Team Grant : Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI) - China

This funding opportunity is part of the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI) to fund a Cohort Leadership Team.

The Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative Linked International Intervention Cohorts (HeLTI LIIC) will work in partnership with countries with populations where there has been rapid changes in population demographics e.g., urbanization and lifestyles, change in diet, that have resulted in increased non-communicable diseases (NCDs) over a relatively short period of time (2-4 generations).  The initiative will be a collaboration of participating countries developing linked international intervention cohorts, both retrospective and prospective interventions, focused on risk factors for NCDs based on the developmental origins of health and disease concept (DOHaD). Due to the deliberate coordination and funding of these linked international intervention cohorts, this initiative will allow for accelerated learning and impact within and across countries through methodological advances, common measures, and data harmonization, as well as enhanced understanding of the results and their implications across contexts.   For each country, the joint team will include both a lead from Canada and a lead from the participating country to establish a cohort composed of a representative sample of the target population in the participating country. This initiative will be supported through a novel partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide secretariat support for initiative management and governance.

The goal of HeLTI is to generate evidence that will inform national policy and decision-making in Canada and the participating countries for the improvement of health and the prevention of NCDs, with an emphasis on obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes throughout the lifespan. Given that both maternal and paternal health have transgenerational effects on development and health of offspring, this funding opportunity also aims to develop gender-responsive evidence for interventions and policies aimed at the needs of men, women, boys and girls. The engagement of multiple countries will promote value-added international collaborations through a multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach to the problem by spanning basic science to public health research and policy, which will position the initiative to have significant long term impacts on global health. It is expected that the research initiative will yield greater value because of the collaborative nature than if studies were implemented as single country projects. The collaboration will enable comparative analysis of interventions, harmonized data, assessment of biological mechanisms and biological-environmental interactions in different populations and the exchange and stimulation of scientific ideas and sharing of expertise.

This current Funding Opportunity will fund a Cohort Leadership Team comprised of investigators and knowledge users/policy makers from both Canada and China for a cohort in China.