BC Professional Fire Fighters’ Burn and Wound Healing Lab celebrates 10th birthday
On June 22, the BC Professional Fire Fighters’ (BCPFF) Burn and Wound Healing Laboratory celebrated its 10th birthday and a decade of research and discoveries. Members of the BCPFF Burn Fund Board of Directors attended to share in the celebration and toast the lab’s achievements.
Since 2005, lab director Dr. Aziz Ghahary and his research team have achieved great academic and clinical feats. Working collaboratively, the team has projects ranging from burn and wound healing to chronic inflammation and diabetes. The team has lead discoveries into critical communication pathways in skin cells, essential to successful healing and prevention of scar tissue after a burn. Similarly, discoveries have expanded our understanding of why some wounds heal and others don’t.
From these and other discoveries, the team is developing highly specialized topical creams and skin substitutes that can be applied to burns and wounds to allow proper healing. Breakthroughs from the lab are allowing for significantly less scarring from burns and improved healing of wounds, results that are radically changing patient care and health outcomes for burn and accident survivors, diabetics and many others. And, this year marked a milestone of great significance as anti-scarring drugs developed by the lab were approved for use in the first-ever, non-industry sponsored phase I clinical trial at UBC.
Over the past decade, Dr. Ghahary has trained an accomplished cohort of nine successful PhD students and four Masters students, all of whom have continued their respective careers in either academia or medicine – or both! As a principal investigator, Dr. Ghahary has now surpassed as a leader in the field of wound healing with 160 peer-reviewed publications. Among these publications, he has diversified his research into addressing – and discovering – novel methods to treat type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic wounds, psoriasis and alopecia, among new clinical strategies to consider for generating allo-tollerance (tolerance of non-self donor organs) in transplantation.
As a result of this exceptional, unprecedented work, the Burn and Wound Healing Lab has surpassed most other laboratories in the amount of funding it has received from high-level, peer review government grants.
Congratulations and happy birthday, team!
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BC Professional Fire Fighters’ Burn Fund