Was your baby born at Royal Columbian Hospital?
If so, you can enter a new contest for your little one to win a commemorative tile that will be displayed on a wall in the maternity and neonatal unit.
The tiles were designed by internationally acclaimed illustrator, Issie Heikkilä, personalized with babies' names, dates of birth and birth weight.
Parents can choose from six designs.
To enter the contest, visit the hospital foundation's Facebook page to "like" the page, then follow the prompts to upload a photo and give a $10 donation.
Once photos are on the virtual wall, the public can vote for their favourite entries for a $2 donation through the website.
The photo that garners the most donations will win a tile, and the family will know they're "helping to fund the maternity programs, neonatal intensive care unit and the work of the hospital foundation," according to a recent press release.
The Facebook page is found at www.facebook. com/royalcolumbian.
Grants for SFU researchers
By the time those suffering from osteoporosis start treatment, it's typically too late to fully restore bone loss.
But this is something Simon Fraser University chemist Robert Young is working to change.
Young, who holds the Merck Frost-B.C. discovery chair in pharmaceutical genomics, bioinformatics and drug discovery at Simon Fraser University, heads a team of internationally-recognized experts in bone disease and drug development working to create new drugs to stimulate bone regeneration.
The team has synthesized several "novel dual-action agents" designed to stop bone loss and restore bone mass.
Now, Young and collaborator Marc Grympas, from the University of Toronto, are planning to take the most promising of these to the pre-clinical drug development stage.
This year, Young received a 2012 Collaborative Health Research Project grant worth $500,000, in tandem with CDRD Ventures Inc., and in July the team also received a $2.5-million grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Meanwhile, Andrew Blaber, a professor of biomedical physiology and kinesiology at SFU, is using a collaborative health research project grant to develop "smart" material to aid leg swelling.
The study is part of Blaber's ongoing research into the causes of and prevention of fainting.
"One of the components of fainting is the pooling of blood in the lower limbs during standing, which reduces blood returning to the heart and the brain," Blaber said in a recent press release.
The $200,000 grant, along with another $200,000 in funding from the Natural Sciences
Engineering and Research Council, will be applied to the development of a smart material technology solution.
Blaber says the new solution will be more effective than currently available devices, such as compression leg massagers and compression stockings. The Collaborative Health Research Program grants were announced at McGill University on Sept. 25.
The program supports collaborative research projects involving any field of the natural sciences or engineering and the health sciences that lead to health benefits for Canadians, more effective health services and economic development in health-related areas.
