The Calvin, Phoebe and Joan Snyder Chair in Critical Care Research: Dr. Paul Kubes

Becoming a researcher was a natural choice for Dr. Paul Kubes. His parents were researchers and fostered an interest in scientific research in their son. He chose to study medicine because he was intrigued about how the human body works.

Dr. Kubes initial research focused on Cardiovascular Physiology. During his post-doctoral fellowship, he examined why there is excessive inflammation associated with heart attacks and strokes. He found that under such pathological conditions, white blood cells are recruited into the affected tissue.

In 1991, he joined the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary as an Assistant Professor. His continued interest in the mechanisms leading to white cell recruitment in cardiovascular disorders led him to study infection and autoimmunity. His current research focuses on sepsis, an immune response in which the body over- responds to an infection in the blood.

Sepsis (bacteria throughout the body) is a very serious condition and kills over 250,000 people in North America each year. The mortality rate for those diagnosed with severe sepsis and septic shock is 50%, a rate that has not changed very much in the last few decades. Severe sepsis is the leading cause of death in intensive care patients. In addition to the high mortality rate, the cost of sepsis on the healthcare system is substantial – approximately $885 million per year in Canada.

Dr. Kubes has made some important discoveries. Using a high powered microscope funded by the Snyder Chair, Dr. Kubes discovered neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) in blood. NETs are the mechanism in which neutrophils, white blood cells that defend the body from infection, use to catch bacteria in flowing blood.

Understanding of this mechanism is important because while catching bacteria the NETs can cause injury to endothelium and tissue. When the body undergoes sepsis, neutrophils release a large number of these NETs. This results in a greater amount of damage, which could ultimately lead to organ failure and death. Dr. Kubes findings could hence lead to a new course of treatment.

Dr. Kubes ultimately hopes to find a way to reduce the mortality rate significantly. His ground breaking work is changing the way physicians and scientists think about sepsis. His work has not gone unnoticed and was published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature Medicine, in April 2007.

More about Dr. Kubes