Gary Kobinger toiled in obscurity until a couple of years ago when, during the Ebola crisis, the chief of special pathogens at the Public Health Agency of Canada’s (PHAC) microbiology laboratory in Winnipeg vaulted to the rank of international hero.

In the midst of the epidemic that claimed more than 11 000 lives, he and his team announced that they had developed both an effective treatment — a drug called ZMapp — and a vaccine against the lethal virus.

Although both are still in clinical assessment, these discoveries came as heartening news to a world gripped by fear of a hemorrhagic fever that, on average, kills half of those who contract it. The twin breakthroughs received attention from media, scientists and public health authorities across the globe, and led to Kobinger being nominated for such honours as Radio-Canada’s scientist of the year.

Dr. Xiangguo Qiu of PHAC, who is first author on most of the publications related to ZMapp, says Kobinger’s support was exceptional. “He immediately saw the potential for this treatment,” said Qui. “We established a plan together. He is very quick and knowledgeable. It is great to work with him. Without him the treatment we developed would have never seen the light.”

The praise and media attention has not distracted Kobinger from his work. He is quick to give credit to his team, and to point out that the Ebola breakthroughs were part of a much wider — and longer — battle against highly infectious diseases.

“My team and I are working on a MERS [Middle East respiratory syndrome] vaccine, currently tested in a phase one clinical trial,” he said in an interview from his Winnipeg laboratory. “We also have a vaccine against Zika that could be ready as early as this summer.”

With the mosquito-borne Zika virus spreading from Brazil to other countries and potentially causing increases in rates of both microcephaly in newborns and Guillain-Barré syndrome in adults, Kobinger fully understands there is no time to waste. Thankfully, he will not be starting from scratch.

“It may sound extraordinary, but we have known and developed this [method] for over 10 years. So what is in fact extraordinary is that it took an epidemic to receive the attention our work deserved,” he said. “We were working in the shadows for years and years.”

It would be hard to imagine a work environment less glamorous, or more dangerous. He often works alone in this maximum-containment facility — Canada’s only level-4 biosafety containment laboratory — wearing what looks like a blue spacesuit, complete with a hood and gloves. Most of his days end with a chemical shower. Yet it is precisely these conditions that have helped Kobinger to attain understanding of the complex mechanisms that could protect human cells from highly infectious and deadly viruses.

“It is so quiet in a level-4 lab,” he said. “The air and temperature are controlled, which allows me to reach an intense level of concentration and focus on my work.”

From the perfect ambient temperature and controlled conditions of his lab, his research took him to the heat and squalor at the heart of the Ebola outbreak. His desire to stop infectious disease in its tracks was fanned by what he witnessed there.

“You never forget the expression of fear imprinted on the face of someone who has died of Ebola,” he said.

Over the course of four trips to Africa between 2007 and 2014, he was instrumental in implementing safety protocols as cochair of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Emerging and Dangerous Pathogens Laboratory Network. With the danger of infection all around them, he and his team were careful to follow all protocols. “I’m motivated by the fact that we can prevent deaths. I have a wife and children, and of course I was thinking about them when I saw women and children dying of Ebola in front of us.”

It was particularly tough to watch death strike when he knew he had a potential cure, as well as a vaccine, at his lab back in Canada. “The hardest thing is administrative and bureaucratic delays which slow us down. Delays make me impatient.”

Kobinger’s sense of urgency about his mission is palpable, but the path that led the Quebec City–born scientist to the Winnipeg lab and to Africa’s shores was not always so direct. The self-described “medical school dropout” spent a year planting trees and travelling before finding his true calling.

“He came back very sick from a trip to India,” recounts his mother, Nicole Kobinger. “I think that this was a determinant for him. One day, after several months of lying ill in bed, he got up and decided to return to university.”

Kobinger’s brush with mortality gave him a sense of purpose. “I realized there was a great need to immunize and protect people from emerging infectious diseases. I became fascinated with viruses and I was convinced we could help people. My goal became to prevent death.”

