Collaborations

The Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium (CANUE) is a CIHR-funded research platform that collates and generates standardized area-level environmental data on air and noise pollution, land use, green/natural spaces, climate change/extreme weather, and socioeconomic conditions and links this data to existing Canadian cohort studies (including CanPath) as well as administrative health databases. CanPath’s ongoing collaboration with CANUE has expanded the available environmental exposure data researchers can access through the CanPath Portal.

CANUE datasets, which are indexed to every postal code in Canada, enrich CanPath’s existing information on individual lifestyle, health, and risk factors, physical measures and biosamples. This information is of interest for a wide range of studies, including those investigating the impacts of the urban environment on health, for example— that of local air quality, access to green spaces, opportunities for walking and cycling, noise and light pollution levels, and climate factors on the etiology of specific health outcomes and population health.

A second round of environmental exposure datasets were linked with CanPath’s national baseline and follow-up datasets and made available to researchers in June 2021.

With its home in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, the CanPath National Coordinating Centre has formed a collaboration with the Waakebiness-Bryce Institute for Indigenous Health (WBIIH) at the University of Toronto. CanPath has partnered with the WBIIH to develop appropriate processes for access to and use of Indigenous participant data and biosamples. Approximately 7,700 participants who enrolled in CanPath have self-identified as Indigenous, and these data have not yet been made available to researchers.

CanPath and the Health Data Research Network Canada (HDRN Canada) formed a partnership in August 2020 that will enable linkage between CanPath cohort data and administrative health data held at provincial data centres. Through this partnership, researchers are able to submit requests for multi-jurisdictional research projects using CanPath data through HDRN Canada’s Data Access Support Hub (DASH).

By enabling researchers to connect data such as self-reported behaviours, physical measurements and biological samples from CanPath with use of health services and health outcomes captured by provincial health databases, we can gain deeper insights and develop solutions to pressing health challenges, including chronic illnesses, mental health, aging populations, and more.

The Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts & Minds collaborated with CanPath and its regional cohorts from 2015 to 2018 to collect detailed information on vascular disease, cardiac disease and cognitive function by using MRI scans of 6,292 CanPath participants. Data and images from this ancillary study were returned to the regional cohorts.

CanPath was awarded $1.9 million by the Government of Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force in October 2020 to conduct a COVID-19 Antibody Study. The seroprevalence study is testing 20,000 targeted CanPath participants, including populations that are traditionally not included in studies or are among the highest risk of exposure to COVID-19.

The Government of Canada established the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force in late April 2020. The Task Force is overseen by a Leadership Group of volunteers that includes leading Canadian scientists and experts from universities and healthcare facilities across Canada who are focused on understanding the nature of immunity arising from the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. To that end, the CITF is supporting numerous studies to determine the extent of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Canada (in the general population as well as in specific communities and priority populations), understand the nature of immunity following infection, develop improved antibody testing methods, and help monitor the effectiveness and safety of vaccines as they are rolled out across Canada. The Task Force and its Secretariat work closely with a range of partners, including governments, public health agencies, institutions, health organizations, research teams, other task forces, and engages communities and stakeholders. Most recently, the Task Force has been asked to support vaccine surveillance, effectiveness and safety as part of its overall objective to generate data and ideas that inform interventions aimed at slowing—and ultimately stopping—the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Canada.

CanPath represents Canada as the sole eligible cohort in the International HundredK+ Cohorts Consortium (IHCC). The IHCC aims to create a global platform for translational research – cohort to bedside and cohort to bench – informing the biological and genetic basis for disease and improving clinical care and population health. CanPath is currently supporting the IHCC’s development of international data holdings from over 70 international cohorts guided by FAIR principles.

In 2020, CanPath became a member of the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative, which brings together the international human genetics community to generate, share and analyze data to learn the genetic determinants of COVID-19 susceptibility, severity and outcomes. Over 195 contributing studies from around the world sought to provide an environment to foster the sharing of resources to facilitate COVID-19 host genetics research (e.g. protocols, questionnaires), and to organize analytical activities across studies to identify genetic determinants of COVID-19 susceptibility and severity. The COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative provides a platform to share the results from meta-analytical activities to benefit the broader scientific community.