Helene Bertrand

Dr. Bertrand is a clinical instructor for the Department of Family Practice at UBC. Her research interests include Low back pain, painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy, and new ways to address neuropathic pain. She has developed a new method to diagnose and treat low back pain, which provides pain relief in less than five minutes to 80% of sufferers and allows them to use the specific exercises at home whenever their pain returns.

She is carrying out a a follow-up study on 180 cases. She has also developed a mannitol containing cream, which she has shown to downregulate the capsaicin receptor, and is currently carrying out a randomized double-blind study comparing a menthol containing cream to the same cream containing mannitol to treat the pain of diabetic peripheral neuropathy.

Research interests

• Bioorganic and bioinorganic chemistry,
• inorganic medicinal chemistry,
• protein-protein interactions,
• Re-tricarbonyl multimodal probes,
• intracellular detection,
• bioimaging,
• Mn(II) spin-labels,
• CO-releasing molecules