Okay. Could you just start by saying your name and your position here?
My name is Daniel Hubner, and I'm a principal investigator at the University of Oxford.
And we're here today with a colleague who is. I'm Stephanie Hatch.
I'm a postdoctoral research scientist. Okay.
Stephanie, let's start with you.
So just going back without telling me your entire life story, going back to how you first got interested in biomedical science.
Can you just run me through your career up to the position that you have today?
I've always been interested in science, and I wanted to do something that would help people.
But the job where I wouldn't have to actually work with people.
And I did my Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill in the U.S. And then I went to London for a postdoctoral position.
And then that was in what was what was the subject of my Ph.D. was DNA repair.
So it was DNA repair in cancer. And then when I went to a move to London, I worked on cell motility.
So most of my career has been cancer research, but it's cell biology broadly.
Would you say yes? Yes. And then I joined this lab about six years ago and.
It's. It's a perfect job for me.
I really enjoy working with robots and scaling up other people's experiments.
It's great. Done. Okay. Yeah, I.
I knew I wanted to be a scientist when I was very young, so I started my professional career in medicine.
And then my first pharmaceutical job was with Boehringer Ingelheim, and I spent a little over a year with Boehringer.
And then I went into biotechnology and in biotechnology I was doing assays for HLA typing.
So for certain types of. Transplants of solid organs, and I started using robots to automate the tests and loved it,
and then came to the University of Oxford to start a very small screening facility in what was
then radiation oncology and biology department within the Department of Oncology here at Oxford.
And then a couple of years after that started the try to write Discovery Institute,
where the robots got bigger and we got more equipment and we started running target based screens for the entire university,
and then it just grew to the facility as it is now.
Well, we'll talk a bit more about that in a moment. But I just wanted to ask, was it a big deal to move out of industry and back into academia?
Actually, that's quite interesting because when I first started and in research, it was a big deal.
There were academic research scientists and there were industrial research scientists and there was very little crossover between the two.
Now there is you'd be hard pressed to find anybody who has really gone back and forth at least once.
You mean there are people that haven't and spend their time in academia?
But the relationship between academics and industrial research scientists is very strong now,
both and the people who cross between the two, but also in the research and the funding.
We, my group has a tremendous amount of funding comes from industry.
So yeah, so there's, there's quite a bit of crossover. So I'm just going to stick with that for the moment.
But you've mentioned a couple of times this place where you work is called the Target Discovery Institute.
When was that set up and what is it there to do?
So so that the Target Discovery Institute was set up about 12 years ago and it was
the culmination of a couple of ideas that coalesced around drug target discovery.
We were running a small screening facility in the Department of Oncology, and Peter Ratcliffe, who is my boss,
had an idea which has been tried to bring together equipment and know how to run
screens for the very first step of drug target discovery or drug development,
which is drug target discovery. And we.
We took some equipment from oncology, we took some money from the Nuffield Department of Medicine under Peter's guidance,
and we've built a small facility in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics from the
building just across from the TV and started running screens for cardiovascular medicine,
cancer, circadian rhythm.
And it then became a actual institute, which is quite important in the academic sphere because oftentimes there's these aethereal institutes.
This was an actual physical presence and we started to publish and started publishing very nice papers.
So I can take you through what Target Discovery means in very, very simple.
So Target Discovery is in the TDR.
Target Discovery means the identification of a novel starting point for drug development.
It is taking an assay which is predictive of the most predictive assay of a particular pathology and probing
it to find what protein targets are responsible for either the start of that pathology or then pathologies,
maintenance or its continuation. And academic research scientists will spend their entire careers in one particular area of research.
For instance, again, my boss, Peter Ratcliffe, has spent his entire career and won the Nobel Prize for his insights into oxygen consumption.
So oxygen consumption is very important in cancers.
This is just at the level of individual cells. Yep. Yeah, exactly.
It's very important in cancers. So there's nobody in the world who understands and knows the intricacies of oxygen consumption in human cells.
