Bringing together experts from different fields is how you find true innovation to improve patient care, according to award-winning assistant professor of medicine Carrie Ye.
Ye started out as a clinical rheumatologist, seeing patients living with degenerative and inflammatory diseases that affect the joints, tendons, ligaments, bones and muscles.
In her search for better treatments, Ye wanted to look for patterns at the population level using statistics and epidemiology methods, so she learned those new skills. Crunching numbers naturally led her to understand how machine learning and artificial intelligence can help.
Ye now works with a broad team that includes rheumatologists, oncologists, immunologists, pharmacists, biochemists, engineers and computer scientists — all collaborating on research questions aimed at making life better for her patients.
"I kind of go organically where my interests lie and then I often will pick up skills to fit whatever question I want to answer," Ye explains. "The way an engineer or a computer scientist or an immunologist approaches a problem is completely different from mine, so we get to think outside the box. It gives so much more depth to our findings."
Ye has just been named winner of the Early Career Investigator in Cancer prize from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and has received funding for two new research projects.
Solving a serious side-effect
The first study will look for ways to stop anti-cancer immunotherapy drugs from causing arthritis as an unintended side-effect. Ye received $592,876 over four years for this investigation.
Ye says more than 40 per cent of cancer cases can now benefit from immunotherapy. Anti-cancer drugs known as "immune checkpoint inhibitors" turn off the braking system on a patient's immune system so it can attack cancer cells and stop them from spreading. But sometimes the immune system doesn't know when to stop and causes unintended consequences such as inflammatory arthritis, with symptoms similar to rheumatoid arthritis. It's rare but seriously affects quality of life for patients, and when it's really severe, the immunotherapy has to be halted.
