Celebrating the Career of Dr. Patricia Brubaker
June 14, 2023
By Krista Lamb
At the end of June, Dr. Patricia Brubaker will retire after 38 years as a professor and scientist at the University of Toronto. Brubaker is one of the world’s leading experts on GLP-1 and GLP-2, with a wealth of highly-regarded research published in this area throughout her career. She played a critical role in the discovery of a treatment for short bowel disease using GLP-2, an achievement that has had a significant positive impact on the health of people living with the condition.
In 2020, she received Diabetes Canada’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to the Canadian diabetes research community. She was the first woman to have received this award.
As a member of the BBDC, she has played a tremendous role in supporting diabetes research at U of T. Brubaker was a member of the BBDC’s Research Committee for 18 years, and the chair for 13 of those. She was also a member of the BBDC’s Executive Committee from 1998 until 2011.
Sitting in Brubaker’s office at U of T, it’s easy to see what has motivated her – an entire wall of the room is adorned with framed photos of her lab teams over the years. These trainees and colleagues include a who’s who of people who have gone on to have their own successes in research. Her final student finished their studies last year, paving the way for Brubaker to shutter the lab and prepare for a full retirement. However, the faces on the wall will always remain in her heart.
She motions to the images, explaining, “That is my life at the University of Toronto. Pretty much every single person I’ve ever worked with is on that wall, and that has been a motivation and a joy to my career. Working with everyone from undergrads, to PhDs, to postdocs, just being surrounded by wonderful inquiring minds, people who don’t hesitate to say ‘this is what I think is going on’ and pushing me and challenging me.”
Beyond her students, the research she has done in GLP-1 and GLP-2 is what Brubaker is most proud of as a scientist. “When I started working on the glucagon-related peptides, the gene hadn’t even been cloned. No one knew that GLP-1 or GLP-2 existed. To go from that to where we are now, it’s amazing,” she says, noting how GLP-1 agonists are now widely used for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and weight loss. “To go from glucagon, which is all that anyone knew about, to these drugs that are just revolutionizing the treatment of patients, that had been a huge motivation. My interest hasn’t been in the clinical application, as much as looking at the basic biology, and it’s just been a fascinating journey.”
Working alongside Dr. Daniel Drucker, her research on GLP-2 was pivotal to finding a therapy for short bowel syndrome. While she fully credits Drucker for pushing forward to obtain the initial funding that led to the discovery, as well as with the clinical side, she was fascinated by the physiology of it all. “That translation of basic science to the clinic has been an amazing thing to watch, beginning on the day I opened that mouse and said, ‘Oh wow, look at the size of that mouse’s guts’, and I went to Dan, because we were doing a collaborative study, and we realized there was something going on here,” she remembers. “It was just that one serendipitous observation.” That moment started the process that changed the lives of those living with the condition.
After working extensively on GLP-1 and GLP-2, Brubaker has focused on circadian rhythms and diabetes over the last few years of her career. One of the things she loves about research is how there is always something new and different to think about or study. Even as therapies based on the research she did came into the clinic, there were still new areas that needed to be explored.
Having planned and pursued a career in science since she was in high school, Brubaker is thrilled with the progress she has made and the professional successes that have come with that. Her mentor, Dr. Mladen Vranic, helped set the tone for the research path she followed and it has been meaningful for her to continue his legacy of work in the field of diabetes in the department of physiology.
Though she herself was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes while in university, the majority of Brubaker’s research has focused on type 2 diabetes. She has been an inspiration to a generation of researchers living with diabetes. In 2021, she and Professor Michael Riddell from York University, another researcher living with type 1, compiled a word cloud highlighting all of the researchers with type 1 who are publishing in the diabetes field—they had well over 100 names at last count.
Always an adventurer, Brubaker also made a unique contribution to the literature around type 1 diabetes and physical activity when she wrote about her experience climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in the late 1990s. “I wrote an article for Diabetes Care about trekking with type 1 diabetes, and how altitude makes a difference,” she says. “I went to Chicago and one of the people hosting me said, ‘You know, I give your article to all of my patients.’ I was really proud of that. That was one effort that, although it wasn’t directly related to my research, it involved taking a scientific approach and thinking about type 1 and applying it to something people could find accessible.” More than 15 years later, she still gets emails from people who are going to tackle Kilimanjaro or a similar trek asking for her advice about doing it while using insulin.
Having made an indelible mark in the field of diabetes research, Brubaker is excited about the prospect of doing more adventure travel and developing new hobbies in retirement. She is happy about the decision to make a clean break and retire completely, but she knows it will be a big change. “What I’m going to miss most is the wonderful people that I work with. Not just the trainees, but a number of my colleagues who have become friends,” she says. “And every year we would have new people coming in and bringing a new dynamic to the lab, I will miss that.” She will, no doubt, also be missed.