Lawson Health Research Institute scientist and Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry professor Paul Adams may not be at the Olympics in Vancouver, but he earned himself a gold medal in the area of liver disease research.
Adams, who is also a physicians at London Health Sciences Centre has been awarded the 2010 Gold Medal for excellence from the Canadian Liver Foundation for his outstanding and sustained contribution to research in the field of liver disease.
Dedicating his professional career to diagnose and treat hemochromatosis/iron overload
disease, Adams has established himself as a respected international expert on this chronic
disease. Hemochromatosis is a genetic disease affecting one out of every 227 Canadian people of Northern European ancestry, making the disease 10 times more common than cystic fibrosis.
Adams is recognized for the breadth of his work, which encompasses fundamental genetic determinants and epidemiology, to effective new treatments to manage the disease, including liver transplantation.
“There is no other physician in Canada who has increased awareness of this disease process
amongst the medical community or has expanded the boundaries of knowledge in this area as
Dr. Adams,” says Dr. Eric Yoshida, Professor of Medicine and Chief of Gastroenterology at the
University of British Columbia.
Nearly a decade ago, Adams received a $34-million National Institutes of Health
grant to lead a study investigating the prevalence of iron overload in a multi-ethnic population to determine the optimal use of diagnostic blood testing including genetic testing.
Adams’ innovative research has far reaching implications for attitudes on genetic testing for all medical diseases, and he is highly involved in developing expert documents that have been and will be utilized for policy development to standardize patient care for the diagnosis and treatment of hemochromatosis.
Adams’ award will be present Feb. 28 during the 2010 Canadian Digestive Diseases
Week in Toronto.
