At Lab That Conquered Ebola, an Emphasis on Creativity

When the VSV-EBOV vaccine was confirmed last month to be effective in preventing Ebola, a single research lab in the hinterland of Canada earned an impressive distinction.

The facility is the National Microbiology Laboratory, in Winnipeg. It has now played a central role in creating both a treatment against Ebola, called ZMapp, and a proven vaccine against the virus.

A study led by the World Health Organization and published last month in The Lancet involving 5,800 people in Guinea showed that VSV-EBOV had a 100-percent success rate in preventing Ebola transmission at least 10 days after their vaccination. And the drug cocktail ZMapp was earlier found to be associated with clinical benefits more than 90 percent of the time in those already infected. The innovations are now sparing millions of people in Africa and elsewhere the prospect of a gruesome death from a highly contagious and lethal disease characterized by bloody vomiting.

Both drugs have long histories involving researchers in multiple labs and countries. But standing first among them is the National Microbiology Laboratory, part of the Public Health Agency of Canada. One scientist who played key roles in creating VSV-EBOV, ZMapp, and another promising Ebola vaccine — AdC7, a precursor to ChAd3, which is now being tested in human clinical trials — is Gary P. Kobinger, a former chief of special pathogens at the Winnipeg lab, who now serves as director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at Laval University, in Quebec City.

Mr. Kobinger, an associate professor of medical microbiology at the University of Manitoba and who previously worked at the University of Pennsylvania, has some thoughts about why the Winnipeg lab is the place where the much-feared Ebola virus appears to have finally met its match. The following is an edited transcript of a Chronicle interview with Mr. Kobinger.

Q. What is it about the environment in Winnipeg that made this happen there?

A. I’m not sure I have the real answer, we can only speculate on this. The one thing that we know for sure is that it was not only a Canadian effort, it was truly an international effort. The VSV vaccine originated with a compound made by a Russian scientist, Viktor Volchkov. And Heinz Feldmann, who at the time was the chief of the special pathogens program in Winnipeg, had the idea of testing this as a vaccine. He worked on it for seven years — there were a lot of people involved. Then Heinz left, I was selected as the chief in 2009, and we kept developing the VSV vaccine project. The one who really made the first observation that the vaccine was truly a good candidate for humans was Thomas Geisbert, at Fort Detrick in Maryland, in collaboration with Heinz.

The ChAd3 vaccine, based on a simian adenovirus, belongs to GlaxoSmithKline. The concept of using chimp or monkey adenoviruses as a vaccine actually was born at the University of Pennsylvania, with me and James Wilson, and I had the chance to start the first vaccine project.

Q. And what about ZMapp?

A. ZMapp was born out of two drug combinations. One cocktail was made in Winnipeg, made of three antibodies. Another cocktail, MB-003, was made in the U.S. We were on the phone all together, and I said, ‘I don’t care which cocktail is the best, I don’t care, I just want the best cocktail. So why don’t we put our best antibodies with your best antibodies, and we extract the best cocktail out of them?’

And to me it was a big surprise — you know a lot of scientists are competing, and instead everybody wanted to work together. It’s not Canada versus the U.S. — I think what made a huge difference for ZMapp is the willingness to work together instead of competing. Because we could have decided on not agreeing, and saying, ‘You have your cocktail and we have our cocktail, and we’ll develop the best one on our side, and you develop what you want.’ And instead we got together. This was before the 2014 Ebola outbreak, so imagine how happy we were we had gone that way. I’ve heard of this being used as an example by senior people at NIH as a very efficient way to do research, as opposed to competing.

Q. How did leadership play a role?

A. At the time, the director general of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg was Frank Plummer, and Frank believed that for doing good research, you have to let the scientists decide what they need to do. So he really pushed hard to create an environment where every scientist could do what he thought was the right thing, and what he thought was promising.

A lot of research centers — I’m directing one now — you’re always trying to give a flavor to it, or give some level of direction to it, or you try to get people who somehow can work together, and be synergetic. But Frank didn’t care about this, in a sense — he thought every individual scientist will come up with the best, and create the best, if he could do what he wanted.

And I think this is something that is rare, and that I haven’t seen to that extent, to tell the truth, in any institution, and it’s sadly enough in my view something that is actually on the decline more than on the rise.

Q. In Canada, too?

A. Yes. Funding agencies, often, of all sorts, are more demanding. There needs to be more and more people of different expertise to be able to tackle big projects. So institutions are more and more specialized, and instead of letting the individual scientists decide who they work with, and what they work on, it’s creating a little bit more pressure toward those networks of scientists that need to be all working together.

And I cannot tell you whether that is good or bad, but I personally believe that the environment that was created at NML at the time in the early 2000s, during those 10 or 12 years, we had tremendous support from Frank, and we could basically do really what we wanted, as long as we could find the funds and the money, and we had basic financial resources.

Q. And did you have a lot of resources?

A. One thing is clear is not the amount of resources we had, because we were what you would call underfunded compared to a lot of comparable facilities in the U.S., for example. It goes back to this environment where individual scientists are free, completely, to decide what they want to do and with whom they want to do it.

Q. Are you talking about models such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which fund researchers rather than projects?

A. It’s a concept I wish could grow rather than decline. Maybe it’s only my impression, maybe it is not declining, but from what I can see, it is declining because more and more scientists are forced into these big teams where the direction is pre-set. More and more you see these funding agencies, they come with a project, and they are more and more specific in what they want, and again that leaves less and less room.

Q. So you’re saying the problem exists not just in the U.S. but in Canada too, and that the Winnipeg lab was different because of the leadership there?

A. I think so, yes, because the system is the same, the funding — instead of NIH we have the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The thing that I admire, that I’ve seen recently, is for example BARDA (the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) or DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). They will come with a call, but they won’t be specific. They will say, “We want something that will be able to detect, say, 10 pathogens in three seconds, and how you get there is up to you.” ’ You still have an imposed goal, so it cuts a little bit into the creativity of basic science, but still it’s really an open field where you can come up with anything and everything you want.

Q. Is this something your scientific colleagues see?

A. A lot of people ask me, How do you think you guys got this done? What is the environment that created this? I get this question from scientists but not much from the media. I think it’s a very important question, because if we want to reproduce those successes, we need to look at what works and what doesn’t, or at least what works, because it’s phenomenal that it worked that well and that fast.

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.