This past November, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) named Kubes Canada’s Health Researcher of the Year. This award honours remarkable contributions to health research and comes with a $500,000 research grant. Kubes says it will allow him to conduct research that otherwise might not have been funded.
“I’m going to take some big risks. If they work, there is the potential for greater rewards scientifically.” Aside from the grant, Kubes is already noticing the effects of the acclaim. “This week alone I’ve received a huge increase in fellowship applications from all over Canada and abroad,” he says.
Since the announcement, the demands on his time have been extensive. In between academic speaking engagements all over North America, he has managed to provide several local and national media interviews for outlets such as The Globe and Mail and CBC’s Radio Canada International. Despite the time commitments, Kubes is not complaining.
“Absolutely it’s been busy. This is fabulous news for the University of Calgary, and it puts a spotlight on all the research happening here.”
The research
Kubes’ research touches on many areas of science and medicine that are not always in the spotlight. He studies infection and inflammation−conditions which affect vast numbers of people but which do not receive the publicity or notoriety of other diseases.
“People don’t often think about infections,” Kubes explains. “You usually recover really quickly or you die.” The conditions do not come with the long lasting relationships that you have with arthritis or other autoimmune diseases, but they kill a lot more people.
Kubes specializes in the visualization of the immune system. Specifically, he looks at white blood cells, as occasionally the body can dispatch an excess amount to sites of infection, causing tissue damage. His real-time imaging system can visually display immune cells and the bacteria they are chasing.
“Five or six years ago, we couldn’t picture what was happening in the blood. Now it’s easier to see and target the cells.”
The impact
Antibiotics are often cited as one of medicine’s greatest achievements, but over the last few decades there have been disturbing developments in the field. Some bacteria have begun developing resistance to common antibiotics, triggering an arms race as scientists strive to develop new weapons to combat these increasingly common “superbugs”. In the last six years, the medical community has seen a 30-fold increase in the prevalence of these organisms in Calgary alone.
Kubes’ research will be of vital importance as the number of antibiotic resistant bacteria grows and alternatives for the treatment of infection become critically important. “We’ve got to stop using antibiotics. We need to target the immune system and not the bacteria,” says Kubes, referring to the overuse of antibiotics which can lead to resistant infections. He has another thought about the future, and it’s a chilling one. “We will reach a stage similar to the early 1900’s where people lived in a world without antibiotics. We won’t have antibiotic protection.”
The connection
Kubes is the lead researcher for the Alberta Sepsis Network. Sepsis is a potentially fatal blood disease where the blood is overwhelmed with bacteria and inflammation throughout the body. Approximately 250,000 people in North America die from sepsis each year.
The most common treatment for sepsis is a combination of antibiotics and IV fluids to maintain blood pressure. In a patient infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria however, this treatment will not be effective, and the patient’s treatment and recovery will become much more complicated.
After a conversation with a doctor about the high rates of infection in stroke patients, Kubes also became interested in studying how the immune system responds post-stroke. He discovered that when a patient has a stroke, the brain tries to protect itself by blocking inflammation. This lowers the body’s immune system and could lead to infection. Using a mouse model, Kubes’ team believes they may have found a drug to halt cells from suppressing the immune system and stopping the infection. Kubes and his colleagues are now seeing if the science can be applied to humans.
The future
The research done in Kubes’ lab has applications in many different areas of medicine. Kubes’ research is looking at new ways to treat infections by making the body’s own immune system more effective, as opposed to trying to keep up with the relentless evolution of resistant bacterial strains. This research is critically important to the many Canadians who must deal with any type of infection, and it will hopefully contribute to new ways to improve treatment options.
Kubes' work has been supported by Alberta Innovates-Health Solutions (AIHS).