Investigators

CPNDS Executive Steering Committee

Bruce C. Carleton, B.Pharm, Pharm.D
CPNDS Principal Investigator

www.bcchr.ca/POPi

“My research focus is on the impact of drug therapy on human health and quality of life”, says Dr. Carleton. “My lifelong goal is to make medication use safer and more effective for all patients – particularly children”.

Dr. Carleton is researching better ways to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs, medication-use models designed to improve patient health, and practical surveillance systems to improve the safe use of medication. He has clinical interests in the use of medications in children, as well as the epidemiology, pharmacogenomics and clinical management of adverse drug events.

“The key element of my research is the communication of results to clinicians, patients, health care administrators, and government staff, who also hold responsibilities to improve patient care and our systems of healthcare delivery,” says Dr. Carleton. 

Dr. Carleton is a senior clinician scientist at CFRI, a professor of Pediatrics at UBC, and director of the Pharmaceutical Outcomes Programme at BC Children’s Hospital and BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre, agencies of the Provincial Health Services Authority.

Colin Ross, MSc, PhD, is an Associate Professor at UBC, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and is responsible for CPNDS genomic analyses and co-lead of the CPNDS’s Genome Canada Go-PGx project. His key area of research is to understand why some patients respond positively to certain medications, while a small fraction of similar patients develop serious, debilitating or even life-threatening adverse reactions to the same medications.

Denis Lebel, B.Pharm, MSc, is a pharmacist at CHU Sainte-Justine in Montréal, and is part of Unité de Recherche en Pratiques Pharmaceutiques. His main research focus is evaluation of technology and safe medication use. He finds it hard to tell parents the reason for their child’s adverse drug reaction is unknown. Identification of genetic risk factors will help explain those reactions and contribute to prevention.

Michael Rieder, MD, PhD, is a Professor, Departments of Medicine/Dentistry, Pediatrics, and Physiology/Pharmacology at the University of Western Ontario and CIHR-GSK Chair in Paediatric Clinical Pharmacology at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. His principal area of research is adverse drug reactions, with a special focus on mechanistic studies of hypersensitivity ADRs including the role of reactive drug metabolites in ADRs.

Ursula Amstutz, MSc, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Bern, and co-head of the Clinical Genomics Lab at the Inselspital Bern University Hospital in Switzerland. Her research interest is on the use of genomic information to improve patient care with a focus on identifying patients with an increased risk of adverse drug reactions, and the monitoring of organ transplant recipients and cancer patients using cell-free DNA. At the Clinical Genomics Lab, she provides diagnostic laboratory services for pharmacogenetic and liquid biopsy testing in daily clinical practice.

David K. Lee, JD, is the Chief Regulatory Officer for the Health Products and Food Branch. In this role, he advises on regulatory matters across the Branch; guides the development of legislative and regulatory amendments; leads foresight initiatives for food and health product regulation; and coordinates with the Department of Justice on certain litigation. David was previously the Director of the Office of Legislative and Regulatory Modernization, Health Canada. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Office of Patented Medicines and Liaison which administered the Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations and provided liaison for health product litigation. David received his law degree at Queen’s University, and articled at the Federal Court of Canada. He worked in private practice until joining Health Canada in 1999. He has lectured extensively on intellectual property law and food and drug law both nationally and internationally. 

Gabriella Groeneweg, MA, has a Masters of Arts in Professional Communications, focused on organizational behaviour. She works in complex health system environments at the intersection between policy making, clinical decision making for patient care and clinical research. Her professional interests and passions lie in better understanding the conditions that promote and facilitate organizational change and the barriers to creativity and innovation in organizational behaviour. Her expertise is in Knowledge Translation (KT) to promote the implementation of health research into clinical practice settings. For the past 10 years she has worked at the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute on numerous projects moving research into clinical practice. She firmly believes that research is a critical component of patient care

Rod Rassekh, MD, MPH, is a pediatric oncologist at BC Children’s Hospital. His main research interest is identifying risk factors for adverse events due to chemotherapy. As a doctor treating children with cancer, he currently has to use chemotherapy which come with major side effects, many of which are life threatening. His goal is to make chemotherapy safer for kids by identifying genetic risk factors that may help him personalize treatment for children being diagnosed with cancer.

Greg Guilcher, MD, FRCPC, FAAP, is an associate professor of oncology and pediatrics at the University of Calgary. His clinical and research focus is hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) for non-malignant diseases. He also studies acute and late effects of oncology and BMT therapies. He serves as the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors and Clinical Operations for the Sickle Transplant Alliance for Research. STAR aims to make HCT safer and more accessible for sickle cell disease. He also serves as the Chair of the HCT Late Effects Taskforce for the Children’s Oncology Group. He is the Clinical Director of the Alberta Children’s Hospital HCT program, has volunteer leadership roles within the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and teaches regularly in Mbarara, Uganda.

