The Winnipeg lab saving the world from disease
FACILITY HAS ‘EASY TO PRODUCE’ ZIKA VACCINE IN THE WORKS
First, it was a Canadian creation that became the first real weapon against Ebola.
Scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) were working on a vaccine before the 2014 pandemic hit.
The World Health Organization used vials of the untried medication in clinical trials in Guinea. It quickly proved a “game-changer” that protected everyone who received it.
Now, only days after most people learned the word “Zika,” the Winnipeg- based researchers may have done it again.
The lab’s head of special pathogens said last month they could have a vaccine to combat the mosquito-borne illness ready by year’s end.
“This vaccine is easy to produce. It could be cranked to very high levels in a really short time,” Dr. Gary Kobinger told Reuters.
“We’re kind of right on the front line of monitoring and detecting emerging diseases. That gives us the first indication of when something might warrant a vaccine,” said Dr. Matthew Gilmour, its scientific director general.
In 2002- 03, the lab helped control the short- lived but deadly SARS epidemic, while in 2009, it was the first to confirm a mysterious disease spreading through Mexico was H1N1, or “swine flu,” a new strain of influenza.
Frank Plummer, the lab’s then-scientific director, was alerted to the new strain by his Mexican counterpart while watching a hockey game.
The Canadian lab was picked, he said later, “because of our SARS experience.”
NML researchers also receive antibiotic- resistant strains of C. difficile from around the world.
Opened in 1999, the National Microbiology Laboratory is the only facility in Canada with a laboratory rated to biosafety level 4. it’s here that scientists deal with potentially city- emptying viruses and biological agents, wearing pressure suits and working in labs that are intricately sealed off from the outside world.
It’s also where researchers somewhat controversially reconstructed the 1918 Spanish flu virus and used it to infect macaque monkeys.
The point, as explained in a 2007 article in the journal Nature, was to gather data on how the 1918 flu had been able to spread so quickly, killing nearly 50 million people.
Gilmour said the lab’s recent success rate is the result of its unique status.
It receives samples of any unusual pathogens that show up in Canadian hospitals; it is also among the first to get samples of emerging diseases brought home by jet-setting travellers. “It gives us the opportunity to see the early blips,” said Gilmour. The whole facility is a “one- stop shop” for identifying diseases.
Once a new pathogen is identified, researchers down the hall can get started on producing a vaccine.
“Under one roof, we can do a full investigation,” he said.
The system has allowed laboratory scientists to work on little-known diseases years before they make headlines.
As Heinz Feldmann, the lab’s first special pathogens chief told the National Post in an email, we “did our best to motivate people for work on infectious disease problems with national or international impact.”
That was the case with Ebola. There was “foresight” in researchers identifying the deadly virus early as a “candidate for consideration,” said Gilmour.
But when researchers first studied the virus, they thought their work was intended to protect apes.
“The great apes are actually at substantially more risk of elimination because of Ebola infection than humans,” researcher Steven Jones said in 2007.
As for Zika, the virus was first detected in 2013, long before it hit the headlines as a cause of babies across Latin America being born with abnormally small heads.
“Having that two- year head start is what gives us the time to isolate the virus and do work,” said Gilmour.
But once the virus — which is named for a forest in Uganda — was identified as the culprit in 2015, the NML already had a road map of diagnostic tests, while Gary Kobinger was able to work with U. S. and South Korean researchers on developing a vaccine.
“I’m amazed. This vaccine is already in clinical production,” Kobinger, who is soon set to leave the Winnipeg lab for Quebec’s Laval University, recently told the CBC.