Her Ebola vaccine work saved lives
‘Quiet, unassuming woman’ a key figure in Ebola vaccine that saved lives in West Africa and Congo, Elizabeth Payne writes.
For years, Judie Alimonti’s life revolved around the Ebola vaccine. She would sometimes be called in to Winnipeg ’s National Microbiology Laboratory in the middle of the night to work on the high-stakes project. She took calls on weekends and once checked urgent emails by the side of the TransCanada Highway in Saskatchewan as trucks rolled by, her husband recalls.
Alimonti’s fingerprints are all over a vaccine that has been called one of Canada’s greatest publichealth achievements. As part of a team that worked on creating the vaccine that has saved lives in West Africa, Alimonti played a key role in its development. Yet few Canadians have ever heard of her.
One of Canada’s unsung scientific heroes, Alimonti died in Ottawa late last year of cancer. She was 57.
The daughter of a truck driver and store clerk, Alimonti took an indirect route to her career in immunology.
First she became a massage therapist, opening a clinic in Kelowna with her husband, Alan Giesbrecht, whom she met at massage-therapy school in Ontario. While working as a massage therapist, she decided to take a few science courses, and was hooked. She enrolled full-time in university as a mature student, earning a Bachelor of Science-Microbiology at the University of British Columbia in 1991 and, eventually, a PhD in immunology at the University of Manitoba.
She took to her research immediately, Giesbrecht said. Alimonti’s PhD thesis became the basis for an article published in the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology in 2000, which is now part of the research being used by a startup company working on a breastcancer vaccine, Giesbrecht said.
While at the Public Health Agency of Canada — a job she started in 2005 — Alimonti took on the role of project lead for the Ebola vaccine, between 2010 and 2015. She was instrumental in its development, said former co-worker Lisa Fernando.
Much of her work was focused on ensuring the vaccine was of high enough quality, or GMP (for good manufacturing processes), that it could be used if needed. If not for Alimonti, said Fernando, “we would not have had a GMP-grade vaccine.”
Its high quality was one reason the World Health Organization chose the vaccine — VSV-EBOV — for a historic clinical trial near the end of the West Africa outbreak, which lasted from 2013 to 2016. That trial, which proved the vaccine worked, set the stage for it to be used earlier this year during another outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Influenced by her mother’s premature death from cancer, Alimonti wanted to do something that would make a difference to people’s lives. Ebola vaccine fit the bill, although Fernando said, they had no idea the vaccine they were working on would one day be urgently shipped to West Africa.
“I don’t think many of us ever expected to see the end use of the product. This was really good for all of us to see the impact that we had.”
Alimonti didn’t look for recognition, said Giesbrecht, who described his wife as “a quiet, unassuming woman who did the right thing for people.”