How studying wildlife is changing the way we think about infectious disease

Samira Mubareka is an infectious disease physician, medical microbiologist and scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and an associate professor of laboratory medicine and pathobiology at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

For the past six years, she’s collaborated with colleagues to look for coronaviruses in wildlife species like bats, mice and other small mammals in Algonquin Park and the Algonquin Wildlife Research Station, as well as urban parks around the Greater Toronto Area. Perhaps best known for co-leading the research team that isolated the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of Mubareka’s work today focuses on the intersection of infectious diseases, public health and wildlife driven, in large part, by what the pandemic revealed.

“Over the course of the pandemic, we realized that there were coronaviruses everywhere, but we also realized that we didn’t know much about the viruses here in Canada, especially the coronaviruses that might be in the wildlife around us,” says Mubareka, who also holds an Applied Public Health Chair co-funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Only a few months after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in 2020, Mubareka and a group of multidisciplinary collaborators established the Wildlife Emerging Pathogens Initiative (Wild EPI) to study the interconnections between humans, animals and their shared environment.

The goal of the collaborative has been to develop approaches to understand and prevent zoonotic pathogen spillover between species. Simply put, the Wild EPI research team emerged out of one pandemic to understand how viruses jump between species, in order to stop the next.

Please visit Sunnybrook’s website for the full story and to see the photos following the research team from Algonquin Park to the lab.