Recent Discoveries and Research Initiatives at McGill

Good Eggs

Researchers at Molecular Biometrics LLC, a New Jersey company formed by McGill chemistry professor David Burns and colleagues, have developed a non-invasive test to identify embryos capable of producing successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) pregnancies. IVF is one of the primary treatments of infertility; the technique involves removing egg cells, fertilizing the cells, then implanting them in the uterus.

Current embryo screening methods are inexact, relying on visual examination of the embryo's appearance. In contrast, the new ViaTest-E analyzes the culture medium that bathes the developing in vitro embryo. Burns used spectroscopic analysis to examine the molecular composition of the culture medium three to five days after IVF. These studies, conducted in collaboration with members of Molecular Biometrics' Scientific Advisory Board, led to the development of ViaTest-E. The project expands on earlier research collaborations with Kristine Koski, professor in the School of Dietetics and Human Nutrition, and Dr. Hyman Schipper, professor in the Faculty of Medicine and the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery.

"What we found was a very tight correlation between the probability of implantation and certain measurable properties in the culture medium or fluid," says Burns. "Basically, we are determining how metabolically active each embryo is in the culture."

The test promises to increase IVF success rates, while decreasing occurrences of multiple births by reducing the need to simultaneously implant several fertilized egg cells. And that's welcome news indeed for prospective parents.

This research is funded by NSERC and CIHR.

The Allure of Jihad

Khalid Medani: Carnegie scholar explores Islamic fundamentalism
Owen Egan

Political science and Islamic studies professor Khalid Medani wants to understand the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan—and his interest is more than just academic.

Medani was born in Sudan. A 1989 coup made his homeland the first country to be completely controlled by Islamic fundamentalists. During the first year of its reign, the new government killed a group of black marketeers—including someone Medani knew.

"After that execution, I became obsessed with understanding the linkages between formal and informal institutions and the notion of identity in Islam," he recalls. "I wanted to know how and why they took power." Medani wasn't alone in his curiosity. "When fundamentalism came to Sudan, with prisons and tortures, my colleagues said to me, 'Why don't you research and write about what's going on and tell the world?' Muslims are trying to understand what's happening to their religion and to their countries."

Medani's work recently received a big boost when he received a two-year Carnegie Scholarship worth $100,000. He was the only Canadian-based researcher chosen by the New York-based Carnegie Corporation, a non-profit funding organization created in 1911 by businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

Medani will be looking at the different factors that drive young Muslims into fundamentalist groups in Sudan, as well as Somalia and Egypt. His approach is multifaceted, interviewing and surveying ordinary Muslims for their street-level perspectives, while also conducting historical research. He wants to get a sense of the various factors—ideological allure, sociopolitical issues, employment histories of local populations, levels of poverty, ethnic or tribal loyalties—that facilitate recruitment by fundamentalist groups.

Medani will also be travelling to Africa to study the expansion of hawwalat (unregulated Islamic welfare organizations) and the role of alahi (private mosques) in providing an environment conducive to recruiting young militants.

Knee Bone's Connected to the... Ink-jet Printer

Jake Barralet: Ink-jet printers make for better bone grafts
Claudio Calligaris

Bone grafts force doctors to rely on ceramics, or harvesting bone from other parts of the patient's body. But one day all they might have to do is fire up their ink-jet printers.

A McGill dentistry professor has developed a technique to use the common office technology to create three-dimensional bio-ceramic bones.

"We're a long way from seeing this method used in a hospital setting, but it's an important first step toward a revolutionary change in bone-grafting technology," says Jake Barralet, the Canada Research Chair in Osteoinductive Biomaterials. Barralet, working with researchers from Université Laval and the University of Würzburg in Germany, has taken advantage of the ink-jet printer's ability to print layer upon layer.

"It's similar to a CT scan, in that the image is created one layer at a time. The result is three-dimensional," says Barralet. "Rather than printing on paper, we're printing on a bed of cement powder using an acid instead of ink, which reacts with the cement to print whatever pattern we want."

These artificial bone sections, composed mostly of calcium phosphate, can be precisely constructed to include holes that will guide the growth patterns of new bone—effectively acting as biodegradable scaffolds for regrowing bones. The new process may eventually be used in reconstructive surgery or other types of bone repair, and could prove much more effective and less risky than harvesting bone from elsewhere in the body.

This research is funded by the Québec Ministère des Relations Internationales' Québec-Bavaria Exchange Program.

