Congratulations to Dr. Abhay Srivastava with the Cardiac Regeneration and Tissue Engineering Program, ICS, who was recently awarded the highly competitive CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship worth $135,000 over three years.
Srivastava’s application received an impressive 4.54/5.0 rating and will help support his project working under the supervision of Dr. Sanjiv Dhingra, to develop a personalized pre-screening platform for patients with Leigh Syndrome, an extremely rare genetic disorder.
Working with Dr. Dhingra’s collaborator, Dr. Cheryl Rockman-Greenberg from Children’s Hospital of Manitoba, Srivastava works with blood samples from patients to create a patient-specific stem cells based personalized platform to determine cell function and metabolism, and screen potential new drugs to help understand which treatments may work.
“It’s like performing clinical trials in a cell culture dish, and hopefully in the near future we can create a library of treatment data from which new therapies can be developed,” he explained.
Srivastava felt incredibly honoured to receive this highly competitive fellowship, “I think the credit goes to our entire team at the Dhingra lab who have contributed tremendously in building my research portfolio. Dr. Dhingra and I worked very hard in preparing the application and it’s very gratifying and humbling to see it come through,” he said. Thanks were also expressed to Dr. Cheryl Rockman-Greenberg as his clinical collaborator and mentor, as well as Dr. Sarita Gupta, Ph.D. Supervisor.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), provides vital support to Canadian researchers, spanning the tightly linked pillars of health research, with the ultimate goal of improving health for all Canadians.