New Whitehead Fellow Kate Rubins
studies infectious disease
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (March 8, 2007) — When she was
in high school in the early 1990s, Kate
Rubins’ parents enrolled her in a student-led
HIV education outreach program. Part of her parents’
goal, Rubins suspects, was to scare their daughter away
from any and all dangerous behavior.
“But mostly, I became fascinated with the science,”
says Rubins. “This was in the early days of antivirals,
and the promise of science was just starting to emerge.”
Nearly fifteen years later, Rubins is relentlessly pursuing
the area of inquiry that her high school program inspired.
Last month, after completing her doctorate at Stanford
University, Rubins joined the Whitehead Fellows program.
“I'm impressed with how skillfully Kate
is exploring the molecular workings of a bevy
of viruses,” says Whitehead Director David
Page. “It's clear to me that she is on her
way to becoming a leader in this field.” |
A Whitehead Fellow is a recent PhD graduate who has
demonstrated such exceptional promise and is given the
space, resources and support to start and run his or
her own labs, minus the traditional faculty responsibilities.
After about five years, Fellows are primed for top faculty
posts. (For a list of former Fellows and their current
positions, visit http://wi.mit.edu/research/fellows/former.html.)
“I'm impressed with how skillfully Kate is exploring
the molecular workings of a bevy of viruses,”
says Whitehead Director David Page, himself a former
Fellow. “It's clear to me that she is on her way
to becoming a leader in this field.”
Probing pox
Rubins began her undergraduate research focusing on
HIV and coauthored her first paper while still a junior
in college. By the time she entered graduate school
at Stanford, she had changed her focus to poxviruses,
a class that includes not only smallpox but cowpox,
monkeypox and vaccinia—the virus from which the
smallpox vaccine is developed.
During this period, Rubins was part of the research
team that developed the first animal model of human
smallpox.
“Smallpox has been around for thousands of years,
but the virus only infects humans,” says Rubins.
“That’s good for us because it allowed the
World Health Organization to eradicate it. We’ve
had it in the freezer since the 1950s, but no one had
successfully created an animal model.”
Rubins and her colleagues succeeded in creating such
a model in the primate Cynomolgus macaques,
publishing their results in 2004 in the journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences.
Rubins’s primary contribution to the program was
developing a microarray platform in which she could
study how the mammalian immune system responds to this
pathogen. She found that in the presence of smallpox,
immune cells release an alarmingly high number of cytokines—proteins
that act as intracellular regulators during an immune
response.
“We call it a cytokine storm,” says Rubins.
“It almost looked like the blood condition sepsis,
where a major release of cytokines can cause organ failure”
However, one particular cytokine, called TNF alpha,
was missing from the blood samples. This was surprising,
because TNF alpha is one of the most common immune system
proteins. “We have reason to believe that smallpox
codes for a TNF alpha decoy receptor that inhibits TNF
alpha signaling and that dupes the immune system,”
she says.
The eradication of smallpox by no means detracts from
the value of this work. Potential bioterrorism threats
aside, immunologists need to know how these pathogens
work. And learning their tactics teaches us a great
deal about human immunity as well.
“If you knew nothing about the immune system,
and you just looked at how smallpox interacts with it,
you’d immediately learn about interferons, cytokines
and the protein complex NF-kappaB, to name a few,”
Rubins points out. “You’d have all the innate
immune responses laid out for you. What makes smallpox
so fascinating—and so scary—is that it acts
in ways that no other viruses does.”
Working at Whitehead (and away)
Rubins was attracted to Whitehead mainly by the balance
of basic science and clinically oriented biomedical
research. “The caliber of the faculty here goes
without saying,” she emphasizes. “And the
Fellows program is unique.”
At Whitehead, Rubins will study tissue culture models
of vaccinia. She will also continue a project she has
begun with the U.S. Army to develop therapies for Ebola
virus, as well as conducting field studies in the Democratic
Republic of Congo to research monkeypox.
All live viruses will remain at the Centers for Disease
Control in Atlanta, Georgia and the US Army Medical
Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Frederick,
Maryland. No infectious samples will be brought back
to the Institute.
“No smallpox samples are ever allowed to leave
the Atlanta facility,” she says. “They remain
in securely-guarded, Biosafety Level 4 conditions.”
Rubins joins current Fellows Thijn Brummelkamp, Fernando
Camargo, Hui Ge, Andreas Hochwagen and Paul Wiggins.
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