Dr. Rhian Touyz

As a young medical student at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, Rhian Touyz couldn’t help but notice how many young adults, who were patients in the hospital where she was training, had suffered from debilitating strokes, heart disease and kidney failure mainly due to a preventable condition — high blood pressure, or ‘hypertension.’

Having already decided at the age of seventeen to pursue a career in medicine, Touyz’s passion and curiosity to understand what causes hypertension were ignited at a very young age.

“I was struck by the terrible damage that hypertension did to such a large number of patients,” says Touyz. “The cause of the disease is largely unknown, and this also touched me.”

Today, Dr. Touyz is the Canada Research Chair in Hypertension at the University of Ottawa and Senior Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute’s (OHRI) Kidney Research Centre. She has received numerous academic and research awards, published over 240-- original papers and more than 30 review articles. She is the past President of the Canadian Hypertension Society and is the incoming Chair of the Council for High Blood Pressure Research of the American Heart Association. She is the third Canadian and fisrt female to hold this important position of the most prestigious international hypertension organization.

Her internationally recognized work on high blood pressure focuses on trying to unravel the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying hypertension in order to identify new targets to prevent or better treat hypertension.

Hypertension is a major killer. It’s the major cause of cardiovascular disease, which kills more people around the world every year than any other cause, including cancer or infections. One of the great ironies of the disease is that because it often remains asymptomatic, it has little or no immediate effect on an individual's quality of life. For this reason, hypertension is known as ‘the silent killer.’

In Canada, 30% of adults are hypertensive, and the number of children, adolescents and young adults with high blood pressure is increasing. Despite progress in treatment, the fundamental causes of hypertension remain elusive.

“Considering these facts, I believe that it is important to know what causes hypertension so that it can be better treated or hopefully prevented with appropriate strategies,” explains Touyz.

Her lab has identified important signaling molecules and pathways, which could be potential therapeutic targets, in vascular cells that are responsible for causing vascular injury — a major contributor to hypertension. Her research is internationally respected for having a very strong translational component from the bench to the bedside.

Touyz believes that her research findings will contribute to greater insights and understandings of the mechanisms causing hypertension and that this knowledge will result in strategies to improve the management and therapy of hypertension — possibly even preventing it and its resultant heart, brain, and kidney damage.

“The field of molecular, cellular and vascular biology is very exciting today because we have fantastic new biomedical systems to evaluate biological responses in real time, for example, using sophisticated imaging equipment at the cellular and whole body levels,” explains Touyz.

In addition to development of new drugs to better manage hypertension, there are exciting advancements using other novel strategies to treat hypertension including vaccines, nerve ablation and surgical manipulations. According to Touyz, these offer the promise of more effectively managing hypertension, especially in patients with severe and resistant hypertension.

“I’m very excited about the future of research in my field.”

Touyz is also appreciative of the fantastic opportunities that she has had in Canada that have enabled her to pursue her longstanding passion in hypertension research as a clinician-scientist.

“I am truly lucky to have been able to pursue my career here in Canada and feel most fortunate to have been able to do this through the Canada Research Chair program,” says Touyz. “In Canada I have had the opportunity to work with great scientists and clinicians, to work in superb research institutes, to have access to state-of-the art technologies, to train enthusiastic and dedicated young scientists and to be close to a research community where hypertension research is at the forefront.”

For further information, please contact Dr. Rhian Touyz using the Email contact form