Congratulations to Dr. Carrie Ye on receiving the Fall 2024 Early Career Researcher in Cancer Award!

As part of its commitment to capacity building in the Canadian cancer research landscape, the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) established the Early Career Researcher in Cancer Award in 2019 to recognize early career research excellence and help support awardees' research programs. This award is given to early career researchers with the highest-ranked applications in the Project Grant competition that fall within ICR's mandate. ICR congratulates the recipients of the Fall 2024 Early Career Researcher Award in Cancer!

Dr. Carrie Ye

Assistant Professor, Division of Rheumatology

Dr. Carrie Ye is a clinician researcher, specializing in the epidemiology of bone and joint health in individuals with cancer. She is a rheumatologist and runs the Northern Alberta Osteoporosis Program, as well as the Rheumatology in Immuno-Oncology Clinic. Her research focuses on understanding the musculoskeletal toxicities of immune checkpoint inhibitors by leveraging and linking data from the Canadian Research Group of Rheumatology in Immuno-Oncology (CanRIO) to administrative health data.

Project funded

Gaining insight into immune checkpoint inhibitor associated inflammatory arthritis using administrative health data

Background and Importance: Immunotherapy, which works by activating the immune system, has received a lot of interest due to its ability to improve cancer survival and even cure certain late-stage cancers. Over 40% of patients with cancer can be treated with immunotherapy. However, by activating the immune system, immunotherapy can cause unwanted side effects such as inflammatory arthritis (ICI-IA), which can cause severe joint pain. Little is known about who gets ICI-IA and what happens to them. Most studies on ICI-IA have only included small numbers of patients. One major barrier to studying ICI-IA in large groups of people is the lack of validated case definitions. Canada is in a unique position to conduct this study as the only country with a national database of rheumatologist-confirmed cases of ICI-IA (the CanRIO database).

Research Aims:

1. Validate administrative data definitions of ICI-IA.
2. Evaluate ICI-IA in Canadians using health care administrative data.

Methods:

• Aim 1: Using rheumatologist-confirmed cases of ICI-IA from the CanRIO database as the gold standard, we will test various administrative healthcare data case definitions based on physician billing codes, hospitalization codes, medication codes and lab test results.
• Aim 2: We will use the most accurate case definition from Aim 1 to find cases of ICI-IA in multiple provinces and study frequency of, risk factors associated with and outcomes after the development of ICI-IA.

Expected Outcomes/Impacts: Our work will help us understand how common ICI-IA is in patients using immunotherapy for cancer. Patients and doctors will be able to make better informed decisions on the risk to benefit balance of immunotherapy. Our work will also help doctors identify those at highest risk for ICI-IA and start earlier screening and treatments to lessen or prevent long term consequences of ICI-IA.

Visit the CIHR website to read about other Fall 2024 awardees.