Public Health Laboratory
Medical Head, Hepatitis - Clinical Prevention Services
BC Centre for Disease Control
655 W 12th Ave.,
Vancouver, BC
V5Z 4R4
Professor, Dept. of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Univ. of British Columbia
Mel Krajden MD, FRCPC is the Acting Director of BC’s Public Health Laboratory and the Medical Head, Hepatitis at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. He is also a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Krajden’s clinical research involves integration of hepatitis prevention and care. His laboratory research involves the application of molecular techniques to: diagnose viruses; assess correlates between infection and clinical disease; monitor antiviral efficacy and track microbial infections for epidemiological purposes. He has extensive clinical trials expertise and serves as a laboratory coordinator for a number of industry sponsored clinical trials. He receives CIHR funding in the fields of human papillomavirus, HIV and hepatitis C virus. He is a Co-investigator/Mentor for CIHR funded National Research Training Program – Hepatitis C Program (now known as CanHepC) and a Co-PI on the CIHR Hepatitis Team grant.
With the development of new, well-tolerated, short course hepatitis C treatments that can cure greater than 95% of hepatitis C infections, Dr. Krajden and his team are applying state of the art genomic and data integration tools to distinguish new from old infections and determine how hepatitis C is spread within transmission networks. He also spearheads a linked laboratory and administrative database initiative focused on the assessment of population level outcomes. This database initiative, involving the Health Authorities and the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, will enable British Columbia to design and evaluate hepatitis C prevention, care and treatment interventions.
At the BCCDC Dr. Krajden is assembling a multi-disciplinary team to focus on understanding the key components of value-based clinical and laboratory practices that impact population health outcomes using the BC-Hepatitis C Tester’s Cohort (BC-HTC). BC-HTC contains de-identified health information for 1.5 million British Columbians tested for HCV, HIV, HBV & TB. It iincludes almost all: lab tests/results, medical visits, hospitalizations, prescriptions, cancer outcomes, and mortality outcomes. With 25 years of information, the BC-HTC is able to determine net costs of services and health outcomes by different groups & adjust for confounders. The goal is to drive value-based practices from the bench to population level -- translating discovery into practice across a range of health related questions.
Dr. Krajden serves on numerous organizations and is the author of 227 peer-reviewed publications.
Disciplines
Laboratory diagnosis, nucleic acid testing, data linkage, burden of disease, modeling infection, Microbiology; Pathology; Virology
