Over 75% of pregnant women take medications of which the risks or benefits are not known.

The Canadian Mother-Child Cohort (CaMCCo) Active Surveillance Initiative project aims to quantify the risks and benefits of prescription drug use during pregnancy on short- and long-term maternal and child health outcomes, in order to have meaningful impacts on how medications are used and prescribed during pregnancy and childhood, and on how health policies are implemented.

To achieve this goal, large harmonized cohorts are needed. CaMCCo will fill this gap with a state-of-the-art infrastructure that will collect administrative, hospital and birth data.

A multi-disciplinary team from five Canadian provinces will be put in place to operate the large provincial health databases. The use of multi-provincial health data will also provide access to diverse populations and result in the development of a world-class active research and surveillance program in perinatal pharmaco-epidemiology.

Because children cannot communicate their cognitive and psychological states as well as adults do, the use of nonverbal neurophysiological and neuroimaging strategies to refine diagnoses and evaluate treatment outcomes is a promising strategy for neurodevelopmental conditions.

CHUSJ Centre IMAGINE: Imaging for Mental Health Across Age, Genetics, Interactions, Neurons and the Environment will set up a multimodal pediatric digitization facility dedicated to research. This infrastructure will support computational and quantitative research with multimodal approaches in order to study changes in the neonatal, pediatric and adolescent brain with quantitative anatomical, metabolic and functional parameters during key developmental periods and in relation to important environmental and congenital influences.

This infrastructure will enable the setting up of a world-class pediatric imaging center that will contribute to the training of the next generation of pediatric brain health clinicians and researchers.

This is particularly relevant to research on pediatric populations, compared to adult populations, due to the rapidly changing nature of the child's brain.

There are more than 7,000 rare diseases, most of which are genetic diseases or cancers, including all childhood cancers. Because these rare illnesses are so diverse, many have no effective treatment. Therapies based on the modification and engineering of cells, genes and tissues are currently the main drivers of innovation in genetic diseases and cancer therapies. The initial results of these new therapies are promising, but their efficacy, feasibility and safety need to be improved before they can be used in a clinical setting.

The goal of the research program is to create a translational research platform to significantly accelerate the development of novel gene, cell and tissue therapies for the treatment of rare diseases and childhood cancers.

Although this program focuses on pediatric genetic diseases and cancers, the technologies developed will also be transposable to regenerative medicine and cancer immunotherapy in adults, significantly expanding its scope and impact.

The role of Intensive Care Units (ICUs) is to manage patients in life-threatening situations. Treatment in ICUs has resulted in reduced mortality, shorter hospitalization times and fewer complications, due to continuous monitoring and a high staff/patient ratio. However, while medical knowledge and clinical information have increased considerably, the health system has constraints that are compounded by limited staff resources. Taken together, these considerations lead to three main challenges: 1) delays in the detection and management of life-threatening situations, 2) delays in the implementation of good practices, and 3) lack of research tools to conduct pragmatic clinical trials integrated into the ICU.

Rapid advances in clinical data management systems and artificial intelligence are opening up prospects for the development and validation of computerized clinical decision support (CCDS) systems to improve patient management. ICUs are the ideal clinical research environment for developing and validating CCDS’s because they collect large amounts of clinical data from intensive ongoing monitoring. 

The MIIRCIC project Multimodal Intelligent Infrastructure for Research in Critically Ill Children wants to organize a database and a powerful analysis infrastructure that will help in the development of a number of CCDS’s that can be used in clinical settings.

Mega-data are radically transforming biomedical research and health care around the world. Genomes tell us about individuals' predisposition to disease, their response to treatment, and the impact of environmental exposures on their health.

However, as a scientific community, our ability to interpret and exploit ever-increasing volumes of genomic and health data is still very limited. In order to realize the full potential of personalized medicine based on the harnessing of this massive data and the use of artificial intelligence (AI), Quebec urgently needs a high-performance software platform, an ethical-legal framework and a large-scale IT infrastructure for storing, sharing and interpreting this data with the aid of advanced analysis tools, including AI.

The aim of the SecureData4Health project is to create a secure cloud computing storage infrastructure, which will be unique in the world, for hosting, sharing and analyzing genomic and health data generated by research centers and hospitals. This infrastructure, of which the Quebec-funded part is hosted by Calcul Québec, will provide all Quebec researchers and projects with the software tools, storage and computing power they currently lack in order to carry out their research into genomics and AI. In addition, the project will contribute to the development of secure and confidential protocols for the exchange of clinical and genomic data that will promote the influence of Quebec researchers through Canadian and international collaborations for the greater benefit of patients.