Strategic Partner(s)

Dr. Terry Hébert

This resilience conversation with Dr. Terry Hebert was recorded in spring 2020, when Montreal was the national epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and every non-essential bench in the country was shut. The discussion moves across three scientific registers: the practical mechanics of holding a GPCR signaling lab together remotely; the continuity of receptor pharmacology work already in the pipeline before the shutdown, including a newly accepted BRET-based platform for beta-1 adrenergic receptor signaling built with the Bouvier lab; and a pharmacologist's reasoning about the then-unresolved question of whether human challenge trials were an ethical shortcut to a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Dr. Hebert's argument — that challenge trials depend on a reliable therapeutic the field did not yet have — sits at the intersection of drug discovery logic and public health ethics, and illustrates how GPCR scientists reason about pharmacology problems well outside their primary receptor. For Dr. Hebert, the conversation is also about what he had to let go of: the assumption that a lab, once built, runs on its own inertia.

About the Guest

Dr. Terry Hebert is a professor at McGill University in Montreal, where his lab studies G protein-coupled receptor signaling. His research spans BRET-based assay platforms for characterizing signaling downstream of specific GPCRs, the transcriptional regulation of signaling components as an underappreciated axis of pharmacological modulation, and long-running collaborations on beta-adrenergic receptor biology with the Bouvier lab and others. His work is grounded in careful assay development and a conviction that the signaling space around a receptor is richer than single-pathway readouts suggest.

Scientific Themes of the Conversation

Lab continuity during institutional shutdown — What it takes to maintain scientific output when the physical lab is closed and every operation has to happen remotely.
BRET platforms for GPCR signaling — The role of resonance-energy-transfer-based assays in capturing signaling downstream of specific receptors, with the beta-1 adrenergic receptor as a worked example.
Challenge trials and the therapeutic floor — Why the ethics of accelerating vaccine trials depend on having an adequate treatment for the disease under study.
Vaccine development at scale — How to read a landscape of 90+ parallel vaccine candidates without confusing breadth of effort for probability of success.
Mentorship under isolation — The practical and emotional work of keeping graduate students — especially international students far from their families — connected to a lab that has gone quiet.
Pandemic preparedness as a scientific failure — The gap between what infectious disease researchers had been warning about and what institutions were actually ready to do.

Key Insights from the Conversation

Challenge trials don't work without a reliable drug. Dr. Hebert's core pharmacology argument is that proposing a challenge trial — where volunteers receive placebo or active virus — is ethically unworkable without a therapeutic that can rescue the ones who get sick. His position is that the drug problem has to be solved, or at least bounded, before the vaccine trial design can responsibly change.

90 vaccine candidates is a number about effort, not probability. The conversation pushes against the comfort of large numbers. A field running 90 parallel vaccine trials is a field hedging under uncertainty, not a field with 90 independent chances of success. Dr. Hebert is hopeful but careful about the distinction.

BRET platforms carry work forward when the lab can't. The beta-1 adrenergic receptor paper — a BRET-based platform for capturing downstream signaling, built with the Bouvier lab — illustrates how assay-development projects remain productive when benchwork stops. The experimental data was in hand before the shutdown; the intellectual work of writing, reviewing, and revising kept going regardless.

A lab is a social infrastructure, not just a physical one. Weekly Monday lab meetings, Friday journal clubs, daily Slack and Zoom contact, a faculty-vs-student trivia night — the lab's continuity came from translating routines, not suspending them. The most fragile link in the system was the isolation of international students away from their families.

Reopening is a puzzle about labs, not benches. The hardest logistical problem isn't social distancing within a single lab — it's social distancing between labs sharing a floor, shared equipment, and a public transit system that funnels everyone through the same bottleneck.

The warnings were there. Dr. Hebert's reflection on preparedness is quiet but pointed: the scientific community had been warning about this for years. The failure wasn't epistemic — it was institutional. And that failure is what will cost the most, borne hardest by the people least cushioned against it.

The next one is coming. The most forward-looking moment in the conversation is also the most sober. This disease, for all its damage, is survivable for most people. The next one might not be. The open question is whether the system will have learned anything by then.

Episode Timeline

Timestamps were generated using AI for readability.

00:00 Welcome and Dr. GPCR Summit 2020 announcement
01:49 Check-in with Dr. Hebert — shutdown, reopening plans, and Montreal as epicenter
03:06 Paper acceptances, thesis writing, and 30 hours of Zoom teaching in one month
04:29 The beta-1 adrenergic BRET paper and a review on transcriptional regulation as a drug target
05:22 Lab meetings, journal clubs, and the Slack/Zoom scaffolding
06:12 Student wellbeing and the puzzle of reopening a shared floor
07:16 Why challenge trials aren't ready — and the remdesivir question underneath them
08:52 When pandemic infrastructure breaks down at national scale
10:16 Lessons for the next one, and the shape of the new normal

Selected Quotes

"So we made a decision a month and a half ago to kind of stop going to the lab. Montreal being the epicenter of the disease in this country — we don't regret that decision now."

"I don't think [challenge trials] are a good idea because we don't really have good drugs to deal with the disease when people get sick. If we have a way to control the disease and keep people from getting really sick, I think we can go to challenge trials more rapidly."

"Honestly it could be worse, right? This disease, most people survive. When the next one comes, let's hope we learn something from this one."

"Those are the people we have to protect, not big corporations who, you know, are probably in a sense part of the cause. Globalization is not something that is without its consequences here."

About this episode Dr. Terry Hébert is a Professor within the Department of Pharmacology & Therapeutics at McGill University. Much of his work is based on GPCR signaling in the context to cardiovascular diseases. In this special episode of the Dr.GPCR podcast, we re-connected with Dr. Terry Hebert to chat about how he and his team has been adapting to the new reality of working remotely. Terry tells us about the importance of adapting, communicating, and being mindful of those around us.

Dr. Terry Hébert on the web