He pursued his studies with those he considered the best in his field. His doctoral work was with Éric Cohen of Université de Montréal’s Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal, who was known for his research into retroviruses such as HIV. Then from 1999 to 2004, he did postdoctoral training under James M. Wilson’s supervision at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “He joined my lab at a time when [there was] a collection of incredibly ambitious and aggressive post-doc cohorts,” said Wilson. “He was part of that exceptional and superior class of researcher that came through.” Wilson credits Kobinger with conducting extremely challenging experiments using bits of the HIV virus and pseudotyping them with bits of the Ebola virus, at a time when bio-threats were heightened.

“After 9/11, and biosecurity heightened, it became very hard to gain access to one of those labs. Gary was very persistent and impatient with the bureaucratic delays, but not in a reckless way. I admire that in him,” said Wilson. “He is an amazing human being; the type that I have rarely encountered. What is so amazing about him is that he is one of the very rare people who are extremely smart, pursuing ambitious goals while abiding by very high levels of principles, and with great generosity. I mean, he would give his shirt off [his back]. What he did in Africa was selfless. It is very rare in our world, where competition is fierce and ruthless, to encounter that level of selflessness and integrity in one human being.”

Vaccines usually take at least 10 years to develop, but Kobinger and his PHAC team claim to have created what he calls a “template” — or recipe — that applies to several types of vaccines, including one tested against Ebola. This type of vaccine acts on several fronts to trigger an appropriate immune response.

“When you look at the structure of the wormlike Ebola virus under the microscope, you see its surface is peppered with glycoproteins,” he said. These proteins, which form the envelope of many other viruses, bind onto human cells and act as keys, opening a target cell and allowing the virus to penetrate and infect it. By using glycoproteins in combination with features of other infectious agents, this new type of vaccine triggers an immune reaction that has produced promising results in the recent initial human tests.

Kobinger leaves PHAC in June to head Laval University’s Infectious Disease Research Centre in his hometown of Quebec City. “We will miss him greatly, says Qiu. “We love him here, and we wish him luck.” Kobinger may be moving across the country, but his goal remains the same: preventing death.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has awarded a new CA$3.99 million grant to Gary Kobinger of Université Laval for work on a vaccine to prevent HIV infection.

This three-year grant supports a scientific collaboration between Kobinger and the Design and Development Lab, a state-of-the-art research facility in Brooklyn, New York, operated by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). Led by Kobinger and IAVI's Chris Parks, the respective Canadian and U.S. research teams aim to improve upon a promising HIV vaccine candidate designed by Parks, with the goal of advancing the candidate to clinical testing in human volunteers.

"We are encouraged by this support of Gary Kobinger's work and the prospects of his collaboration with IAVI's Design and Development Lab," said Mark Feinberg, IAVI CEO. "The innovative work of the Kobinger lab provides a great illustration of how creative and insightful science can advance the global response to emerging infectious diseases, and exemplifies ways in which the benefits of research progress in one disease area can be translated to another, in this case, from an understanding of how to develop an effective Ebola vaccine to the ongoing search for an AIDS vaccine."

Using a modified animal virus called Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSV) that does not cause disease in humans, the IAVI vaccine candidate delivers copies of a protein taken from HIV's surface. Once inside the body, the protein stimulates protective immune defenses against HIV infection. Studies in animals to date have yielded encouraging results.

Kobinger's team will further modify the IAVI candidate vaccine for greater efficacy and clinical testing. An expert in the Ebola virus, Kobinger helped develop the Ebola (rVSV-ZEBOV) vaccine, which to date has proven the most effective at preventing Ebola infection, and which also uses a VSV backbone.

"While there is still much work to be done, progress is being made towards finding a vaccine that will protect and eventually eliminate HIV/AIDS, one of the most serious health threats of our time," said Marc Ouellette, Scientific Director, Institute of Infection and Immunity, CIHR.

In 2016, more than 2 million people were newly infected with HIV around the world. Though antiretroviral treatment has prolonged life for millions, scientists concur that discovering a vaccine against HIV is the only way to end the AIDS epidemic. By combining their expertise, CIHR and IAVI hope to advance the field of HIV vaccine discovery and to build a more efficient vaccine-development model that can potentially be replicated in other disease areas.

