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Dr. Dana Devine, former chief scientist at Canadian Blood Providers.Canadian Blood Providers
Twenty years in the past, Dana Devine knew there was a greater strategy to extract platelets from donated blood.
She advocated for Canada to undertake an method utilized in Europe referred to as the “buffy coat method,” which employs a centrifuge to separate a buff-coloured layer of white blood cells and platelets from different blood elements. The method affords a number of benefits over the strategy used beforehand, making it simpler to detect blood-borne pathogens, yielding larger high quality platelets and mitigating transfusion-related acute lung harm, a uncommon however critical complication.
On the time, Dr. Devine was director of analysis and growth at Canadian Blood Providers (CBS), which operates the nationwide blood and plasma provide system, and she or he confirmed how this method could possibly be put in place. In 2004, the group made the choice to transition to the buffy coat methodology.
“This change was really driven by Dana’s scientific expertise and her passion,” says Graham Sher, CEO of CBS. “She provided the science and the technical know-how and the leadership.”
Dr. Sher says this new method probably saves lives. “The platelets work better. Patients bleed less and they need fewer doses. They have better clinical outcomes with fewer side effects.”
Dr. Devine was a key determine in serving to Canada modernize its method to the gathering, storage and use of blood merchandise within the wake of Canada’s tainted blood disaster of the Eighties, when 30,000 transfusion recipients have been contaminated with hepatitis C and one other 2,000 contracted HIV. After a nationwide inquiry, Justice Horace Krever issued a damning report in 1997 on Canada’s failures to safeguard the blood provide, the Canadian Purple Cross Society subsequently ceased its involvement within the blood system and CBS was created.
A grasp at managing a number of roles without delay, Dr. Devine, who had served on committees on the Purple Cross, started working at CBS in 1999, whereas additionally a professor on the College of British Columbia. At the moment there was no place in Canada targeted on blood transfusion analysis, so in 2002 – whereas nonetheless at CBS, the place she later turned chief scientist – she helped set up the Centre for Blood Analysis at UBC, later serving as its director.
“This was her visionary way of thinking. It was an important step forward for advancing transfusion medicine research in Canada,” Dr. Sher says.
She held main management roles in transfusion drugs internationally as properly; most notably, she served as president of the Affiliation for the Development of Blood & Biotherapies (AABB).
“That’s the most senior position in transfusion medicine,” says long-time good friend and colleague Cedric Carter, emeritus member of the Centre for Blood Analysis and affiliate professor at UBC. “In transfusion medicine, she probably would have been regarded as one of the top world experts.”
Dr. Devine died on Nov. 12 on the age of 68 of issues associated to frontotemporal dementia.
Her profession spanned greater than 35 years at UBC, largely within the Division of Pathology and Laboratory Drugs, the place she was director of graduate research for a few years. She printed greater than 200 articles in scientific journals.
She was editor of the journal Vox Sanguinis, the Worldwide Journal of Transfusion Drugs, and president of the Biomedical Excellence for Safer Transfusion (BEST) Collaborative. She served on quite a few boards and committees; Dr. Carter says her problem-solving expertise have been in excessive demand.
Her analysis targeted on, amongst different issues, blood storage and liposomes in blood, which are sometimes used as a car for drug supply.
When Dr. Carter labored together with her on liposomes, he says, they observed sure behaviours and handed alongside this discovery on to UBC researcher Pieter Cullis. Dr. Cullis used the data to assist a crew work with Pfizer and BioNTech to develop COVID-19 vaccines, and two of his colleagues received the Nobel Prize in 2023 for this work.
“Two COVID vaccines that are available around the world use Pieter’s liposomes. So Dana indirectly made a terrific contribution,” Dr. Carter says.
Dr. Devine supervised quite a few graduate college students and sometimes championed the work of girls, particularly these experiencing discrimination. “When she discovered women were unhappy with their supervisors, she’d take them on in her lab,” Dr. Carter says.
“She was a great believer in diversity, equity and inclusion,” Dr. Sher says. “She made sure people of colour and people from the LGBT communities were given a voice and given credibility and given space.”
