Yves De Koninck recently gave an interview to Le Soleil newspaper about an important discovery published in Nature Medicine which offers new hope to people suffering from dependency to morphine and fentanyl. In the interview, Yves De Koninck indicates that the discovery his team participated in could help people get out of their dependent state by blocking withdrawal symptoms, without blocking the pain relieving effects of morphine and derived drugs.  

Congratulations to Canadian Neurophotonics Platform researcher André Longtin and collaborator Leonard Maler, both at University of Ottawa, who were awarded the NSERC Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering.  

From the NSERC website:

The SfN Quebec city chapter is proud to announce that Caroline Dallaire-Théroux, PhD candidate in neurobiology, from Dr. Simon Duchesne's laboratory, has won a travel award for the upcoming Canadian Association for Neuroscience (CAN) annual meeting.

Congratulations to Caroline who will represent the Quebec city chapter at the CAN meeting.  

A discovery made in collaboration with Yves De Koninck of the Neurophotonics Centre has been listed as one of the top 10 discoveries of 2016 by Québec Science, and is a candidate for the magazine's people's choice award for discovery of the year. This discovery, a collaboration between neuroscientists and physicists, offers hope for repair of nerve connections, and even a way to create new ones.  

The director of the Neurophotonics Centre, Yves De Koninck, will receive the Canadian Pain Society's 2017 Distinguished Career Award.  This award recognizes Dr. De Koninck's longstanding contributions to pain research.  The award will be given at the next Canadian Pain Society meeting, in May 2017 in Halifax.  

http://www.canadianpainsociety.ca/?page=AwardsGrant

Congratulations to Loïc Binan, who was named Étudiant-étoile des Fonds de recherche du Québec - Santé for the month of December for his work on the development of a new single-cell tagging of live cells, work that was recently published in Nature Communications.  This technique, named CLaP, uses a laser to tag single living cells, thereby allowing researchers to follow specific cells during many days.  This technique has applications in research on cancer, cell therapy and neurobiology.

A delegation of three Ministers from the government of Québec, the Ministers Dominique Anglade, François Blais and Gaétan Barrette, visited the Neurophotonics Centre to announce an investment of almost $30 million in research in mental health.  This investment will finance the building of neurophotonics and imaging laboratories, of an animal facility and equipment, as announced by the Minister of Economy, Science and Innovation, Dominique Anglade.