DMartin

Saw a teaser that they're making a new season/movie.

Make the CEO of Adobe try to cancel their Creative Cloud subscription on Instagram Live.

This is so beautiful

Ugh. That's terrible. Sorry

A part me understands the Impact Chairs & supports it to some degree. But only if the government was ready to invest in total research. Otherwise it's just going to be the thing that breaks all of us.

Yeah. What I've paid is pittance compared to what others have paid. But I guess that's the thing, you just keep spending more thinking it's just for a bit....

I'll take some blame. I'm obviously not getting things across the right way. But we have more models than anyone working on this disease. We have clinicians, patients, & knowledge users. At some point, this has to count for something.

I know I'm not the only one who has to use personal funds to make their research go a little bit further. But that's the reality of Research in Canada.

I want to reiterate, this is all from startup funds & little internal grants & CIHR fellowships. We've done so much with so little. I even pay my own way to most conferences so that my trainees can attend. I buy a lot of lab reagents myself. I 3D print supplies. Again, this is research in Canada!

I don't see how we can do anything else with no funding. The people in my lab have done amazing work with no new funds. So, although this work will likely die after this submission I know we did good work. I'll share it with ppl who can move it forward, likely in the US. This is research in Canada.

Sadly, reviewers don't like our over expression model & don't think it negates our efforts to move into better models including knockin cells, patient stem cells, a mouse model, & primary neurons from the mouse.

Ultimately, we found a totally new pathway for pathogenicity in our disease models. We also found a new drug that is already showing potential!

With our knowledge users, patient network, & multiple clinicians we think we can move this into patients if we can map the pathway!

Based on another new pathway we identified we designed & completed a drug screen of FDA approved drugs. Amazingly, our top drug is already being repurposed in a similar disease & is in clinical trials. So, if funded, we can test this in our mouse models & potentially get it into patients faster!

We want to map this effect/pathway in the mouse model & patient derived stem cells provided by the knowledge user & our knockin cell model provided by a clinician & collaborator. We've already made the motor neurons from stem cells & regularly make primary neurons from mice.

We think we found a marker of disease. We first found the effect in cells over expressing our protein of interest (POI).

But we've shown it is conserved in
1) fly model
2) Patient lymphocytes
3) Trending in the mouse model

But reviewers argue that over expression isn't relevant

First, for 7 years we've worked with a knowledge user that connects us with patients & researchers. They're excited about our work & they support us.

So my CIHR is submitted & I highly doubt that it will be funded...I think we'll be lucky if it's discussed. But let me tell you why I'm still excited about it & proud of it.

Everyone should start their day this way, so I thought you could all live a bit vicariously through me.

Coffee, cuddles, & thesis reading.

The rest of the day will probably be downhill from here....

Loss of interruption in the HTT CAG repeat is associated with increased somatic expansion and loss of medium spiny neurons in HD https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.02.709181v1

I mean, at least I would have less rejections each year :-p

Happy CIHR project Grant submission day to all those who celebrate. May the 13% odds be in your favour, and may they continue to hold two competitions per year!

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

Time to celebrate some wins! New paper out on Biorxiv today & submitted CIHR today! Someone I really respect & an expert in the field told me the last version was too good & important not to submit. Let's hope it at least gets discussed.

I'm currently making some last minute updates after my OR did their compliance check. Apparently I need to take some figures out of the R2Rs & trying to find room in the main proposal.

At least it gives me a chance to update my CCV with our new paper. :)

Oh. I love that movie! Enjoy!

Fatima started this work during the pandemic & @jesuisyasmeena.bsky.social took it from cell culture models, to primary neurons & finally HD mice! An impressive feat for an MSc student. ~1 month treatment of Vorinostat was enough to restore SQSTM1 palmitoylation in the brain.

Excited to share this paper. We found a potentially new role for Vorinostat in regulating Palmitoylation & found Vorinostat restored SQSTM1/p62 palmitoylation in the brains of an Huntington Disease mouse model. This project was driven by 2 MSc's @jesuisyasmeena.bsky.social & Fatima Abrar!

CIHR Funding Crisis: Canada's Health Research Community in Jeopardy | Paola Marignani PhD, EMBA posted on the topic | LinkedIn The recent announcement of a 13.6% success rate (86.4% fail rate) for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research | Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada (CIHR) Fall 2025 PG competition is a stark ...

I have been asked by many of you to share my LinkedIn post regarding internal deadlines. Here you go.
www.linkedin.com/posts/drpaol...

Assistant Professor - Psychology (Behavioural Neuroscience) Assistant Professor - Psychology (Behavioural Neuroscience)

New neuroscience job at Wilfrid Laurier University. You may not know the name, but science has been growing fast. It is also down the street from Canada's top tech university (Waterloo) and a world class physics institute (Perimeter). I feel happy and lucky to be here careers.wlu.ca/job/Waterloo...