Marlene Orton
As a high school student, Arsalan Haqqani had no interest in biology. Today, he is growing into a leading Canadian scientist in the field of biochemistry whose specialty includes protein changes in the brain during stroke.
Haqqani has been awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal for his doctoral thesis last year on neutrophils – the infection fighters in immune cells – and their behaviour in advancing the growth of cancerous tumours where infection is present. Now conducting postdoctorate work at the National Research Council with a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, he is looking into similar changes in the brain. Much of Haqqani's education at the University of Ottawa, where he first enrolled to do a BSc in biochemistry in 1994, has been financed by scholarships. These include a travel award to the American Association for Cancer Research in 2001, where for the third time in as many years he presented papers or abstracts to the international scientific community.
In 2000, Haqqani was awarded a three-year doctoral research award by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. “I didn't plan to go into biology,” he says quietly. “In high school it was my worst subject. I was very good in math but I found biology very challenging. Now in my post-doc, I am working in chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology – everything in science.”
His three-year fellowship at the NRC, which got under way last fall, is largely carried in the venerable laboratories at the Sussex Drive campus, one of the oldest scientific labs in the country. His time is divided between the Sussex lab and the main NRC campus where he carries out research at the Institute of Biological Sciences examining protein changes in the brain during a stroke.
“Cancer and stroke exhibit similar patterns because of the immune cells which attack,” he says. In his award-winning doctoral thesis, Haqqani tested on mice the hypothesis that neutrophils, which constitute the first line of defence against infections or alien substances that penetrate the body's physical barriers, actually cause more DNA damage when a tumour is present.
“That is a classic sign of cancer progression,” he says. “My research was consistent with this hypothesis and the immune cells actually cause certain tumours to progress more rapidly.” His research also showed how oxidants are released that spur on the advance of cancerous growth and the specific role of anti-oxidants - the so-called cancer fighting agents found in many foods such as blueberries.
“Anti-oxidants actually mop up the immune cells, which release the oxidants and that's how we see anti-oxidants working.”
