New CIHR funding brings $14.3M to health researchers at Schulich, hospitals - Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry

Stories can be a child’s first window to the world. But growing up, Nadith Ranasinghe, BSc’25, a second-year medical student at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, rarely saw children of colour or immigrant families in the books he read. Today, Ranasinghe is helping create children’s books that reflect these diverse experiences and make health-related topics more accessible to young readers. During his undergraduate studies at Western, he founded the Kids Health Shelf initiative with his classmates to give students a creative outlet and produce stories that resonate with young readers.

Bioengineer.org news storyFor millions of people living with HIV, antiretroviral therapy has transformed a once-fatal infection into a manageable chronic condition. Yet the very drugs that suppress the virus can carry quiet costs, and one of the most insidious is bone loss. Tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, or TDF, has been a cornerstone of HIV treatment worldwide for two decades, prized for its potency, durability, and low cost. But a growing body of evidence has linked TDF exposure to measurable reductions in bone mineral density, raising an increasingly urgent clinical question: once bone has been lost on a TDF-based regimen, can it be recovered? A new prospective cohort study, published in BMC Infectious Diseases, offers some of the most detailed longitudinal evidence to date that the answer, for many patients, is yes. The research team enrolled 223 virologically suppressed men living with HIV who had low bone mineral density while taking TDF-based antiretroviral therapy.