Dr. Andrea Edginton, Dr. Shinya Ito (SickKids, Toronto) and Dr. Julie Autmizguine (St. Justine Hospital, Montreal) received a 4-year $680,000 CIHR Project grant awarded in Spring 2018. The project abstract is as follows:
Breastfeeding has many benefits, but women on medications are often advised against breastfeeding or to avoid taking necessary drugs, because information about drug excretion into human milk is largely lacking. On the other hand, inadvertent infant exposures continue and serious drug toxicity is seen in some cases. This lack of information is a result of difficulty in conducting studies of drug level measurement in breastfeeding mother and infant. The proposed research will apply a study method which can use a small number of milk samples taken at convenient timing of the patients, instead of many samples at a strictly instructed timeline. Furthermore, a computer model will be used to study a "virtual infant" at various ages during the first 6 months of life, so that we can predict how much of the drug appears in their blood. The results will be described as follows: "there is a 99.9% chance for the breastfed infant to have blood drug levels less than one in ten thousand of the mother's level". Initial target drugs to test were identified, and will continue to update the list after consulting the investigators in the field and patients themselves. The results will be shared in the web-based site for health professionals and patients for clinical decision-making.