Gary Kobinger is world-renowned for his work on the Ebola vaccine and treatment of those affected by the disease. More recently, while Chief of Special Pathogens with the Public Health Agency of Canada's microbiology laboratory in Winnipeg, Kobinger garnered international attention for his efforts to develop a treatment and vaccine against the Zika virus.

CANADA- Medicago, a Quebec-based biopharmaceutical company, said it has produced a virus-like particle of the novel coronavirus, a first step to producing a vaccine.

The isolated particle will now undergo pre-clinical safety and efficacy.

Medicago said it could begin human trials as soon as July or August if approved by Health Canada and other agencies.

If the vaccine is successful, it could be available to the wider public by November 2021, CEO Bruce Clark said.

“These timelines are heavily reliant on what will give the regulators enough comfort to say this product is ready to go into human testing and then, secondly, for use in the broader public,” he said. “Our best guess right now is 18 months.”

Within just 20 days of obtaining the gene of the virus, Medicago researchers were able to produce a candidate vaccine, Clark said.

If given the green light, they could produce as many as 10 million doses per month out of their plant in North Carolina. The company currently has the resources to create about two million doses per month out of its plant in Quebec, according to Clark.

The biopharmaceutical company said they used a plant-based platform to grow vaccine proteins rather than chicken embryos, allowing for them to make the vaccine candidate quickly.

“We have a [seasonal flu vaccine] that is currently under review with Health Canada, and the [technology] we are using for this COVID vaccine is exactly the same, which has proven to be efficacious,” Clark explained.

The company’s ability to grow virus-like particles in plants has helped it produce vaccines in the past against influenza, including a vaccine candidate against H1N1 in 2009, Canada Research Chair Dawn Bowdish said.

“A virus-like particle looks like the outside of a virus but doesn’t have any of the genetic material on the inside,” said Bowdish, who also sits on the scientific advisory board of Medicago. “It doesn’t cause infection but looks really similar from your immune system’s perspective.”

Medical researchers around the world continue to race to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.

Medicago is also working to develop antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, in collaboration with Dr. Gary Kobinger, who helped develop the vaccine and treatment for Ebola.

Bowdish warns that most vaccine trials fail and in 17 years there was never a vaccine fully developed for the SARS outbreak.

"It’s unlikely there will be a miracle drug,” she said. “But Canada has had some incredible successes creating vaccines very quickly. We had huge success with the Ebola virus.”

Globally, roughly 20 coronavirus vaccine candidates are being developed by research institutes and drug-makers, including America’s Johnson & Johnson and France’s Sanofi SA, according to Reuters.

Two pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. are getting close to human testing.

Biotechnology company Moderna Inc. has announced plans to start a trial of a vaccine candidate on 45 people in Seattle this month. Testing on animals will proceed simultaneously with human trials, the NIH told Reuters.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc., an immunotherapy company, is working with a company in China to develop a vaccine and expects to start human clinical trials in 30 U.S. volunteers in April.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee on Thursday that human trials for a vaccine would be possible “within a few weeks.”

“I want to make sure people understand, and I’ve said that over and over again, that does not mean we have a vaccine that we can use,” he said. “We mean it’s record time to get it tested. It’s going to take a year to a year and a half to really know if it works," Fauci said.

Gary Kobinger, who worked with the Winnipeg team that developed a successful Ebola vaccine, has resigned from a federal task force of high-level vaccine experts, pleading for more transparency in the battle against COVID-19.

With conspiracy theorists interpreting the current low death rate from COVID-19 as a sign the pandemic is over, even as the number of cases continues to rise, experts and political leaders need to be more forthright, Kobinger believes.

His warning comes as public health authorities say Canada could be drifting into a second wave of the pandemic.

“The first step is transparency,” Kobinger said in a telephone interview Monday.

He would like to have journalists specializing in health sitting in on the deliberations of the task force, with a link allowing anyone in Canada to tune it as well.

“Everybody should be able to call in.”

The World Health Organization allows journalists with health expertise to sit in on its meetings, Kobinger said.

Kobinger also proposed that members of Canada’s task force publicly declare their conflicts of interest to put to rest potential suspicions they are not working in the public interest, and are not influenced by corporate or other connections.

