Taming world’s deadliest pathogens
Winnipeg lab labours to protect the nation from microscopic dangers
WINNIPEG— In late November, a strange envelope turned up at the Canadian embassy in Lebanon. Its suspicious contents — wood shavings, according to local reports — sparked alarm: did it contain dangerous pathogens? Could this be a bioterrorist attack? The building was closed until the package could be investigated.
In snowy Winnipeg, 9,600 kilometres away, Dr. Cindi Corbett received the call: she was going to Beirut. In the hours before sunrise on Nov. 30, Corbett and her team drove to a nondescript warehouse and grabbed four black bags — inside were the components of a mobile laboratory, capable of handling some of the world’s deadliest pathogens. The team was soon en route to Lebanon. Within hours of arriving at the embassy, they had set up their lab, investigated the package and deemed it to be harmless.
THE EPISODE drew little attention, both at home and in Lebanon, and nowhere on Google will you find any mention of Corbett in Beirut. For the mother of two, it was just another day on the job as one of Canada’s top bioterrorism scientists. For the National Microbiology Laboratory where Corbett works, the Beirut incident was just another example of how Public Health Agency of Canada scientists work behind the scenes to protect people from microscopic dangers.
Public-health practitioners sometimes mutter that people only notice them when things go wrong. Canadians may remember reading about the National Microbiology Laboratory during SARS, the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic or the recent XL Foods E. coli outbreak.
But even in the long, quiet stretches between crises, the lab is working every day to keep pathogens at bay. The Next Big One is always simmering; whether it boils over depends on a mixture of chance and preparedness.
Ten years after SARS, considered by some to be the first pandemic of the 21st century, the Toronto Star travelled to Winnipeg to meet the people whose job it is to keep pathogens from gaining the upper hand.
A FORMER acting director once described the NML as Canada’s “Supreme Court of clinical microbiology” — as a reference laboratory, it has an inventory of cultures and cutting-edge diagnostics to support labs across the country.
The building’s architects envisioned more of a “cathedral of science,” however, designing a clean white exterior, a vaulted atrium and plenty of glass for sunlight to stream in.
But the NML, which employs about 400 people, feels more like an elite university campus. The vibe is serious but casual; at lunch, the cafeteria fills with co-op students from the University of Manitoba.
If the NML were a university, then the dean would be Dr. Frank Plummer. On a recent March day, the white-bearded Plummer is relaxed; dressed in blue jeans and brown leather shoes, he strolls through the lab with the leisurely pace of a beachfront vacationer.
But Plummer, a widely respected scientist known for his groundbreaking HIV research, is probably the “busiest person I know,” says one staffer. Three pins on his jacket lapel hint at a career brimming with accomplishments: Order of Canada, Order of Manitoba, Royal Society of Canada fellowship. And there is no reason Plummer shouldn’t be relaxed. This is “peacetime” after all — no ongoing outbreaks — and he has confidence in the lab he has cultured since becoming scientific director general in 2000.
After $172 million, and about a decade of planning and construction, the NML opened in 1999 — a feat in itself, some might argue. After all, the building contains Canada’s only “biosafety level-four lab” (or BSL-4 in scientist shorthand), meaning it contains the world’s deadliest incurable pathogens — think Ebola, Marburg, Nipah virus. In other words, level-four labs tend to make their neighbours uneasy.
IN ONTARIO, TWO ATTEMPTSto open BSL-4 labs have failed spectacularly. In 1995, a $5.8-million lab in Etobicoke was mothballed after fervent community backlash; in the ’80s, a completed $2million lab at Toronto General Hospital never opened due to “bureaucratic ass covering,” a former hospital president complained to the CBC.
But the NML opened with minimal fuss on the site of a former asphalt plant, in a hardscrabble Winnipeg neighbourhood of low-income homes and the occasional auto shop. It shares a building with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s centre for foreign animal disease — a common-sense arrangement, seeing as some 400 new infectious diseases have emerged in the past seven decades and more than 60 per cent came from animals.
The building’s security is muscular. The foundation is embedded into the Canadian shield and there are backup systems for backup systems; a chemical storage facility is designed to ensure accidental explosions blast away from the main building. The level-four lab is a concrete box inside another concrete box — and the concrete sat and “cured” for a year; it was then X-rayed for cracks and slathered with thick sealant to prevent microbes from escaping.
Getting into the NML is also difficult. Mail is X-rayed and contract workers — everyone from the cafeteria lady to the garbage collectors — must have “secret level-two” clearance, meaning they’ve been subjected to background checks and have a neighbour who will vouch for them. Visiting reporters are restricted from writing about camera locations, security features — even the views outside the windows.
BUT THE NML, as with any organization, is not immune to error. In 2009, a former employee smuggled 22 vials out of the lab, including ones containing non-infectious Ebola material (he was caught at the U.S. border and arrested). Incident reports also document occasional fluctuations in air pressure and, in one instance, an employee accidentally poked with a needle while handling non-infectious material (the lab takes a proactive approach to reporting incidents and meets with a community oversight group four times a year).