Breast Cancer Breakthrough

Researchers first discovered that overexpression of the PTB1b gene led to obesity in mice. They now know that this same gene also plays a key role in breast cancer.
Courtesy of Dr. Michel Tremblay

Our genes are busy little multitaskers. Take PTB1b. At normal levels, PTB1b's enzyme helps regulate cell growth and cell division. Too much PTB1b, however, causes cells to grow out of control. Now Dr. Michel Tremblay, Director of the McGill Cancer Centre, has found that 40 per cent of breast cancer cases in women present overexpression of PTB1b.

A mere seven years ago, Tremblay linked this same gene to obesity and diabetes—and at least one pharmaceutical company is already doing human trials for PTB1b-suppressing drugs. This quick progress may mean that a breakthrough breast cancer drug is just on the horizon. "Adapting these compounds is all that is needed to attack breast cancer," Tremblay explains.

Of course, just as one gene can be linked to more than one disease, a disease like breast cancer involves a number of genes working in concert. Fortunately, researchers such as Dr. William Foulkes are continuously furthering our understanding of these deadly tangles of DNA segments. Foulkes, Director of McGill's Program in Cancer Genetics and Chief of Cancer Genetics at the Jewish General Hospital Cancer Prevention Centre, recently characterized two mutations on the PALB2 gene that seem to relate to a particular breast cancer "signature." Foulkes and his colleague Dr. Marc Tischkowitz collaborated with researchers at Harvard's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Institute of Cancer Research in Britain and the Netherlands Cancer Institute. Foulkes describes their discovery as another "factual brick" in our still-under-construction understanding of breast cancer.

"Approximately 10 genes, including PALB2, have now been associated with a twofold or greater risk for breast cancer," says Foulkes. "We're not yet clear on the exact importance of PALB2, but carriers of mutations in these genes do have a higher than average risk for breast cancer—and therefore require special surveillance, including magnetic resonance imaging, and may opt for preventive surgery."

Dr. Tremblay is the Jeanne and Jean-Louis Lévesque Chair in Cancer Research; his research is funded by the Cancer Research Society, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Weekend to End Breast Cancer and Rethink Breast Cancer. Dr. Foulkes's research is funded by the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance.

Diabetes Genes Discovered

Fotolia

Dr. Robert Sladek recently found a quartet of DNA needles in a veritable haystack, a discovery that will change how we think about type 2 diabetes. Sladek, an endocrinologist at the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre, joined Dr. Constantin Polychronakos from the McGill University Health Centre—plus researchers from Canada, Britain and France—to search the entire human genome for genes linked to type 2 diabetes. The team compared hundreds of thousands of fragments from diabetic and healthy patients. The gamble paid off. Repeatedly.

"Of the four genes we have identified," says Sladek, "two are involved in the development or function of insulin-secreting cells and one plays a role in the transport of zinc, an important mineral required for the production of insulin." The function of the fourth gene is still unknown but, based on the sequencing of the human genome, the researchers suspect it's associated with diabetes.

Nearly two million Canadians live with type 2 diabetes. It's a complex disease, believed to be the result of a multifaceted interplay between genetic and environmental factors. The mere presence of all four of these newly identified genes does not guarantee a person will develop type 2 diabetes; rather, it significantly increases the odds that certain lifestyle choices (particularly an unhealthy diet and lack of exercise) will lead to the disease. Prediction may therefore mean prevention.

"If we examine a newborn's DNA and discover that he has a 70 per cent chance of developing diabetes if he lives like the average North American," says Polychronakos, "then we can give advance warning for this kid to acquire good lifestyle habits—and hopefully prevent the disease from ever starting."

This project is funded by Génome Québec and Genome Canada.

The Steacie and a Slew of Sloans

It's already a big awards year for researchers in the Faculty of Science. Victoria Kaspi is this year's winner of the Steacie Prize in the Natural Sciences, which recognizes a young scientist or engineer for notable contributions to research in Canada. Kaspi, who is McGill's Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology and the Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics, received the $15,000 award for her groundbreaking work on neutron stars.

Each year, the New York-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards 118 two-year fellowships, each worth $45,000 U.S., to early-career scientists. This year, four McGill researchers received Sloan Research Fellowships: Mathieu Blanchette, professor at the Centre for Bioinformatics of the McGill School of Computer Science, uses complex algorithms to decode the function of DNA; Aashish Clerk, professor in the Department of Physics, is a theoretical condensed matter physicist who explores the complex quantum-mechanical behaviour of electrons in nanostructures; Patrick Hayden, professor in the School of Computer Science, is a Rhodes Scholar and McGill graduate whose work focuses on developing new ways to manipulate quantum information at the very limits of the laws of physics; and Jacques Verstraete, professor in the Department of Mathematics, works in the relatively new areas of extremal and probabilistic combinatories. McGill's Sloan showing outperformed all other Canadian universities, as well as Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Yale.

