Faculty members earn nearly $2.5 million in CIHR grants

By Diane Peters

Cancer and pain projects garner five-year funding

Two research projects at the Faculty of Dentistry have brought in nearly $2.5 million over five years from the Canadian Institutes of Health Information (CIHR). These projects have the potential to impact care in oral health and well beyond.

Oral cancer progression

Associate professor Marco Magalhaes has earned $1.06 million for a project titled Understanding the Role of the Fn14-TWEAK Pathway in Oral Cancer Progression.

The cytokine TWEAK and its receptor Fn14 increase when an oral lesion become cancerous, according to previous research from Magalhaes and his team. They will look to animal studies, lab experiments and patient samples to see if, as they theorize, Fn14 helps abnormal cells move and invade tissue.

The project is led by the Faculty of Dentistry and includes teams from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Mount Sinai Hospital and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute.

“Our goal is to understand how oral cancer progresses and create mechanisms to prevent this devastating disease,” says Magalhaes.

Firming up an understanding of this new biological pathway will help with determining which patients are at higher risk of having their precancerous lesions become dangerous cancers, and also impact the monitoring, diagnosis and treatment of oral cancer.

Opioids and chronic pain

Associate professor Massieh Moayedi is the co-principal investigator of a research study that has earned $1.3 million from CIHR.

The study, called Investigating the Interplay between FAAH and Opioid Misuse in Chronic Pain, will explore fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH), an enzyme responsible for metabolizing anandamide, a cannabis-like compound, and its relationship to chronic pain and opioid use disorder.

“The body has multiple natural pain-relief systems, including the opioid and cannabinoid pathways. Evidence suggests these systems work together to reduce pain,” says Moayedi.

He’s working with researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at U of T to recruit 120 people for the study. Subjects will include those with chronic pain who rely on opioids, people with chronic pain not using opioids, and controls. They will use positron emission tomography (PET) scans to assess FAAH levels in the brain, plus other metrics.

“Currently, we don’t understand whether or how chronic pain and opioid use affect brain levels of this enzyme — or whether such changes contribute to disease progression. Understanding this relationship could reveal new therapeutic targets for treating both chronic pain and opioid use disorder,” says Moayedi.