The Canadian Society of Microbiologists has awarded its prestigious Armand-Frappier Outstanding Student Award to McMaster University postdoctoral fellow Rabia Fatima.

The award is given to an exceptional graduate student in Canada, and Fatima was selected this year from a national pool of candidates for her critical PhD studies into bacteriophages — viruses that kill bacteria.

“My research is unique because it looks at phage therapy from a very different perspective,” Fatima says.

“The subset of phages that I study are abundant and relatively easy to isolate, but they are often avoided therapeutically because they can go dormant inside the bacteria that they infect.

“It’s not well known what happens during this dormancy — can it make bacteria more virulent? Will it allow bacteria to persist longer? — so we’re exploring ways to prevent it from happening.”

Fatima has been pairing these phages with different antibiotics, changing how they behave inside bacteria. Some drugs obstruct phage dormancy altogether, while others shorten it considerably.

Administering this subset of phages with certain antibiotics could have immense therapeutic potential and may lead to new options for treating drug-resistant infections, Fatima says.

What’s most unique about this work, though, is not the results; it’s the model in which she’s testing them — not rodents or rabbits, but the nematode C. elegans, which she became interested in during her undergrad.

Fatima’s research is being conducted in the laboratory of Alexander Hynes, an associate professor of Medicine at McMaster and a member of the university’s Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research.

This research only ever began thanks to a mutual willingness to try new things, Hynes says. Fatima had very little knowledge of phages prior to joining his lab, and Hynes had never worked with C. elegans.

An exceptional researcher

Fatima’s work will be celebrated at the society’s annual conference this June in Montreal. She will also present her award-winning research in a special lecture.

Armand-Frappier winners are exceptional, says Hynes, who has watched the presentation nearly every year since he was an undergraduate, even skipping his own convocation to attend one year.

Past winners have gone on to become some of the world’s top scientists, including McMaster professor Dawn Bowdish, who received the award in 2006 as a graduate student at the University of British Columbia (it was then called the Cangene Gold Award).

Fatima fits right in, Hynes says.

“I’ve had good students, and I’ve had great students, but every now and then you get a student who can really push your research forward and take it in new directions,” he says. “That’s Rabia.”

“She came to the lab and built an entirely new research axis — she has absolutely changed the trajectory of my research program for the better.”