Article content continued

Dr. Kym Boycott, who is working with Sienna at CHEO, is wrestling with the genetic quirk that makes Sienna unable to get enough vitamin B6 from food. Sienna receives extra vitamin doses, which have reduced but not eliminated her seizures.

Boycott will oversee an effort to take rare pediatric diseases through the whole “pipeline” from finding the genetic causes to, they hope, finding new treatments.

Although each disease is rare in itself, they add up. CHEO says as many as half a million Canadian children may suffer from one or another.

“Even though these children don’t all have the same thing, the families are struggling with similar issues,” said Boycott, a clinical geneticist.

Meanwhile Sienna has other help: Her dog, Jedi, is trained to alert the parents when Sienna has a seizure. Sometimes Jedi can sense a seizure before it begins and get the parents in time for them to give an extra shot of vitamin B6, which makes the seizure less severe and may even prevent it.

In all, nearly $30 million will go to Ottawa universities and hospitals.

• At the U of O, there’s also funding for stem cell scientist Michael Rudnicki (also part of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute); David Park, who studies Parkinson’s disease and stroke; Paul Corkum, who uses ultra-fast laser bursts to make images of new materials on a tiny scale; and Juan (Tito) Scaiano who will do materials research in the Advanced Research Complex.

• At Carleton University, engineer David Lau is looking beyond the damage done by earthquakes to analyze what dangers buildings face after the ground stops shaking.

“Earthquake is one major component, but other major hazards include fire, some wind damage and and climate change-induced to structures, especially in northern environments,” he said

He received nearly $2.2 million funding for a new test facility that will also include U of O scientists.

• Carleton also receives $5.9 million for Gerald Oakham’s continuing particle physics work at CERN, the lab outside Geneva that found the Higgs boson.

tspears@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/TomSpears1