa was – writing grants on it took a lot I mean it finally got funded but it took many iterations to to get through CHR being Canadian Institutes for Health Research in Canada but I don't I mean we don't have to say how many iterations but it it takes perseverance

to

stay

That was very early in development, and as you likely know, it's quite a process.

It's harder than getting a CIHR grant to convince a large pharmaceutical company to embark on a trial.

In any case, both of them agreed to do phase two trials.

We did them within our group, which was split to prevent any cross-transfer of information.

And our central banker prime minister is letting them do it by not enforcing the only thing, the only federal law that can guarantee Medicare forever, which is called the Canada Health Act.

And as part of that long march, there are now medical insurance companies, and really this is-- you know, we're talking about three mega corporations in a trench coat, uh, are seeking new markets and are starting to fund more studies in a political economy where funding for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which is basically our NIH, has been effectively frozen since twenty oh six, so that's twenty years, while the grant success rate for researchers has gone down by half.

So what are these philanthropic insurance organizations funding? Well, like, you'd have to go through all of them individually to see, but what do we imagine the research priorities of insurance corporations might be, huh? You know, whatever they're up to, um, they are expanding into a shrinking public sector.

So at McGill University in Montreal, the Desautels Faculty launched the Institute for Transforming Healthcare this past April, and that's funded by five point seven five million dollars from Power Corporation, Canada Life, and IGM Financial to study efficiencies in primary care access, surgery, and emergency department scheduling, and care coordination.

So that can be anything from, like, award management.

So when someone wins an award from a tri-agency, so a SSHRC, an NSERC, or a CIHR postdoc, I usually liaise with them, their faculty supervisor, their department, help make sure that their award is going well.

I also help with people completing their applications with CIHR, so a little bit of award management.

Do some professional development support, which is super fun, so getting to run programming with different partners across campus, anyone from, from HR over to some individual faculty members.

So support for things like helping postdocs build a teaching dossier or helping postdocs learn about project management or whatever different skills they may be interested in for both academic and non-academic context, kind of professional development for whatever their next step may be.

Really, the next steps are integration into workflows, continual learning and responsible deployment.

I'd like to acknowledge my research team and collaborators internationally and our funding sources, particularly the CIHR.

We have a very nice national project involving all our Canadian liver transplant So three key projects supported by CIHR nationally.

And I'd like to invite everyone to attend our Transplant AI Symposium, co-organized with Mayo Clinic.

So we've been holding this Transplant AI Symposium for three years now in Toronto.

What does that mean?

So if you look at tri-council funding, for example, insert and CIHR and all of these things, it is only relatively recently that those agencies have started to talk about impact beyond the lab as part of the things they want to see.

They

certainly don't resource it, right? And so a university will prioritize the outputs or the metrics that are imposed by the funding agencies on them and what has historically been the case is publications arising from the grant money that's coming into it with tech transfers sort of being this afterthought.

Certainly.

So the Chronic Pain Network was born out of a CIHR strategy for patient-oriented research network grant focused on chronic diseases.

And the call for application was launched in 2014.

And we assembled a team together under the leadership of Dr.