“We tend to think of disease as a single cause-and-effect event,” says Dr. Andrew Tasker. “For example: ‘I come into contact with a flu virus, I get the flu.’ In neurological diseases such as schizophrenia or epilepsy, it’s much more complicated. A relatively minor event early in life can progress, due to a number of factors, into a major consequence later in life.” Dr. Tasker is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Atlantic Veterinary College. His team has developed animal models for research in epilepsy, schizophrenia and stroke. He’s now using these models to help science better understand how these neurological diseases develop over time. “We can pinpoint in our models an exact event that starts the progression towards compromised brain function,” says Dr. Tasker. “And we already know the...

Perched atop the microscope on Dr. María Forzán’s desk is a small, plush frog—the kind you might find at a fair-trade craft sale. Hanging in the corner of her office at the Atlantic Veterinary College is a string of decorative turtles. Don’t let the playful decorations fool you. Her research is serious business. Dr. Forzán is a Wildlife Pathologist with the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre at AVC. Two summers ago, her research team found Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or chytrid fungus, in frogs on PEI. Chytrid fungus is responsible for the extreme decline or extinction of more than 200 species of amphibians around the world. “We started by asking one question: do we have this fungus on PEI?” says Dr. Forzán. “The first frog we collected had it. That created dozens of new questions.” Dr. Forzán...

When Prince penned his classic song “1999,” he likely wasn’t thinking about the sea lice that infect Atlantic salmon. Dr. Mark Fast says that was a crucial year for sea lice in the aquaculture industry, and now the parasite is partying again like it’s 1999. Dr. Fast is the Novartis Research Chair in Fish Health at the Atlantic Veterinary College of UPEI. “1999 was the year the aquaculture industry gained what would be its most powerful tool in the fight against sea lice,” says Dr. Fast. “It’s called SLICE. It’s an in-feed treatment that, for a time, acted like a silver bullet. It was so effective that as a researcher studying sea lice, I found it difficult to harvest sea lice from salmon in an aquaculture environment. I just couldn’t find them. It worked that well.” Dr. Fast says the treatment was so effective that...

"Kidney disease is hard enough for adults,” says Dr. Sunny Hartwig, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at UPEI’s Atlantic Veterinary College. “But for a kid, it means not being able to play soccer. Or baseball. Instead, you spend your after-school hours sitting in a hospital room hooked up to a dialysis machine that manually filters your blood.” Dr. Hartwig says children with end-stage renal (kidney) failure have two unpleasant options: transplant or dialysis. “No machine can do what the kidneys do,” she explains. “Kids on dialysis may struggle with obesity, bad skin, and are also more likely to develop diabetes. As a result, many really struggle with self-esteem. It’s a quality of life issue for the patient, and their families.” Dr. Hartwig uses this knowledge as motivation for her work in the lab. She and her team are...

“When a dog comes into the Veterinary Teaching Hospital with knee problems, I tell my students, ‘it’s a CCL rupture until proven otherwise,’” says Dr. Trina Bailey. “CCL stands for cranial cruciate ligament, and they’re a common and expensive problem in dogs. Pet owners in the United States spend more than $2 billion a year in CCL-related treatments.” Dr. Bailey is an Assistant Professor and Surgeon in the Department of Companion Animals at UPEI’s Atlantic Veterinary College. Working with AVC colleague Dr. Laurie McDuffee, she is developing stem cell-based therapies to repair and even regrow damaged ligaments in dogs. “The CCL is an important ligament inside the knee,” explains Dr. Bailey. “It’s important because it holds together the two main bones of the leg—the femur and tibia—and prevents them...

The rhetoric in British Columbia around farmed salmon is so polarised that I think many people may have a hard time believing this,” says Dr. Crawford Revie, “but environmental groups, industry, and government are now working together. They are keen to see whether science can help answer some of the big questions around aquaculture.” Dr. Revie is UPEI’s Canada Research Chair in Population Health: Epi-Informatics and a Professor of Health Management at the Atlantic Veterinary College. He is exploring new ways to use techniques from informatics—such as data mining, data-driven modelling and semantic web technologies—to better understand disease epidemiology. “We have developed a program called the Broughton Area Monitoring Plan, or BAMP,” explains Dr. Revie. “The Broughton Archipelago is an area with relatively intense salmon farming...

"Pancreas disease is a major economic problem on fish farms in Norway and Scotland, causing increased death loss and illness during the seawater phase,” says Dr. Ian Gardner. “It's spread easily when fish are in close contact, such as those found in an aquaculture environment. It's not believed to have migrated yet to this side of the Atlantic, but we need to be ready for it.” Dr. Ian Gardner is UPEI's Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Aquatic Epidemiology at the Atlantic Veterinary College. This prestigious new research chair is one of only 19 CERCs awarded to Canadian universities by the Government of Canada in 2010, each of which is valued at up to $10 million over seven years. An internationally renowned veterinary epidemiologist, Dr. Gardner is examining health interactions between farmed and wild fish populations, and developing cost-effective...

