Dr. Peter K. Stys

Dr. Peter K. Stys was raised in Montreal and completed his medical studies at the University of Ottawa. He went on to complete his specialty training in Neurology at the University of Toronto, then engaged in post-doctoral studies at Yale University, supported by a Centennial Fellowship from the Medical Research Council. There he worked on the fundamental mechanisms of injury to nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord. In 1992 he returned to Canada to set up his own research laboratory and an academic clinical neurology practice at the Civic campus of the Ottawa Hospital. He is presently a Professor of Medicine (Neurology) at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Scientist at the Ottawa Health Research Institute. He divides his time between basic research, clinical neurology in a tertiary care center and teaching.

The brain and spinal cord are composed of gray matter (where the nerve cells are located) and white matter, consisting of millions of vital nerve fibers that connect various parts of the central nervous system. Dr. Stys' research is aimed at understanding the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms of nerve fiber injury in the white matter. His work has led to several major discoveries on how fibers are damaged by lack of blood flow or traumatic injury. In the early 1990’s he published several key papers describing how excessive calcium entry into nerve fibers destroys them, and discovered a major route by which calcium is admitted into fibers. Normally, calcium is a substance vital for normal cellular function, but can kill if it accumulates excessively inside cells. Subsequent work has expanded on his initial findings showing that the neurotransmitter glutamate, normally responsible for transmitting signals in gray matter, damages white matter tracts, and he discovered that a key protein used to mop up excessive glutamate, is instead tricked into releasing it from cells, in turn causing damage to nerve fibers. Very recently his team published another key paper showing for the first time that calcium not only enters nerve fibers to cause injury, but that there exist large calcium pools already within fibers that can be released to cause major damage. This latter finding may have profound implications for the design of neuroprotective drugs, many of which are aimed at limiting calcium entry from the outside, but not calcium release from within. This finding was the subject of a recent News and Views article in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine, underscoring the importance of the discovery.

The work on white matter conducted by Dr. Stys and his team may have very important implications for the design of treatment for a number of disorders, such as stroke, spinal cord injury, brain trauma and multiple sclerosis. All these conditions cause major disability, in large part because of disruption and damage to white matter fibers, for which treatment options are currently very limited.

Since returning to Canada, Dr. Stys has been awarded more than $6.3 million in peer-reviewed research funding. He is presently funded as a Career Investigator by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario, and holds research grants from the National Institutes of Health (US), Canadian Institutes of Health Research, National Multiple Sclerosis Society (US), Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, Canadian Stroke Network and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario Center for Brain Recovery. His publication record includes 69 peer-reviewed papers, 62 abstracts, 14 book chapters, 2 books, 3 software programs and one patent. He was awarded a Premier’s Research Excellence Award from the province of Ontario in 1999 and is a biographee in the Canadian Who’s Who. He has been invited to lecture at over 30 national and international conferences, and has supervised 25 trainees at the undergraduate to post-graduate levels.

For further information, please contact Dr. Peter K. Stys using the Email contact form or by phone at 613 761-5444