Housed within Canadian Blood Services’ Medical Affairs and Innovation division, the Centre for Innovation supports Canadian Blood Services to continuously improve blood products and their utilization to help every patient, match every need, and serve every Canadian. The Centre’s annual report details the achievements that have been made by our network of scientists, medical experts, research partners, and collaborators. It is filled with stories and insights that highlight the Centre’s research, development, training, education and engagement activities. A selection of 2019-2020 year in review

There are inconsistencies in criteria and practice of brain death (death by neurologic criteria) both internationally and within countries. The World Brain Death Project was created to formulate recommendations about the determination of brain death based on extensive reviews of the literature and expert opinion of a large multi-disciplinary, international panel, including representation from intensive care (adult and pediatric), critical care nursing, neurocritical care, neurology and neurosurgery. The recommendations were recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association

Thanks to a collaboration among Canada’s leading experts in transfusion medicine, front-line physicians can access Treat the Bleed, a new website that supports clinical decision making in the management of bleeding. The content is presented in a practical and user-friendly format: top questions on three topics (warfarin reversal, direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs), and massive hemorrhage protocol) are answered in concise text using plenty of infographics We spoke with one of the contributing experts, Dr. Andrew Shih, medical director and regional medical leader in transfusion medicine at the

The 2020 Canadian Blood Services’ Lay Science Writing Competition has launched and is open for submissions until Dec. 15, 2020. This year, we’re asking trainees to test their plain writing skills and use clear language to send submissions under the theme “Challenges 2020”. The theme is open to interpretation, but submissions could include stories about challenges in the trainee’s own research, challenges in conducting or communicating research, challenges faced by a trainee’s field of research, or, more broadly, challenges facing science, research, education and communication in 2020

Understanding blood compatibility is critical to ensuring safe transfusions, but in some cases, identifying compatible blood types for a patient can be challenging. That’s because blood can be typed according to 38 different blood group systems and hundreds of different blood cell antigens within these systems—not just the familiar ABO and Rh types—and knowing if a patient has antibodies to these antigens is crucial to their transfusion care. Data collected by the Public Health Agency of Canada from 2011–2015 show that adverse reactions to receiving a blood transfusion, triggered when a

It was a Friday night in June when Craig Jenkins got the urgent call from Dr. Chantale Pambrun, director of Canadian Blood Services’ Centre for Innovation. “She asked, ‘What’s the likelihood we can test 10,000 samples in the first week?’” remembers Jenkins, senior manager of product and process development at the Centre for Innovation. The next morning, he, Dr. Pambrun, and senior medical lab technologist Valerie Conrod were in the Ottawa lab, and they clocked 14-hour days all week to meet the target for Canada’s first study to determine the prevalence of COVID-19 antibodies in Canadians’

Postponed in April 2020, the Centre for Blood Research’s annual Norman Bethune Symposium moved to an online format and was held on Sept. 9, 2020. We heard from some Canadian Blood Services research trainees about the symposium and their experiences presenting their work in the “new normal” virtual format, which included a research showcase via Twitter. Olga Mykhailova (postdoctoral fellow, Acker laboratory) On the Norman Bethune Symposium: From my perspective, NBS-2020 went under the title “New reality”. This “during-COVID life” makes everyone challenge themselves to be totally open to new

A recent research paper points towards machine learning as a solution to improve how experts assess the shape of red blood cells, or red blood cell morphology. With the potential to eliminate subjectivity and standardize testing, this approach could herald a new era in red blood cell morphology assessment, with potentially big implications for transfusion medicine research and beyond. “This work took over three years and involved 19 experts across five countries and 12 institutes,” explains Dr. Jason Acker, a senior scientist at Canadian Blood Services’ Centre for Innovation. The research

The Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS) was established in 2004 and brings together Canada’s top-ranked health and biomedical scientists and scholars to make a positive impact on the urgent health concerns of Canadians. Its Fellows are individuals of great achievement within the academic health sciences in Canada, who serve the Academy as unpaid volunteers to provide assessments of, and advice on, key issues relevant to the health of Canadians. Last week, the Academy announced its new Fellows, among them Dr. Heyu Ni. Dr. Ni is a Canadian Blood Services senior scientist. He is also a