Who has influenced you the most?

Dr. Denis Sasseville and Dr. Moshe Ben-Shoshan were my research mentors during my research and clinical training at McGill University and really sparked my interest for clinical and epidemiological research in Dermatology. I was also very lucky to have had a very supportive Division Chief and Program Director Dr. Linda Moreau who made it possible for me to be the first resident in Dermatology at McGill to be enrolled in 2 programs at the same time (Experimental Medicine and Residency training in Dermatology). Since I have started my practice and independent research, I often turn to my official and unofficial mentors for advice and guidance, Drs. Murray Baron, Sasha Bernatsky, Joyce Rauch and Elham Rahme. I am very grateful for the support and guidance from all of them and they really helped to shape who I am today.

What are the greatest challenges in your research area?

I think the greatest challenge for almost all junior (and not only junior) clinician scientists in Canada is funding, because without funding you cannot produce a meaningful research and train graduate students. Often for obtaining funding you have to produce and publish preliminary results and you dedicate weeks and months to actually writing grants which can take significant amount of your nonclinical time. I think it is certainly the biggest challenge for me and many others, but despite that I feel I am privileged and grateful to have received support for my research from the Department of Medicine at the MUHC, FRSQ, MUHC Foundation, Skin Investigation Network of Canada (SkIN Canada) and CDF to both have protected time for research and startup funds to conduct my studies.

What can be done to grow the impact of skin research in Canada?

I think SkIN Canada is an excellent step forward to establish channels of collaboration across dermatologists in Canada. Through these channels of collaboration, we can have registries of patients that will allow us to study rare diseases or even common diseases but with a special focus. National biobanking process for skin diseases will also be a huge asset. SkIN Canada will allow us to share our expertise to support each other in our research A-Z from collaboration in grants writing, feedback during protocol preparation and eventually manuscript writing. We are still a small family in dermatology compared to other researchers in Canada who are mainly from other specialties. As a complex medical dermatologist, the biggest challenge I see right now is not the treatment of atopic dermatitis or psoriasis because there is a great deal of research that happened in these conditions in the last 10-20 years; we certainly have better treatments and knowledge. Huge treatment gaps remain for inflammatory skin diseases that are less common but when combined, these are daily challenges for all of us. Examples include but are not limited to sclerodermoid conditions (morphea and systemic sclerosis), immunobullous diseases, vitiligo, and inflammatory alopecias. I hope with research, in a few years we would see access to targeted effective treatments in these diseases as well. Combining efforts to study these diseases in Canada through clinical registries, epidemiological and translational research will help us improve the knowledge gaps and ultimately better care for our patients.

If you have worked with patients as part of the research team, what did you learn? If you haven’t yet, what are you looking forward to learning from patient research partners?”

The answer to both of them is yes. I think it is something extremely important because very often we see the disease from our perspective as dermatologists but unless we involve patient research partners we do not fully understand what is troubling them the most and where are the most pressuring needs from their perspective. For example, in the morphea registry (C-MORE) that we are establishing with SkIN Canada support, we immediately involved several patient partners representing different ethnic backgrounds and disease subtypes. Patient small group sessions facilitated by Canadian Skin Patient Alliance (CSPA, Rachael Manion, Executive Director) helped us to review our registry baseline, follow up and study specific questionnaires to make sure that they are easy to understand and appropriate length to avoid data misclassification and missing data. They also shed light on some extra variables of importance to them that we did not think of. We hope in conjunction with CSPA to establish a patients’ support program for morphea in the upcoming year.