On Monday, Conservative health critic Michelle Rempel Garner and public services and procurement critic Pierre Paul-Hus blamed the Trudeau government for lacking transparency in their deliberations over vaccines.

“Canada’s Conservatives will continue to press for these answers and demand to see a plan,” she said in a statement.

“Canadians’ health needs to drive vaccine decisions, not the bottom-line of pharmaceutical companies. It is extremely disturbing to see reports that members of Justin Trudeau’s vaccine task force stand to make money off of the outcome of procurement decisions.”

Canada’s National Research Council announced the creation of the task force, made up of 18 top-of-their-field experts from academia and vaccine producers, in August.

Kobinger noted that while task force members were required to sign a conflict of interest and confidentiality agreement, those conflicts of interest were not made public.

“I don’t want my name involved in this,” he said.

Joanne Langley, one of two task force co-chairs, is listed as a Dalhousie University professor of pediatrics, community health and epidemiology and head of infectious diseases at the IWK Health Care Centre in Halifax.

But Kobinger said Langley also receives funds from Novavax, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen unit. On Aug. 31, federal Procurement Minister Anita Anand announced Ottawa would buy up to 76 million vaccine doses from Novavax in Maryland, as many as 38 million doses from Janssen.

Earlier that month, Canada ordered 20 million vaccine doses from Pfizer and 56 million doses from Moderna. It was also in talks with AstraZeneca.

Langley was also a principal investigator for a vaccine prospect being developed by China-based CanSino Biologics.

Kobinger wonders what happened to the federal funding Ottawa committed to that project, for testing centred in Halifax. It fell apart after China’s customs refused to allow CanSino’s candidate to ship to Canada for months.

Two of the prospective vaccines Canada is considering, developed by Pfizer and Moderna, are based on RNA, ribonucleic acid.

This is a new approach, which Kobinger said is interesting, but choosing two RNA vaccines is “taking a big risk.”

Kobinger is working on his own vaccine project and is doing testing on vaccines developed by Medicago in Quebec City, as well as Inovio in Pennsylvania, which is developing a DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) vaccine.

Medicago’s plant-based vaccine uses virus-like particles, a technology employed in the successful HPV vaccine.

“That would be the first candidate I would look at,” Kobinger said.

There is another Canadian vaccine project receiving federal funding at the University of Saskatchewan’s VIDO-InterVac project.

The first priority in the task force’s mandate calls for, “Prioritizing vaccine projects seeking support for activities in Canada.”

Kobinger interprets this as meaning having vaccines produced in Montreal at the National Research Council’s Biotechnology Research Institute, better known as NRC-BRI, where Ottawa has committed $125 million.

But he noted that Medicago now is the only vaccine developer in Canada with its own manufacturing facilities, and the capacity on its own to do testing through phases one to three.

Kobinger said he has been inundated with emails from others in the vaccine sector since his resignation from the task force became public. Some are nasty, but “an amazing number” are congratulating him.

“Some of my colleagues are really mad at me,” he said.

Kobinger has also worked with the Singapore government in fighting COVID-19. Singapore is one of the East Asian countries that have controlled COVID-19 and have low death tolls. Kobinger said the reason Singapore has done so well is that they were prepared for a pandemic “five years ago,” with the needed personal protective equipment, epidemiologists and other health experts ready to act.

Canada was not as well prepared, but Kobinger still has praise for Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam, who he says is doing “an incredible job.”

Kobinger believes Canada, in addition to beating the current virus, has to prepare for the next pandemic.

“I’ve never seen Canada spending so much on science,” he said.

But the mixed messages on masks, with public health authorities early-on advising against their use, now insisting that masks be worn, has confused people.

Prescribing transparency, Kobinger said public health should have said then, “We don’t have enough masks.”

Another critique is that in March, when there was awareness the virus was coming, Canadians travelled abroad during spring break, bringing the virus home with them.

Kobinger questions whether political leaders should be involved in the process, suggesting that a health authority, free of political considerations, might do a better job communicating the dangers and the prescriptions to defeat COVID-19 and future pandemics.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said Gary Kobinger led the Winnipeg team that developed a successful Ebola vaccine, instead of worked with the team.