N.B. scientist helped to grow COVID-19 from Canada's first patient
‘It landed on our doorstep,’ said Dr. Samira Mubareka from her lab in Toronto
It's hard to imagine, in the context of COVID-19, what it could mean to be in the right place at the right time.
But you could say it happened to Dr. Samira Mubareka.
On Jan. 23, Canada's first COVID-19 patient was admitted to Sunnybrook Hospital, where Mubareka had spent 10 years building up an infectious disease lab with a focus on respiratory virus transmission.
Her office is above the emergency department, where a man in his 50s, with a cough and fever, who had just returned from Wuhan China, was delivered by paramedics who were wearing full protective gear.
"It literally landed on our doorstep," Mubareka said of the novel coronavirus. "Sunnybrook had the first case of COVID-19 in the country. It was quite obvious we need to start working on this."
Swabs that were taken from that patient made it possible for Mubareka and her colleagues from McMaster University and the University of Toronto to replicate the virus in a high containment lab in Toronto.
That pure virus supply has been making it possible to study COVID0-19's DNA.
By decoding its genetic material, scientists can try to answer questions about where the coronavirus came from and how it might be mutating.
"That in turn is really going to help inform how diagnostics are developed, and it will inform vaccine development, and anti-viral development as well," said Mubareka.
The work is getting a lot of attention and recently attracted new funding.
The role of fate
For Mubareka, this follows decades of study and preparation.
Her career includes a fellowship at Mount Sinai in New York and the infectious disease and microbiology program in Winnipeg, where she got "hooked on viruses."
She studied internal medicine at McGill and got her medical degree from Dalhousie.
She grew up in northern New Brunswick and attended high school in Edmundston.
But she said it was running free and playing outdoors as a child in St. Joseph-de-Madawaska that probably sparked her science career.
"Without that, I don't know if I would have been nearly so connected [with nature] or curious about biology and how things work in the natural world," she said.
The investment company QuestCap Inc. has put $1 million into Sunnybrook's COVID-19 research. In announcing the investment, the company said Mubareka's team will focus on three areas: vaccines and therapeutics, virus biology and transmission prevention.