Heinz Feldmann has known and worked with Xiangguo Qiu for years, and to this day says he has nothing but respect for his fellow microbiologist.
Indeed, Qiu won global accolades for her part in developing an experimental new drug for treating Ebola virus, most of the inquiry done at her high-security lab in Winnipeg.
So Feldmann says he was taken aback Monday to see a media report that the scientist and her entire research team, all from China, had been escorted out of the federal government’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) last week and reported to the RCMP.
“I still hope that this is a big misunderstanding,” said the former head of the lab’s special pathogens program, where Qiu worked. “She is a great researcher, she has been a great collaborator, she has been a great interacter in the field. I can’t say anything bad about her.”
Feldmann, now chief of the U.S. National Institutes of Health laboratory of virology in Montana, stressed that he had no personal knowledge of the reported events.
CBC-TV said that Qiu, as well as husband and NML scientist Keding Cheng and her students had been forcibly dispatched from the facility on July 5, a fact the National Post could not independently confirm.
Eric Morrissette, a spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada, would not comment on whether she had been dismissed, citing privacy concerns.
But he said the agency is looking into an “administrative matter,” and advised the RCMP on May 24 of “possible policy breaches” at the lab.
The organization is “taking steps to resolve it expeditiously,” said Morrissette in a statement. “There is no employee from the NML under arrest or confined to their home.”
He also said the public is not at risk and that the work of the lab continues.
An RCMP spokesman confirmed to Reuters news agency it had received a referral from the agency, but refused to comment on its investigation. A University of Manitoba spokesman told Reuters that Qiu’s non-paying adjunct professorship had been suspended “pending an RCMP investigation.”
With the government releasing so few details, it is unclear what might be behind the unusual episode.
But in the United States, at least, security agencies have recently put a magnifying glass on researchers and students with ties to China, amid fears that Beijing is overseeing widespread theft of intellectual property and trade secrets.
A number scientists south of the border — and one now-retired professor at McGill University — have been charged under a controversial new “China Initiative” of the U.S. Justice Department, which critics call a racially biased witch hunt.
The Ebola drug partly discovered by Qiu is being developed by a California company, and three potentially competing medicines are also in the works.
But Feldmann said he doubts that treatments for an illness that afflicts relatively few people, with little pharmaceutical buying power, would be the subject of economic espionage.
“To make money off these rare diseases, there would be better things to do if you really wanted to make money,” he said.
Regardless, there are few more high-profile figures still at the microbiology lab, whose level-four unit is one of a small number worldwide that work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens, including Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers.
Qiu worked with Gary Kobinger, who succeeded Feldmann as head of special pathogens but has since left the lab himself, on so-called monoclonal antibody treatments for Ebola, their findings coming to the fore internationally when the lethal virus swept through west Africa in 2014 and 2015.
Their discoveries make up two of three elements in the drug ZMapp, which has had promising results in limited trials and case-by-case in compassionate use, but has yet to receive regulatory approval.
According to a 2014 conference biography, Qiu obtained her medical degree in 1985 from Hebei Medical University and her Master’s degree in immunology in 1990 at Tianjin Medical University, both in China.
She moved to Houston, Texas’s MD Anderson Cancer Center in 1996 as a visiting scientist, then moved to Cancer Care Manitoba the next year as a research associate. In 2003, says the biography, she joined the NML’s special pathogens program.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