On Plummer’s third year as scientific director general, he was confronted with the SARS coronavirus, his first time dealing with a major outbreak. He admits people were caught off guard. “We sort of muddled through SARS.”
Ten years later, SARS is gone but the microbial threats continue to loom: Lyme disease is creeping into Canada, deadly bacteria strains are developing drug resistance and a new coronavirus is popping up in the Middle East.
But the lab has come a long way since SARS, Plummer says.
“We’re ready,” he says, when asked about the next big outbreak. “And we’re always improving on the readiness.”
Technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade and the NML has kept pace. Now included in the lab’s lineup: several machines that can quickly sequence entire genomes (because the staff likes to name the machines after dead rock stars, “Kurt Co- bain” is now working at the NML) and a newly acquired robotic machine (nicknamed Wall-E), which can generate more than 100 cell cultures at a time — giving the lab a major advantage the next time scientists need to quickly identify a mysterious new outbreak.
Part of being ready is also the existence of the lab’s emergency operations centre, built shortly after SARS. It is the lab’s Situation Room: TV screens encircle the room, the windows go opaque with the touch of a button and a digital world map covers one wall. Taped to the desks are sheets of paper that read “Bomb Threat Checklist.”
Ten years ago, Plummer and his people were writing the emergency playbook as SARS unfolded; communication was haphazard. Now, there are protocols that click into place when an outbreak emerges, with everything flowing through the operations centre.
The centre also supports NML scientists deployed overseas — as was the case last fall, when a small team went to the Democratic Republic of Congo to assist with an outbreak of Ebola, one of the world’s most feared viruses, which can kill up to 90 per cent of its victims.
Corbett, who runs the lab’s microbiological emergency response team, accompanied the DRC group and brought the same “lab in a box” she took to Beirut. But her team also has larger mobile labs at its disposal, including a Freightliner truck that can handle levelthree pathogens such as anthrax (Torontonians may have noticed the truck at the G20 summit in 2010).
OFFICIALLY, Corbett’s title is “chief of bioforensics assay development and diagnostics” — or chief of BADD, she jokes. Overseas deployments are only a small fraction of her job, however; dayto-day, she is more likely to be researching the latest in microbial forensics (law enforcement agencies often ask Corbett for help with criminal investigations involving biological specimens) or developing tests to diagnose agents that could be used as bioweapons. Corbett also trains law enforcement on everything from handling dangerous materials to spotting clandestine labs (apparently, slow cookers can incubate more than just pot roasts).
Although Corbett attended the DRC trip, she is not the lab’s Ebola expert — that title belongs to Dr. Gary Kobinger, who led the deployment.
“We’re ready. And we’re always improving on the readiness.” DR. FRANK PLUMMER WHEN ASKED ABOUT THE NEXT BIG OUTBREAK
Kobinger is the kind of scientist who works in a lab with bulletproof glass and wears a pressurized containment suit, familiar to anyone who has ever watched a Hollywood pandemic movie. As the lab’s head of special pathogens, he is a rare specimen: an Ebola expert from Quebec living in the Canadian prairies.
Recently, the National Geographic Channel featured Kobinger as part of a one-hour special on modern-day exploration. “Join Dr. Gary Kobinger as he battles the world’s deadliest viruses,” the promo read. In November, Kobinger published a study that found pigs were capable of transmitting Ebola virus to monkeys through air droplets — a revelation that had Kobinger and his people wrestling pigs in the DRC so they could sample their blood for Ebola antibodies.
Kobinger has also developed an Ebola vaccine that works in monkeys; his next goal is to test it in humans (something that likely won’t take place for at least another year, he says).
“It’s really exciting,” he says. “It’s a dream come true, in seeing a treatment moving forward to the clinic.”
In Kobinger’s BSL-4 lab, his team of about 25 people are regularly working with everything from Hantavirus to the deadliest flu strains. They also diagnose samples taken from Canadian tourists — perhaps recently returned from some exotic locale with some microbial hitchhiker in tow.
Reference laboratories such as the NML need to be prepared for anything — in today’s borderless world, any infectious disease is just a plane ride away.
Polio, for instance, has long been eradicated from Canada but the NML continues to maintain a lab, and the expertise, to test for it. The world is inching closer to polio eradication — it now circulates in just Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan — but that means it is more critical than ever to ensure against the virus’s return, said Dr. Tim Booth, director of viral diseases.
WHEN IT COMES to outbreak prevention, however, one of the NML’s most important roles is surveillance. In Booth’s viral diseases division, the influenza department tests thousands of flu samples every season to detect which strains are circulating — this information also helps shape next year’s flu vaccine.
Scientists at the lab also monitor hospital outbreaks, drug-resistant bacteria and food-borne diseases. In the enteric diseases division, Dr. Celine Nadon is tracking E. coli and Listeria outbreaks using molecular fingerprinting and a continental laboratory network called PulseNet, which can detect outbreaks before they spread beyond as few as two people.
For Plummer, this means his calm is unlikely to be disturbed anytime soon — even when the Next Big One hits.
“We’re like the fire department — when something happens, you don’t go ‘Oh boy, it’s a fire!’ ” he says. “This is what we’re here for. You just sort of click into high gear.”