New HIV centre director studied virus for decades
Since high school, Dr. Zabrina Brumme has been fascinated with HIV, the “simple yet adaptable” virus that takes on drugs and the body’s immune system alike.
“I graduated from high school in the mid-1990s and that’s when HIV was its most destructive and scary, the point where it was the leading cause of death, for example, among adult males in the United States,” Brumme said.
Today she begins her new job as director of the HIV/ AIDS laboratory program at the B.C. Centre for Excellence.
“We’ve known about HIV since the early 1980s, but it’s actually been with us for about 100 years total. We just didn’t notice until the ‘80s.”
Part of Brumme’s new job will be searching for vaccines and cures for the virus.
Since 2009 Brumme has been an associate professor at SFU’s faculty of health sciences (molecular epidemiology of infectious diseases), a post she’ll retain.
“The B.C. Centre for Excellence is the leading centre that integrates HIV clinical care and research, education and advocacy,” she said.
“There’s no other centre like it in Canada. I’d say there’s no other centre quite like it in the world.”
Brumme comes highly lauded.
“Dr. Brumme has studied HIV through the lens of a molecular biologist and epidemiologist,” Dr. Robert Hogg, a professor at SFU’s health sciences faculty, said. “She has dedicated her career to understanding how HIV can adapt and evolve within populations.”
Brumme’s work will involve overseeing studies into HIV at a molecular level, helping discover more personalized medicines, as well as mapping HIV genome data, on top of searching for vaccines and cures.
There are many therapies available in Canada and can be tailor-made for an individual, an area pioneered by Dr. Richard Harrigan, Brumme’s Ph.D. adviser who retired from the B.C. Centre for Excellence last year and who Brumme is replacing as lab director.
“The new job’s pretty daunting,” Brumme said. “I’m basically taking over the clinical program and the research program of a very eminent scientist in the field, Dr. Richard Harrigan.
“He was my mentor and over the last 20 years established the personalized medicine testing service for almost every part of Canada.
“Also, there’s a vibrant research program on HIV drug resistance, HIV transmission surveillance and, obviously, treatment as prevention.
“And we’ll expand that into additional areas. It doesn’t seem possible but the Centre will do even more research than before. We’re going to add HIV-cure research and vaccine research.”
The centre is part of a worldwide push known as 90-90-90: That 90 per cent of those infected will know they are; 90 per cent will be on antiretroviral medication; and 90 per cent will essentially be living with negligible levels of HIV.
It’s estimated the virus has killed 39 million people overall and 37 million are infected, but new infection rates have fallen from 3.4 million a year to 1.8 million, according to the International AIDS Society.
While there is as yet no cure for HIV, it has become a chronic, manageable condition, that can be managed with one pill a day, Brumme said.
“Today, people are living with HIV, they’re getting older, there are a lot of other diseases, there’s a lot of other news and political stuff going on in the world,” Brumme said.
“HIV is fighting for that media space. We need to keep it in the news, keep up that pressure. It’s a solvable problem, we have the tools, we know what needs to be done, it’s just the implementation that’s the challenging part.
“We want to remind people HIV is still out there.”