One out of 11 Canadians suffers from some form of dementia, and there is no known cure.
The federal government is looking to the expertise of the University of Alberta to reduce those odds, announcing Sept. 25 that Liang Li, Canada Research Chair in Analytical Chemistry and researcher in the Department of Chemistry, received a three-year, $600,000 2012 Collaborative Health Research Projects grant to take on one the most pervasive forms of dementia, Alzheimer's disease.
Li says that although diagnostic accuracy of Alzheimer's can be 90 per cent, it is often made in the later disease stages when irreversible brain damage has already occurred. He adds that developing drugs for treating the disease is hindered by the lack of definitive chemical biomarkers that can be used for monitoring the disease's progression, particularly in the earlier stages of Alzheimer's.
"Thus, finding sensitive biomarkers for the early diagnosis or detection of Alzheimer's is critical for managing and treating this devastating disease," he said.
Li said his proposed research focuses on applying newly developed mass spectrometry tools to search for metabolite biomarkers of Alzheimer's that can ultimately be used in clinical applications. To do so, Li will be collaborating with David Wishart, professor in the departments of biological sciences and computing sciences; David Westaway, Canada Research Chair in Prion Disease; Roger Dixon, Canada Research Chair in Cognition in Aging; and researchers with DynaLIFE, the team's industrial partner brought aboard to help validate the biomarkers and potentially commercialize the use of the biomarkers for diagnosis of Alzheimer's.
"The U of A is one of the leading institutions in the world on metabolomics research and its applications in the biomedical field," said Li. "I'm working with world-class and top-notch researchers in their respective fields. Now we will work together to try to find the Alzheimer's biomarkers."
The Collaborative Health Research Projects program is a partnership between the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Grants offered under the program will assist with interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers in the fields of the natural sciences, engineering, and the health sciences. Grant recipients are selected following a rigorous peer review competition.