Well, he is perfectly placed to help develop assays which would probe oxygen consumption and its implications in cancer.
And that mean if you take that scientist at one scientist and you multiply them across a university is powerful.
Research is University of Oxford. It was a area that was missing from R from the University of Oxford's research portfolio.
So it was basically filling a need that was definitely there.
And it was really well-timed because I could academic perfectly positioned to do that.
Pharmaceutical companies absolutely rubbish at target ID,
but extremely good at taking a validated target and generating a commercially viable product out of that.
So just trying to find something, it's a kind of lock and key thing. It's hard to find something that will attach to complement each other.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So so the target discovery.
Then there was a big grant that was written to have Key and a major philanthropic donor in cash and then the building was built so effectively.
Yeah, Target Discovery Institute. I was employee number one I suppose, or Peter probably employee number right now, employee number two.
But it just started from from cell based high throughput screening platform and now encompasses chemical biology,
mass spec proteomics, medicinal chemistry.
So a lot of scientists who are complementary each other but all focus on drug target discovery, the very first stages of drug development pipeline.
Thank you. So, Stephanie, you got here about halfway through the the life of the institute so far as did you say, six years ago, you started here?
Yeah, well, with Daniel, I worked and not actually worked in radiation oncology and biology.
Okay. Before that. So that's where we Daniel and I met the first time when I first moved to Oxford,
and then I worked for the best GC, the Structural Genomics Consortium on this floor here.
So I knew, I knew the lab and I used some of the equipment.
And then six years ago I moved over to this lab. And what was the specific area of research that you were looking?
Well, when I was in radiation oncology and biology, it was, you know, cancer.
And we were working on melanoma, just skin cancer.
And then for the SGC, I, I did more of a, of a test, so I it's kind of medium throughput.
So now we do high throughput screens, but this was a little bit more by hand.
And I looked at chemical probes.
So compounds that targeted epigenetic.
Proteins. So it was more tests. So I went from, from studying a specific kind of biology to running a test that was more about a protein.
And specifically here, this is all kinds of assays for all kinds of biology with a lot of automation.
Yes. And is that something you you like?
I think I heard you say robots were cool. So what kind of difference is it made to have that level of automation?
I mean, we can do thousands of of compounds in a day to handle multiple cell lines.
To think the most plates that I've handled in a day, but it's me can do a lot of samples.
Yeah. Yes. And the automation is very cool. And how much do you need to understand yourself about the the actual machines?
I mean, clearly, your expertise is in the biology, but it's a tool.
You just learn.
You know, you learn some software and you, you know, so you're translating something that you would tell someone played the cells the second day,
add some drugs, you know, and a few days later, change the media.
It's very simple to say that. But when the automation is all right, we're going to play the cells using the flux drop.
We need to dilute the cells in a glass bottle and put them under pressure and the plates are
in a stacker and the plates get down stacked and the cells are added with machine as a tips.
And you know, and these are all things that when, you know,
you've always seen pictures of people in labs with pipettes doing what hand by hand when they run into an into little vials.
So essentially what the robot is doing, it's just doing all that for the same thing.
So one of the we have a machine that you can load a different head which picks up plastic tips,
so we can load 96 tips or 384 tips and then it just moves liquid.
So just as you would pipette, pick up, sprayed some liquid and then dispense it somewhere else, the robot does that.
You just need to do things that you would do automatically.
You can't tilt the plate on the robot. It's it's flat.
So you have to choose the height and the speed that you set it to spray the liquid so it doesn't knock the cells off.
And you said, you know, you tell it where to go to dispense the liquid.
So it's all things that are. Simple.
You just need to think through what you're doing and program it to do that.
And are you essentially providing service to the other researchers in the in this area?
So people will come to you and say, I need an essay for this particular existential target.
We'll do different levels of essay development. We might take on an experiment where they have a very vague idea of what they want to do,
and sometimes they have an essay that they already do in a 96 wall plate.
But we automate that in a 384 wall plate and we yeah, we do that with them.
