This text is part of the special Feminine Leadership notebook
Anick Bérard is passionate about her research work. She has dedicated her career to studying the consequences of medication use during pregnancy on women’s health and their fetuses, in order to generate evidence.
A specialist in perinatal epidemiology, Anick Bérard is a full professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Montreal and a researcher at CHU Sainte-Justine. Truly passionate, the professor recognizes that her career and her research objectives are one and the same. A prolific author, she has nearly 600 scientific articles, abstracts and patents to her credit, according to the Azrieli Research Center at CHU Sainte-Justine. She is also the recent recipient of a major grant to bring the CAMCCO-Outreach knowledge transfer hub to life. Established as part of the Pan-Canadian Coalition for Women’s Health, this center aims to reduce gender inequalities in the field of reproductive health care.
Evaluate the impact of medications more quickly
Anick Bérard’s attraction to perinatal epidemiology comes from the observation that 75% of pregnant women take medication at some point during their pregnancy, indicates the researcher. When she started her career 20 years ago, the number of studies on the subject was limited or their validity questionable because they often involved too small samples. It is therefore to fill this knowledge gap that she and her team developed the pan-Canadian mother-child research (CAMCCO-Research) and training (CAMCCO-Learn) infrastructure on which the CAMCCO-Outreach center is based, of which she is the principal investigator with Modupe Tunde-Byass, associate professor at the University of Toronto.
Now, the developed infrastructure facilitates collaboration in research environments and with the pharmaceutical industry. It also allows decision-makers, such as Health Canada, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA, in the United States) or the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to consult CAMCCO in order to obtain evidence to include in their lines guidelines. This information allows them to know if a drug should be accepted, reimbursed, sold, or if the manufacturer should be required to set up a pregnancy register, reveals the researcher.
New drugs are continually appearing on the market, explains M.me Berard. As soon as one of them is approved by Health Canada, “it is almost certain that pregnant women will use it”, even if very little data is available on its effects, continues the researcher. This data is collected “once it is used by hundreds, even thousands of women” and it currently takes a minimum of ten years before determining the foetotoxic or teratogenic nature of a drug. This means that for ten years, “we [le] prescribed with very little evidence”, trying to estimate the risks and benefits. With the data collected and artificial intelligence models, the professor hopes to be able to halve the time needed to evaluate the impact of a medication on a pregnancy. This is currently her “research mission”, says Anick Bérard.
Ten million pregnancies
The CAMCCO-Outreach hub, which will see the light of day in November 2024, has 80 experts in the field of pharmacy and obstetrics, underlines the researcher. The aim of the platform is to provide clear, evidence-based information to help the general public, particularly pregnant people and their families, make informed decisions about their health and that of their child. Doctors, prescribers and pharmacists will also be invited to consult the website, which will highlight popularized knowledge based on scientific publications. The content will take the form of videos, texts and podcasts.
Over the years and her work, the researcher developed a Quebec cohort of approximately one million pregnancies which gave her international recognition. She then conducted research on a larger sample by replicating the Quebec model. Now, its pan-Canadian research cohort has nearly 10 million pregnancies.
Mme Bérard also attaches great importance to the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion and is delighted with the diversity of the cluster’s research team. For a data transfer to be based on science, publications are needed, specifies the researcher. But, even today, the majority of populations studied are Caucasian, she laments. This is why its research teams set out to “meet underrepresented populations”, listen to them, observe their reality and assess their knowledge transfer needs. To this end, she emphasizes the importance of her collaboration with obstetrician-gynecologist Modupe Tunde-Byass, president of the Association of Black Doctors of Canada.
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