Jacob Jaremko went into medicine because of one of his little sisters.The winner of the 2001-2002 Lionel E. McLeod Health Research Scholarship says that when his sister was diagnosed with diabetes, it made him realize he wanted to help people. Midway through his studies in Civil Engineering at the time, Jacob realized that if he continued as a pure engineer he would be “ignoring the passage of life”.
“It was very frustrating for my whole family when my sister was diagnosed,” he explains. “I realized that there are more important things, like when people get sick, and that through medicine I could do something to make more of a difference.” His very first research interest—working on an artificial pancreas—allowed Jacob to apply engineering principles directly to diabetes.
Non-invasive detection of spinal deformity
A native Calgarian, Jacob began his combined degree program in 1997, working toward an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering through the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Medicine. When shopping around for a Ph.D. project, he became interested in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, a spinal deformity which affects more than 94,000 children in Canada between the ages of 11 and 14. Cancer risk is associated with the spinal x-rays currently used to monitor progression of the disease. Jacob is now working on developing a non-invasive means of detecting spinal curve through scanning the surface of the torso with low-power lasers which generate a three-dimensional image of the existing spinal deformity. He is involved in a multi-disciplinary, multi-centre collaboration involving research teams in Calgary and Montreal. More knowledge in this area could lead to earlier detection of the disease, a reduction of radiation exposure for patients, and improved design of braces for scoliosis patients.
Finishing thesis
Jacob is currently finishing off his thesis, and after another year and a half of medical school he plans to do a clinical residency in either orthopedics or radiology. In the latter years of his residency, he hopes to get back into bioengineering-related research.
The Lionel E. McLeod Health Research Scholarship is awarded annually by AHFMR to an outstanding student at the University of Alberta, Calgary, or British Columbia for research related to human health. Dr. McLeod was the founding president of AHFMR from 1981 to 1990 and was Head of Endocrinology at the University of Alberta, Dean of Medicine at the University of Calgary, and President and Chief Executive Officer of the University Hospital, Vancouver.
Jacob Jaremko is an MD/PhD student at the University of Calgary working in the lab of Dean of Kinesiology Dr. Ronald Zernicke. In addition to the McLeod Scholarship, Jacob also holds a Canadian Institutes of Health Research MD/PhD Studentship.
Selected publications
Jaremko J, Rorstad O. Advances toward the implantable artificial pancreas for treatment of diabetes. Diabetes Care 1998; 21(3):444-450.
Jaremko J, Delorme S, Dansereau J, Labelle H, Ronsky J, Poncet P, Harder J, Dewar R, Zernicke RF. Use of neural networks to correlate spine and rib deformity in scoliosis. Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering 2000; 3(3):203-213.
Jaremko JL, Poncet P, Ronsky J, Harder J, Dansereau J, Labelle H, Zernicke RF. Estimation of spinal deformity in scoliosis from torso surface cross sections. Spine 2001; 26(14):1583-1591.