So it's. Yeah, different kinds of biology.
So it's quite cool we get to do all kinds of things. Mm hmm.
So let's let's get funny to comment, which we haven't mentioned so far.
So I'll stick with you since I'm looking at you as the moment. Can you remember where you were when you first heard that there was something going on
in China and it looked like it might turn into something that would affect the world?
I think it was here. I tend to kind of avoid the news in here.
And we there's a girl and a woman in the building and her family were from Wuhan, so she'd been hearing about it.
She came up one day and she was telling me about her parents being in lockdown and what was it like and then how they were getting food.
And and, you know, it sounds like science fiction in the beginning, you know, that this this is happening somewhere in the world.
And it's, you know, it just sounds crazy, you know, and then here.
We were working as usual and they were talking about.
You know, a lockdown. And and we weren't really sure we were trying to get our experiments done.
We had an experiment planned with someone in oncology, and they were they knew they were being shut down.
And we were like, okay, bring us the cells and then we'll try to do the experiment.
And when it got to the last day, I had been to visit my friends, I think the weekend before, and I was starting to feel a bit under the weather.
And I and my friend that I had seen on the weekend, she sent me a text message and said that,
you know, I have to tell you that I have I have symptoms of COVID.
And I was like, I don't feel well. I don't know what it is. This is before you could get a test.
And so this is the middle of March 2020.
And then I ended up send an email saying, I don't know what I've got, but I don't think I should go to work.
So you guys can. We'll have to do the experiment without me. You know, I'll try to tell you as much of the plan.
But then the TDA shut down before we. We got to that point anyway.
So then I spent a week at home sick. Flu like symptoms.
You know, not not bad. And then I was told that we had some work to do.
Okay. That sounds like a good time to switch back to Daniel.
So how was the decision taken that the resources of the TBI could be put to the service of of understanding this?
Yes. So it was it was interesting because when when the World Health Organisation declared COVID 19 as a higher level of threat,
it was just at the start of the year and then it just seemed like it was, you know, barrelling towards everybody.
It was every, you know, every couple of days, it just kind of intensified.
And I think it was probably around mid-February that Peter Ratcliffe kind of called the PIs into his office and said,
you know, you really need to start thinking about what you can do in COVID research.
And this was well before anybody had really started thinking too much about lockdowns,
but it was really prescient because it ended up turning into exactly that.
So I, I went home and I was thinking about, you know, what could our impact be?
And I'm not a virologist, I'm not an epidemiologist. So I struggled to understand or think about what we could do.
But we got a phone call from a phone call in an email from Dave Stewart at Truby, who said, you know, that's his structural biology teacher,
structural biology unit, who said, I have the full length spike, which is the main protein that your body develops antibodies against in Sars-cov.
And, you know, could we think of an assay that we could do to test patients with with this spike to see if they have COVID antibodies?
So the first thing that popped into my mind was analyser based assay.
How does that how does that work? It's an enzyme linked immunosorbent assay.
So it's basically you put the you capture the.
The antigen of interest and then through a series of incubation with SERA or
a plasma from a patient and then a detection antibody and then a reporter,
it generates a positive or negative signal for the presence of antibodies against COVID.
So basically that's telling you, has this person had COVID, correct?
Yes. Yep. And and it started sort of as experimentally.
We actually, you know, we thought of analyses straight away and then they've said, oh, well, I know Gavin's working on the lies as well.
So we got a protocol from Gavin's Credence Laboratory.
We modified it, obviously, to run on high throughput robotics.
And the first experiments we ran were.
With Spike RBD, which is the receptor binding domain and the nuclear protein.
So all three components of the body can generate an antibody to and spike was clearly the most sensitive to being specific.
So the decision was was really quickly made and it started as just an experiment to see if we could just do it.
We didn't have an actual application. We didn't really know if anybody was going to be interested in something like this.
But it just it just started, as, you know, speculation on something that we could do.