“We cannot just look at coming up with new drugs to control diseases. We need to look at strategies to prevent diseases,” explains Dr. Sophie St-Hilaire, Associate Professor of Health Management at the Atlantic Veterinary College. “We need to consider the environmental sustainability of aquaculture systems if we want to be able to farm these systems long term. We also have to assess the short and long term cost benefit of an intensive aquaculture system that is prone to infectious disease outbreaks and treatments." Dr. St-Hilaire’s research into disease prevention, sustainability, and public health in aquaculture settings complements the expertise of the AVC’s Centre for Veterinary Epidemiology (CVER) and Centre for Aquatic Health Sciences (CAHS), both of which welcome her as a member. Her research has taken her to Chile, the United Kingdom, and the...

“I don’t do test tubes,” says Etienne Côté. “I’m a clinical researcher. I want to translate information directly to helping patients, to doing things that mean something to individual owners, and for pets that are thought by their veterinarians to have heart problems.” He’s felt that way for quite a while. “I knew I wanted to be James Herriot,” laughs the cardiologist and internal medicine specialist. “I always had a dog and a cat around when I was growing up in Montreal. I’m a city guy but I remember keeping health report cards for my guinea pig—things like that. And, of course, reading Herriot when I was about 10. That pretty much sealed it. I was hardcore set to get into veterinary school when I left home, first to Rutgers for animal science and then to Cornell. “I thought I needed some large...

The “Dragon Lady” did it for Jeff Davidson. “I didn’t live near the sea. I grew up near the bush in northern Ontario. Maybe it was Jacques Cousteau and all that—but my original interest was in marine biology. I never even touched a cow until I was 18. One day, in my second year at Guelph, I asked one of my professors, a formidable character we called the Dragon Lady, what my job prospects would be if I continued on in marine biology. She said if I did really well and got an honours degree or a graduate degree I’d be able to work for her. And I thought, ‘that’s it.’ That’s when I decided I was going to be a veterinarian.” His early career was mostly private practice, and mostly large animal. “But in the late 1970s when everybody was going west—same as they are now—I decided I was going east to take a...

“I conduct research associated with the non-governmental organization called Farmers Helping Farmers”, says John VanLeeuwen, a Professor of Epidemiology and Ruminant Health Management at AVC. VanLeeuwen is president of the farmers’ aid group. It’s an award-winning organization of community-minded PEI people with agricultural backgrounds whose goal is to directly assist Kenyan farmers in boosting their food production and quality of life. Each year for the past five years, he has worked with a dairy farmer co-op in Kenya “to help them fight disease in their cattle and increase milk production and other measures of productivity. The research varies from baseline epidemiological surveys of current status, to evaluation of benefits of our actions, to clinical trials to determine efficacy of new product applications. What is novel is that we have incorporated...

About 91 per cent of halibut are right-eyed. “They start off as a larval fish with eyes on both sides of their head,” says Larry Hammell, “and then they go through a metamorphosis where one eye migrates over the top of their head so they have both eyes on one side and they swim on their sides.” But, says the Professor in the Department of Health Management, when the eye is only partially migrated, or goes missing altogether,  “The fish have higher mortality and much poorer growth.”  He can tell you that because his AVC team went into a hatchery in the spring of 2006 and micro-chipped just over 5,000 individual fish. “We monitored their eyes, their pigmentation, and a number of other factors.” It’s one small part of Hammell’s efforts over the years to create an adaptable, ongoing, and standardized record of...

“When I did my veterinary degree in Kenya we never used to learn about aquatic stuff. It was rarely taught. But,” says Collins Kamunde, “when I did my postgraduate work, I found myself interested in aquatics and ended up studying aquatic physiology and toxicology. Deep inside, this is what I wanted to do.” A year’s NSERC-funded industrial postdoctoral fellowship in British Columbia further refined the expertise he brought to AVC in January 2004, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. His NSERC- and CFI-funded research—“looking at the relative importance of water versus food as uptake vectors for metals in indigenous aquatic organisms” —is a crucial signpost in monitoring our surroundings and helping to frame regulations to protect them. “My work is important, as it takes a short time...

Some people do not take Michael Cockram’s type of research seriously. According to the soft-spoken Englishman, at one time “it was ridiculed in the farming and veterinary press. Who, after all, needs to know what it takes for a sheep to lose its balance and fall over in a livestock vehicle?” Quite a lot of people, it turns out: from farmer and truck driver and slaughterhouse to processor and consumer. In Canada, there are relatively few people involved in animal welfare research which uses applied science—such as behaviour and physiology—to indirectly assess mental experiences in animals. “The role of animal welfare research is to provide a critical and systematic analysis of issues and a framework that can be used to provide the best available answers to practical and ethical questions,” says the new Chair in Animal Welfare at the AVC Sir...