Geert ‘t Jong, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Pharmacology at the University of Manitoba, and has been the Winnipeg Site Lead since 2012. His research focuses on pharmacology in pediatrics, including pharmaco-epidemiology, pharmacogenomics and clinical trials. He is Lead for the Therapeutics Taskforce of the Canadian Pediatric Society, and Chair of the Drug Committee. He leads the initiative to develop a National Pediatric Drug Information Handbook, and is an active member of several Canadian and international networks and societies. Until 2019, he led the Clinical Research Unit at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba, where a dedicated team conducts independent research as well as industry trials. He serves as Associate Head and Associate Medical Director for the Department of Pediatrics & Child Health, and is Head of the Section of Pediatric Hospital Medicine.

Geoffrey Liu, MD, MSc, is the Alan B. Brown Chair in Molecular Genomics and the Cancer Care Ontario Chair in Experimental Therapeutics and Population Studies. He is the Director of the Applied Molecular Profiling Pharmacogenomic Epidemiologic Laboratory at Princess Margaret Hospital and Ontario Cancer Institute. He is the co-Director or the Ontario Patient Reported Outcomes of Symptoms and Toxicity (On-PROST) Applied Clinical Research Unit, the Co-Director of the COMBEL (Cancer Outcomes, Medicine, Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Laboratory) Training Initiative at Princess Margaret Hospital, and Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and the Departments of Medicine and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. His research focus is on the pharmacogenomic epidemiology of solid cancers, pharmacogenomic biomarker discovery and validation through clinical trial and population studies, and pharmacogenomic knowledge translation. 

Tamorah Lewis, MD, PhD, is a physician scientist, Division Head for Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at SickKids. In this role, Dr Lewis helps advance the hospital-wide vision for Precision Child Health and collaborates with multiple clinical Divisions for pharmacology research. Dr Lewis also continues to provide clinical care in the level IV Neonatal ICU at SickKids. The goals of Dr Lewis’ research program are to bring precision therapeutics to the NICU population. Dr Lewis’ interests include PBPK and population pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic investigations in neonates and children, pertaining to both drugs in common use and drugs under development. Her research focuses on the intersection between ontogeny and pharmacogenetic effects on pharmacology of drugs in infants and neonates. In addition to her clinical and research roles, Dr Lewis is a dedicated advocate for Health Equity. Through publications and talks, she educates about the need for increased diversity in the biomedical workforce and the importance of diversity and equity in clinical research and clinical care.

Donna Johnston, MD is a Pediatric Hematologist/Oncologist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and the former Chief of the Division. She is a full Professor at the University of Ottawa. She is the Medical Director at the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario. Her main areas of oncology expertise are in AML, neuro-oncology, supportive care and palliative care. She is involved in a significant amount of clinical research, the majority of which looks at supportive care for oncology patients. She has presented her work at national and international conferences, and is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed publications and several book chapters.

Mara Medeiros, MD, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, National Autonomous University of Mexico, researcher, and head of the Nephrology and Bone Mineral Metabolism Research Laboratory at the Federico Gomez Children’s Hospital in Mexico City. Her principal areas of interest are drug induced nephrotoxicity, immunosuppressant pharmacokinetics-pharmacogenomics, biomarkers of graft rejection and renal function.

Daniel Bernstein, M.D.  is the Alfred Woodley Salter and Mabel G. Salter Endowed Professor of Pediatrics (Cardiology) and Associate Dean for Curriculum and Scholarship at the Stanford School of Medicine. His research has focused on the use of human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) as a platform to study the mechanisms of cardiovascular disease, and as an adjunct to phamacogenomic screening of gene variants suspected to play a role in drug cardiotoxicity.

J. Steven Leeder, PharmD, PhD, is the Marion Merrell Dow Endowed Chair in Pediatric Precision Therapeutics at Children’s Mercy Kansas City (CMKC), Kansas City, Missouri.  He is Deputy Director of the Children’s Research Institute at CMKC and Associate Chair-Research, Department of Pediatrics.  His research focuses on characterizing the relative contributions of ontogeny and genetic variation to observed variability in drug disposition and response in children as embodied in the GOLDILOKs initiative:  Genomic- and Ontogeny-Linked Dose Individualization and cLinical Optimization for Kids.