And, you know, we our group certainly jumped at it because the implications would be if we weren't working on something like this,
we would sit idle for, you know,
what was clearly going to be at least a month, that if you remember that it was a thing,
the lockdown was like one month or two months or something like that. And Stephanie's right.
We, we, we were trying to run experiments right up until the moment that, that, that all of the buildings closed,
not really understanding or appreciating the implications of really just closing down for a proper,
you know, first time in anybody's memory in lockdown.
So we were well and back again by the time these experiments began.
Yes. Yeah, it was yeah, it was only it was right after I got better.
Yeah, I was just told to come in and make some solutions so I was a bit cross because it's like, yeah,
so Daniel hadn't been in the lab too much recently and I was a bit worried that he
was doing the first experiment and all I was about to do was to make some solutions.
Yeah, and we did. We really developed the assay.
It wasn't, we didn't just get a protocol and run it. We, we tried different kinds of plates.
We tried different coding concentrations, coding the plates with the spike protein.
We tried different concentrations of antibodies and just different concentration serum.
And we also did that on the robot. And then we scaled the robot, the protocol in the robot up to do 12 plates a day.
And I think I would agree ultimately what came out is the final what's called Oxford Immunoassay looks nothing like the original experiments,
and that was what we spent a long time working on and caused,
you know, some of the stress that we were discussing earlier around doing it it at a massively accelerated pace,
under the very watchful eyes of all of our bosses and their bosses.
So tell me. Yes, we weren't recording when we were talking about it before.
But so tell me again, what what were your days like? Let's start.
Well, I didn't go to the meeting, not for a few months.
So it started. It started as the results of one experiment,
which certainly suggested that we could develop an immunoassay to test convalescent
patients for the for the presence of sars-cov-2-specific specific antibodies.
Stephanie And I remember when in all of Oxford there were six or nine positive sera sample samples available for actually testing.
And just like any other large, pretty complex project,
it started with people reaching out to acquaintances or colleagues who might fit some of the criteria for for generating an overall assay.
With bioinformatics, with development, with procurement and multiple steps over multiple sites.
And it was very interesting because what started off, as you know, meetings of two and three people quickly grew to meetings of 25,
30 people initially sort of project managed by people who were repurposed to project manage your these.
What was basically a project that they had no understanding or very little understanding of, but sort of just came into it with their own expertise.
So for instance, we had the expertise on a lot of the robotics and the hot and liquid handling.
But somebody like Brian Martin, who was brought in very quickly,
is a an I.T. bioinformatics specialist who started developed links between the
NHS systems so that we could track the samples through from start to finish.
And then David Ayer, who is it was really powerful statistical analysis in epidemiology to help us define
what the actual assay and the criteria for positive and negative samples would be.
And then Dave Stewart in Ruby in the SGC to generate different variants of the spike protein to see if one generated more specific or a better result.
And it just sort of snowballed from there.
And it became quite clear that very quickly it was it would become very important to test all of the scientists in ah, excuse me,
all the research and staff in the John Radcliffe Hospital to see who was being who was being infected and who was generating antibodies.
The research stack, not the clinical staff, the clinical and research staff within within the J.R.R.
And it were actually you know, there were some very interesting findings from that which went into,
I believe, a Lancet paper about who was getting who was getting ill and who was generating antibodies.
And then, yeah, then it went. But tell me, tell me about this atrium meeting that you've mentioned.
Oh, the AA meetings. So the meetings were every single morning and they were they were sort of a
summation of the experiments from the day before which everybody had worked.
We would worked up on them up until probably eight or 9:00 at night or through the summer.
We were leaving after dark. So yeah, it was nine or ten a night we would leave, you know.
So we were generating data and then we would pass it off to Brian Marston and David Eyers teams and they would be looking at it you from maybe nine,
ten until 12 I would think.
And then they were reporting results to the whole group.
The whole group would either look at it at sometime around midnight or first thing in the morning before the AA meeting.
And we would come to some conclusions on what had worked, what weren't,
Zoom meetings and everything, Zoom meetings first thing in the morning at 8:00.
