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CRINA member Elaine Leslie with students Parinika Pal and William Li

For cancer researcher Elaine Leslie, alchemy might just be possible; she’s seen interim funding from the Cancer Research Institute of Northern Alberta turn into gold. 

Leslie has been awarded five-year funding from the  to investigate how the element selenium can counteract the cancer-causing effects of arsenic exposure.

“That’s our question,” Leslie explains. “We want to know: what is the best form of selenium to give people to inactivate and eliminate arsenic in the body, whether they’re exposed to this known cancer-causing metalloid through water from a well, in food, from the air during a wildfire, or elsewhere.”

While her study ranked highly in a previous CIHR competition, only the top 6 in her category were funded.

“We were number 9 out of 36 last year, so we were so close!” she says. “Running a lab is like operating a small business: you have to make decisions about your income, staff and supplies. It can take a couple of years for your team to work expertly and safely with specialized, very expensive reagents like radioactive selenium and radioactive arsenic, and growing liver cell cultures. If you don’t have money coming in, you might have to let everyone go and start all over again later.”

Enter CRINA’s bridge funding program. Designed to help maintain momentum in high-ranking institute members’ research projects that were close to being funded by the CIHR, it provided $40,000 to Leslie’s lab when it was needed the most. Additional bridge funding was later provided by the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry.

Terry and Betty Davis (photo supplied)

“It was hugely valuable! The money meant that I could keep my team intact and working, and preparing for our next funding application. Not only was I able to continue to generate data, I had three graduate students who could continue their academic work towards PhDs.”

Terry and Betty Davis are also thrilled with the new CIHR grant announced in January, which will provide a total of $1,074,825 over the next five years for Leslie’s arsenic research. Both alumni of the ÌìÑÄÉçÇø, the Davises wanted to establish the bridge funding program after discovering the challenges of intermittent financing of valuable, long-term research projects. 

“We have learned how difficult it is for researchers to obtain large grants without financial support during beginning – or ongoing-phases of study,” says Betty Davis. “That gave us the impetus to get involved to ensure that research has a chance for major dollars, for the work to continue uninterrupted.”

With the CIHR funding, Leslie’s team will study cell lines from donated human liver tissue and red blood cells to determine which forms of selenium help the body capture or eliminate arsenic safely. There are two potential pathways: selenium and arsenic are either metabolized together in the liver and excreted in feces, or trapped in red blood cells where they are prevented from harming other parts of the body.

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