We would like to congratulate Dr. Don Vinh and his team at McGill University Health Centre for winning the 2024 Grant Program with their abstract titled,

"Expanding the Horizons of Autoantibody-mediated Immunodeficiency Syndromes of Humans"

Donald C. Vinh, MD, FRCP(C), FCIS, FAMMI, FIDSA

Section Head, Infectious Diseases - Hematology/Oncology/Transplant Clinical Program

McGill University Health Centre

Adjudication of the grant program abstracts was conducted by CDI Labs' scientific leadership team. The abstracts were evaluated on scientific merit, impact, and the level of innovation. This program was open to all our scientific communities, and we were delighted to receive many high-quality abstracts and proposals.

About Dr. Vinh's Lab

Dr. Vinh's translational research program combines clinical infectious diseases and human immunology, with fundamental genetic/genomic investigations and functional immunobiology, to decipher how molecular defects of human immunity contribute to infections that are recurrent, recalcitrant, and/or unusually severe in patients. He is a provincially-funded Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRQS) Senior clinician-scientist, and his program focuses on two themes:

1. Pathogen-specific deficiencies in which they define host genetic defects that selectively predispose to specific infections, particularly those caused by fungi and DNA-based viruses. Examples of this work include defining the risk of invasive aspergillosis in autosomal-dominant HyperIgE (Job's) syndrome, and deciphering CARD9 deficiency through patients that he has diagnosed, complemented with a unique mouse model that they have generated in their laboratory.

2. Inborn errors of human immunobiology, specifically concentrating on a cohort of patients with various types of immunodeficiencies that he has established in his clinic. An example of this is their discovery of ICOSLG deficiency underlying a human combined immunodeficiency syndrome. His capacity to pinpoint the underlying bases for human susceptibility to severe disease enabled them to contribute to the COVID pandemic (e.g. COVID Human Genetics Effort) through the identification of genetic lesions and autoantibodies compromising type I interferon pathway, as well as through the characterization of vaccine responses in the frail, institutionalized elderly.