COVID-19 research successes, and return to research

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Exciting news was announced Thursday this week that three of our CoM researchers and their teams have received funding for work on COVID-19 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Congratulations to Dr. Joyce Wilson, Dr. Kerry Lavender and Dr. Cory Neudorf on their successful applications!

Each is leading, respectively, projects that will: investigate the re-purposing of currently approved drugs to treat COVID-19 patients; rapidly evaluate some highly promising therapeutics against COVID-19; and help prepare for future outbreaks by gathering information on the best interventions public health officers have developed across the country. This last project, led by Dr. Neudorf, is also being funded by the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation.

You can see the full announcement with more information about each project on our website.

Our Office of the Vice-Dean Research (OVDR) at the CoM has provided support to our researchers, with a total of $120,000 in rapid response funds—half from the OVDR and half from the CoM’s Respiratory Research Centre—to catalyze small-scale, time-sensitive research projects focused on contributing to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Congratulations to the recipients of this funding, who are listed on the OVDR website.

We are also working closely with the university on steps to bring some research activities and researchers back to campus. There have certainly been a large number of requests from researchers to return. We continue a very robust review process to ensure we consider applications carefully to maintain the safety of all our people accessing campus facilities.

I know many of our researchers are feeling significant urgency to return to campus. In my role on the university’s Pandemic Response and Recovery Team (PRT), I have been part of work to review these requests against provincial requirements; the return-to-research framework has been developed by the university alongside the Saskatchewan Re-Open plan, of course.

Those who can work remotely will continue to do so. The university needs your co-operation in this regard, so that limited resources can be best used to support necessary and critical on-campus research and teaching and learning work.

More information from the university can be found at: