MUHC in the Media - September 18, 2023

Dr. Geneviève Bernard at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) has reached an important milestone in research into leukodystrophies, deadly neurodegenerative diseases that affect approximately one in 4700 children and remain incurable to this day. Her team has succeeded in creating the first representative animal model of 4H leukodystrophy, one of the common forms of the disease. Dr. Bernard spoke to The Montreal Gazette, La Presse Canadienne and CJAD about this achievement, a crucial step in the development of treatments, recently described in an article published in the prestigious journal Brain.

At just nine days old, Samuel is the youngest child in North America to have received Zolgensma, a gene therapy for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy. Thanks to this achievement from the Montreal Children's Hospital, his quality of life will be greatly improved, says Dr. Maryam Oskoui, head of Pediatric Neurology. La Presse

In an interview on Radio-Canada's Le 15-18 radio program, Dr. Michael Libman, MUHC infectious diseases microbiologist and director of the J.D. MacLean Centre for Tropical Diseases, discusses a number of parasite-related news items that have been in the news recently, such as the case of a woman whose brain was found to contain an eight-centimetre living worm, or worms extracted from the permafrost in Siberia that have come back to life after being frozen for 46,000 years.

Every winter, hospitals find themselves dealing with multiple cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Deployment of vaccination could make a big difference, says Dr. Jesse Papenburg, pediatric infectious disease specialist and medical microbiologist at the Montreal Children's Hospital. The Globe and Mail

Montreal Canadiens goaltender’s wife, Angela Price, recently had a melanoma, a type of skin cancer, removed. Dr. Beatrice Wang explains why melanoma is so dangerous and what to look for in order to detect it early. Read more in this CTV News article.

Dr. Natalie Dayan, an epidemiologist and obstetric internist at the MUHC and a scientist at the RI-MUHC led a study published in The American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology that looked at the risk of recurrence of serious complications experienced by some women during childbirth. Ugochinyere Vivian Ukah, lead author of the study and a former postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, was on CBC’s Our Montreal TV show to explain the findings of the study (watch at 23:25)

A team led by Nathalie Lamarche-Vane, PhD, Senior Scientist at the Research Institute of the MUHC, has discovered a new mechanism by which breast cancer metastasis occurs, at the molecular and cellular level. The discovery, published in Cell Reports, could lead to the development of better drugs for the treatment of certain aggressive breast cancers. Profession Santé