For her contributions to science and affected person care she earned quite a few accolades, together with a Girls of Distinction Award from the YWCA Metro Vancouver in 2001, the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002, the Canadian Society for Transfusion Drugs ORTHO award in 2015, the Worldwide Society of Blood Transfusion Presidential Award in 2020 and the Hemphill-Jordan Management Award from the AABB in 2021.
Dr. Carter and different colleagues endeavoured to appoint her for the Order of Canada, however she was too sick to provide her enter for the award, they felt, in order that they pulled the appliance. In 2023, the Canadian Society for Transfusion Drugs and CBS launched an award in her title to help researchers with coaching and mentorship.
Dana Virginia Devine was born in New Bedford, Mass., on Oct. 5, 1956, to dentist and oral surgeon George Devine and completed pianist and music professor June Craig Fritzinger. (The couple divorced in 1971.) Her brother, Geoff, 21 months her junior, recollects her as a bossy large sister, and really precocious usually.
“She was extremely bright, extremely switched on. You can see what she did in her adult life. Her childhood was like that as well.”
They lived in a seaside city, so younger Dana discovered to sail skilfully and honed her snowboarding method in Vermont, the place the household had a spot. She skied with the crew at Boston College in her freshman yr.
In the meantime, in the summertime after first yr, her father urged her to attend a neighborhood debutante ball. When the biology undergrad was interviewed for the native paper, she stated such occasions weren’t what they was, that the attendees have been on skilled tracks, not looking for husbands, and “it’s just a great party.”
“That ruffled the feathers of the women who organized it,” Geoff recollects. “My sister was dubbed the radical debutante.”
She was one of many first girls to attend prestigious Amherst School, the place her father had studied, however determined to return to Boston U after a yr, preferring its method to scientific analysis. Graduate college at Boston U and its Woods Gap oceanside facility noticed her concentrate on how lobsters use scent and style to orient themselves.
Throughout this time, she met fellow pupil Thomas Frommel, whom she married, and she or he moved with him to Texas A&M, the place she briefly did graduate work in biology. When he transferred to the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she took a job as a lab technician at close by Duke College below well-respected hematologist Wendell Rosse.
“After a month, he said, ‘You shouldn’t be a lab tech. Join our PhD program,’” Dr. Carter says. She targeted on immunology and printed quite a few papers throughout her research.
A Canadian working in blood transfusion visited Duke and observed her effectivity and the modern work she was doing with Dr. Rosse. As she completed her program in 1986, Dr. Carter and others recruited her and crafted a job description solely she might fill, skirting the foundations round hiring a Canadian first.
Dr. Devine started at UBC in 1987, with Dr. Frommel becoming a member of her briefly, then the 2 divorced and he moved again to the U.S. A couple of years later, Dr. Carter says, “I took her to a party and she didn’t come home.” She had met Donald Brooks, a chemistry professor at UBC, and the 2 married in 1993.
It was with Dr. Brooks and others that she co-founded the Centre for Blood Analysis. The couple additionally travelled extensively, liked wine and positive meals, and had an adventuresome spirit. (Dr. Brooks is unwell and was not accessible for an interview.)
Dr. Sher says when the 2 have been travelling collectively for work in Seoul, Dr. Devine took them to an off-the-beaten path restaurant the place nobody spoke English and the menu was solely in Korean. They ate a number of programs of they knew not what, with Dr. Devine revelling within the expertise. Dr. Sher says she at all times entertained everybody at work retreats, and was at all times relied upon to order the wine. She was additionally well-versed on automobile repairs, and will inform what was mistaken with a car and direct a mechanic with exact directions.
Her buddies, colleagues and household marvel at Dr. Devine’s expertise at work, and loyalty, empathy and sense of enjoyable in her private life. “She was an incredible storyteller, an incredible friend,” Dr. Sher says. “She could put aside her science and put aside her stature, and she could just be the most wonderful, caring, compassionate, kind and interesting human being.”
Dr. Devine leaves her husband and her brother.
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Editor’s be aware: A earlier model of this text incorrectly acknowledged Dr. Dana Devine is the one Canadian ever to be president of the Affiliation for the Development of Blood & Biotherapies (AABB). That assertion has been eliminated.