Taylor Takes Templeton

Charles Taylor: Winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize
Courtesy of the Templeton Foundation

On May 2, during a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace, the Duke of Edinburgh presented McGill philosophy professor emeritus Charles Taylor with the 2007 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. The prize is worth £800,000 (approximately $1.7 million, making it the world's largest annual monetary award for an individual.

The award recognizes Taylor's longstanding investigations into the secular and spiritual dimensions of problems such as violence and bigotry. He is the first Canadian to receive the Templeton Prize.

Killam Quartet

Patrick Selvadurai and Rod Macdonald are the latest McGill scholars to win Canada's most prestigious lifetime research award: the Canada Council for the Arts' $100,000 Killam Prize.

Selvadurai is William Scott Professor and James McGill Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics. He is internationally recognized for his work in theoretical, applied and computational mechanics. His work in geomechanics—applying engineering principles to soil and rock—has led to the creation of safer storage facilities for nuclear waste.

Macdonald, former Dean of Law and current F.R. Scott Professor of Constitutional and Public Law, is a public intellectual known for wide-ranging interests that include child abuse, small claims court and aboriginal justice.

Steering Clear of Danger

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When the Titanic sank in 1912, dooming 1,500 of its passengers, it was far from the first vessel to fall prey to the icebergs that stalk the North Atlantic. And even with all the improvements to navigational safety that have been made since, ships are still at risk of unexpected encounters with a silent frozen menace.

Working with scientists from the National Research Council's Canadian Hydraulics Centre and the Canadian Ice Service branch of Environment Canada, Stuart Savage, emeritus professor of civil engineering, helped develop a computational model to better predict an iceberg's movement after being "calved" from the massive glaciers of Greenland.

Fed information on ocean currents, wind patterns and characteristics of the iceberg itself, the model should help ship captains avoid unwelcome surprises; the program will also be used to manage icebergs in the vicinity of oil-drilling platforms. Testing in the Grand Banks has shown the model to be at least 30 per cent more accurate than existing forecasting techniques.

Advances in ship design and navigational systems make another Titanic-sized catastrophe highly unlikely. However, notes Savage, icebergs are still a threat to ships and off-shore drilling projects. "Even a chunk of ice that's just five or six metres in diameter can do a lot of damage," he says. "What we want to do is to prevent the probability of a collision or an oil spill before it's even a danger."

This research was funded by Natural Resources Canada's Program of Energy Research and Development, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

The South Pole Telescope, with crew

Keep Watching the Chilly Skies

Outer space is not far, some wit once observed. It's only an hour's drive away, should you be so lucky to have a car that goes straight up.

To get his view on outer space, McGill physics professor Matt Dobbs had to go considerably further. As a member of the South Pole Telescope (SPT) team, he spent the beginning of 2007 in Antarctica's white wastes. The SPT is a partnership between McGill and eight American institutions. With an imposing 10-metre-wide antennae dish, the telescope is designed to scan the wallpaper of the universe: cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the afterglow light from the Big Bang released long before planets, stars and galaxies formed.

CMB radiation suffuses the entire universe, but the South Pole is a particularly good place to see it. On the electromagnetic spectrum, CMB falls between heat radiation and radio waves, making it easily absorbed by water vapour in the atmosphere—and therefore tough to observe. The South Pole's high elevation (read: thin atmosphere) and dry climate, however, makes for an ideal CMB-spotting environment.

CMB radiation backlights all the objects in the universe. When these objects are particularly large, like galaxy clusters, there is measurable distortion in CMB. (In the shadow theatre of the universe, CMB is the light, galaxies are the puppets, and distortion is the shadow.) The strength of this distortion does not fade over distance, making CMB an indispensable tool for discovering very, very remote galaxy clusters. By measuring small angular scale features in CMB, the telescope may help astronomers detect previously unknown clusters—invaluable data for demystifying the history of how the universe has grown.

Dobbs spent a frigid month helping to build the receiver and readout electronics for this enormous high-tech window to the sky. Working in the South Pole's extreme weather was not easy; even brief forays outside could lead to frostbite. The local weather crew described conditions one day as "Skies: going to hell. Temperature: Going to hell in a handbasket. Tomorrow: Even worse."

Nonetheless, Dobbs left the bottom of the world feeling, well, on top of the world. "As our plane lifted off and circled back over the station," he wrote in his polar blog, "the pilot banked quickly to the left and back again so that the wing would dip down and give us our last view of the South Pole Telescope—commissioned and ready to bring back a year's worth of exciting new science."

The South Pole Telescope is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Kavli Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. McGill participants received additional funding from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.