Leigh Lamont knocks out animals for a living. But, says the Associate Professor of Anaesthesiology in the Department of Companion Animals at AVC, “As I got into clinical practice I realized there were a lot of questions about how we manage cases, and how we handle the health of our patients, which we just didn’t have good answers to. Many interventions or treatments were done because we had a sense that something could or should work, rather than being based on sound science. Veterinary medicine has suffered for many years from a lack of appreciation of the importance of evidence-based medicine. That became of interest to me.” With a specific research interest in anaesthesia and pain management, Lamont undertakes smaller, finite projects. “The field of pain management is relatively new to veterinary medicine,” says Lamont, and veterinarians and pet-...

Asked how a kid who studied physics in the Australian outback ended up doing large animal surgery in Prince Edward Island, Chris Riley laughs and says, “I had an unexpected life. “I was the only boy in my town to finish high school to grade 12 that year,” he says. “And when I was done I was told all the things I couldn’t be. But after serving in the Royal Australian Air Force for three-and-a-half years, where I took physics and aerodynamic engineering, I decided I could do whatever I wanted.” And that was to become what he’d wanted since he was a boy: to be a veterinarian. When he was small, he would often stay with his grandfather for holidays. “He had horses and cows and I just liked being around them and dogs.” He helped put himself through veterinary school by running a weekend pet crematorium and serving as an animal...

Spencer Greenwood is the Lobster Science Centre’s CSI guy. His science—molecular biology, parasitology, lobster pathogens, and host-pathogen interactions—deals with stuff you can’t see even with a simple microscope. Like genes. But the aim is simple, even if the science isn’t. “We are developing a library of genes that are expressed from parasites infecting lobster.” The creation of a library or database of expressed genes has provided clues into how the parasite may actually cause disease in lobsters. They find genes that may code for proteins involved in attachment of the parasite to the lobster, how it invades the tissue, and possibly how it eventually kills the lobster. “We want to see genes that the parasite ‘turns on’ during infection. We thought it might be using an enzyme to actually penetrate the carapace, but work...

We’re all familiar with blood tests at the doctor’s office. That’s one of the things Andrea Battison does in her lab. Except she does them for lobsters. “Part of my training as a clinical pathologist is to interpret blood test results and try to discern what kind of disease process is happening,” explains the research scientist at the AVC’s Lobster Science Centre. “We’re trying to find out if there are measurable indicators in the hemolymph or lobster blood which will be indicative of a certain disease state or damage to a body system.” She brings a unique skill set to her role. A veterinarian by training, she is also a Board-certified clinical pathologist who did her PhD focusing on different ways to evaluate hemolymph to determine the health status of the lobster.   “Up until now, a lot of the work on lobsters has been...

Lobsters are aquatic, yet you can take them out of water and they’ll survive for three days if you keep them moist and cool. They’re invertebrates with an exoskeleton. They can live to be 100 years old. And the biggest can weigh as much as a five-year-old child. “They’re so different from everything you learn in vet school, yet they are still animals,” says Jean Lavallée, Clinical Scientist at the AVC Lobster Science Centre. And they are worth a lot of money, and a lot of jobs. Found along the east coast from North Carolina to Labrador, annual landings in Canada total more than 45,000 tonnes, with a landing value of more than three-quarters of a billion dollars. Over 9,000 people work as lobster fishers. Lobster is the most valuable seafood product in Canada. Yet Lavallée, who has a graduate degree in lobster health, is one of only...

“They call me grandfather fish,” laughs Gerry Johnson. “Fish had started to evolve as a farmed species in Canada, and AVC was advertising for someone to set up its aquatic side. I applied for it and got the job,” says the veterinary pathologist who is now chair of AVC’s Department of Pathology and Microbiology. He remembers arriving at AVC in 1986. “There were a bunch of holes in the ground and a roof over the top, and that was about it for aquatics. But the engineers had listened to all the different interest groups, and once we got the place equipped and operational we found we had landed in probably the best facility in the world at the time. We could run four seasons of temperature in a single experiment in those tanks. We had the potential to do things that couldn’t be done elsewhere and it’s been evolving ever since. “It was...

“I’ve had memorable moments where a barracuda’s face ends up firmly fixed in my mind,” says Russ Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Marine Natural Products at the University of Prince Edward Island. But things with teeth aren’t actually at the heart of his marine science research. Rather, “We’re looking to discover novel natural products in the sea and make medicine from them. And to develop production methods that are ecologically sound for the marine environment. It is clearly of fundamental importance to human health to discover new therapeutic agents. “My interest in the marine environment didn’t really develop until I was doing my post-doc at Stanford,” says the Scottish-born Kerr. “Being there opened my eyes to the field. I had very lab-based scientific training in Calgary before that, but working with Carl Djerassi...