Prof leads diabetes research
December 9, 2005
Angela Wiebe
Research set to change the way health professionals study and diagnose Type 2 diabetes is underway at Trinity Western University, led by Computing Science professor Dr. Alma Barranco-Mendoza and a team of student assistants.
“We can potentially change the face of diabetes diagnosis,” Barranco-Mendoza said of the innovative computer software program she is designing.
Barranco-Mendoza, who began her diabetes research this year after receiving a three-year grant from the TWU Diabetes Research Endowment Fund, hopes to have the software program in clinical testing within three years’ time and eventually in hospitals as a commercial product.
“My goal is to have a working prototype of a completed system,” she said.
Currently, the diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, which is a preventable disease that affects more than two million Canadians, is mostly based on lab tests done when patients are already showing symptoms of having the disease.
But, Barranco-Mendoza said, it is important to take into account several factors, such as lifestyle, race, genetic information, and family medical history. A complete profiling of patients will aid in determining their chances of developing diabetes in the future, before they are affected by the
disease.
“It’s not simply adding numbers,” Barranco-Mendoza said of assessing the different risk factors associated with diabetes.
Barranco-Mendoza and her team of four TWU students, one staff member, and one Simon Fraser University PhD student are working to create a database of information from different sources in order to find relationships and correlations between each category.
Research assistant Sarah Gillis, a third year student at TWU, is one of those responsible for gathering information.
“I find out all I can about the disease,” she said, “Then, I begin to make some connections for putting all this information into a database.”
Throughout the process of collecting data, Barranco-Mendoza is spending many hours creating algorithms to produce an intelligent profiling system that will be able to point out risks not seen by doctors or nurses.
“The system starts to develop trends, establishing relationships we haven’t seen before,” she said.
While Barranco-Mendoza, a mother of three-year-old twin boys, spends every spare moment she has working on this project, she said research and software development are what she loves to do.
She worked for 15 years in the software development industry before joining TWU in September, 2004, and has a background in both cancer and diabetes diagnostics.
Because her father and both of her husband’s parents suffered from diabetes, she had begun to research the disease within her own company.
“The endowment fund helped me to continue doing this research,” Barranco-Mendoza said of coming to TWU.
She added that it is necessary to have this kind of research at TWU. “It is very important in any university to have the creation of new knowledge,” she said. “It’s what differentiates a university from a college. And it gives prestige to the university as a scientific institution.”
Besides a university’s reputation, research projects are important for students.
“It gives the chance for students to be involved,” Barranco-Mendoza said. “Few students have that chance.”
And Gillis recognizes that chance. “I feel really honoured to be part of this project,” Gillis said. “I am very lucky to be able to see research being done from a graduate level.”
Even though Barranco-Mendoza was hesitant to become a professor at TWU, as she comes from a family of teachers and promised herself she would never follow suit, she is enjoying every part of it: “It’s great. I love it.”
She said she is especially enjoying being able to work alongside her students on this diabetes project.
“Mentorship is one of the most important aspects for me,” she said of her research. “Students are the future scientists.”
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