So we would sort of resort we would, you know, review the results of that set of experiments from the day before.
We would say what worked, what didn't, what was new, if there were new samples to be tested,
new criteria set by the government for the stringency of the test, because by this point we had we had representatives from the Vaccine Trials Group.
We had that representative from Blood Bank, a representative from the from the government,
and then scientists from the John Radcliffe Hospital who David Cook who helped Derek.
Derek Cook. Derek Fisher. Derek Cook, who helped with procurement of samples and the, you know, the relationship with the owners.
And it just sort of all came together at 8:00.
Super stressful because you're under the watchful gaze of your boss and your boss.
His boss and Stephanie, myself, Alison, were really the only people, you know, sort of actually in the laboratory.
Many of those scientists had their own people doing, you know, research as well.
They were also in the laboratory studying other aspects of stories.
But for this, you know, there was probably 30 people in in the lab in the meeting and then not very many people actually working.
So, Stephanie, what was that? Yeah, well, I was going to say, you mentioned Alison.
We haven't seen what's her name is Alison Howarth. She had my job before me, so she knew the robots very well.
And after a few weeks, Daniel brought her in to run the processing the samples in the day or hospital,
so they would array the samples into three or four plates and then they would get carried over to us to do the.
So. So during the beginning that there's the AA meeting, which I didn't attend,
I was asleep and then I would come in at ten or 11 and Daniel would tell me what they what they decided in the meeting.
And then I'd have to figure out what we were in and how we were going to do whatever they'd ask for.
And then we'd work late till nine or ten at night.
There were a couple of times, you know, in the summer where or didn't want to wait for me to unlock my bike because it was dark.
Um, so it was yeah, it was stressful, but.
Yeah. But how well. Well, did the technology hold up?
I mean, clearly, there are things that can go wrong in the course of experiments.
Yeah. So that we a lot of the team they wanted everything to be perfect and it's biology.
We kept saying, well, it's, it's not going to be perfect, but it has to be perfect.
So there was this stress to make every experiment.
You know, everything to go to go well. And you have to watch the robot like a hawk to make sure it's working alright.
Because if the tips don't all load correctly they won't,
they won't aspirate evenly and you just need to watch and make sure and then you have to stop it and start again.
So it's not as. It's not as bad as it sounds.
But then there were a lot of steps which which is what we learned over time, that the steps with things could go wrong.
So we learned to watch it, which is, you know, in the end, the AC took 9 hours to do 12 plays and you had to watch it on a good day.
I would get 15 minutes for lunch and that was the only break that I had in 9 hours.
And then, you know, concentrating or all the rest of the time. Yes, I did learn a lot.
So, yeah, I learned a lot. And we integrated some different equipment that we had I hadn't used before.
So I really got to know the genesis very well.
That what's that? The genesis of the robot that we use, that it has different heads.
So yeah. Janice Oh, I see. It picks up the tips,
so and then I got to learn things that I hadn't done always we barcoded the plates so we didn't have to to follow the samples through.
So in the day all they had, each tube was barcoded of patient zero, and then it would go into a plate which was barcoded and then would come to us.
And then the intermediate dilution plate was barcoded and the assay plate was barcoded.
And that assay plate would go into the into the reader at the end of the day to read the results.
It had a barcode reader. So all of the samples, every individual sample was followed through so they could, you know,
decide who what they call positive and negative, you know, who was positive and who was negative and.
For us that looked like it was pink. So the plate would come out and it would end up pink.
And it was you could tell which ones were not pink and which ones were pink.
And sometimes there would be more pink samples and other times.
Yeah. Yeah, I think. I think.
Well, what was what was stressful. Most stressful is stepping in.
I would know the development of an AC just as a is a product.
It's, it's a refinement. It's a experiment.
Refinement, experiment, refinement, experiment, refinement.
Um, but when you're under, you know, in these real time pressures, you feel like every refinement has to be a perfect refinement.
And, you know, they're never really like that. They, you know, you refine and you, you test and you refine and you test.
And that process is not normally done under intense scrutiny.
It's done between Stephanie and I at a pace it isn't quite so.
Demanding. And I think you might say, oh, today wasn't such a great day, but never mind.
We'll have another game tomorrow. Sleep on it.
Yeah, because, you know, everybody was really hoping that this was going to be something that would inform.
Ultimately, what it became clear is this could be used at a population level and could inform governmental response.
And, you know, there was everybody was, you know, breathing down everybody's neck.
And it was just, you know,
because it was very clear that the way that we were going to get out of COVID was developing the vaccine and tracking the population.
So these large scale, population driven experiments were going to tell us a lot about how and where the encoded
was moving and what it was doing and how you were developing antibodies towards them.
Longitudinal studies suggest that the just the pace was just something that was just was unrelenting.
So you did the study of the healthcare workers and researchers from the J are was your assay also used for,
for example, in a survey that was collecting serology data.
Yeah. The assay was used for the study of the J.R. study is now used it was and is now
still used for the onus for tracking the serological data using your machines here,
or has that happened? So about a year after we established the same,
we were running it on an on a daily basis we partnered with Thermo Scientific who installed two
very large robots and commissioned them and adapted the assay tools that a British company,
Thermo, is probably American. I think the device this multinational, let's say, was small, but they have a lab here.
Well, they have equipment here. Yeah. And that's over in the Wellcome Trust.
And Alison Howarth is the scientists use who started the J.R. she took over the project management of what is now essentially a diagnostic test.
And she set up that she set it up.
She she made sure all the robots were tested and then she got the assay working there and then they so over time.
So at first it was me and Daniel and then me, Daniel and Alison that were doing the work.
And then we, we got a little bit of help.
So I had two people and Alison had two people and now she's she manages 16 people and they run that assay in 12 hour shifts.
They they work one four days a week, 12 hours on each person.
And so it's really. Gotten bigger, bigger than just us.
But you. When you were running it here for a full year. Yes.
March to march. On that kind of daily stressful treadmill that you described earlier on.
It was explosive for a while.
I started attending the AA meeting, so I'd get up and do the meeting and eventually, you know, it was only three days a week.
But then I'd come in and then I would run the experiment for 9 hours, then report the data after that.
And, and it was, yeah, it was quite stressful because if the controls didn't work or something went wrong,
they might decide that, that the pilot had failed.
And they Brian Morrison They made a website that we would upload the data on and you'd run it and automatically
it would tell you if the controls were good enough and it would give you a great big red letters,
it would say bail. And that was at the end of a nine hour, you know, shift of work, of constant concentration.
So, yes, that was that could be quite upsetting to get to the end of the day and find that you'd have to do everything again.
And as as the project built up, we got more and more samples and we would run 12 flights a day and someone decided,
I'm looking at Daniel, but that is not it wasn't his decision. Somebody decided that we we could get data back in 72 hours.
And and I felt like, well, nobody asked me if I could return all the data in 72 hours because knowing something might go wrong,
you really want a little bit of leeway there. So there was this pressure that we we now had a full.
Week of samples. And if something messed up, then it was going to push things.
And then there were deadlines and, you know, to get to get the data reported.
Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, when you go, it's fine.
But we did get help and that was interesting, training people to do something that was so technical and in required focus and.
You know, while being under under stress. But I think they're fine now.
If so, how did you feel when the the in his work got transferred to what they did?
I was asked if I wanted to apply for that job and then when the deadline came, I was asked again, be sure you don't want to apply for this job.
And I was like, Oh, I'm sure. I was very happy to go back to my old job.
I'm like I said, we keep saying we learned a lot, but it was so intense.
And it it's it's it it is all the same thing, but it's it never got boring because you had to watch to make sure things were going okay.
And we learned over time, you know, the somethings with the tips and this the SAM samples,
they would get goopy and you'd have to centrifuge them fairly hard to get the whatever was in there down to the bottom so you
wouldn't pick that up tips and then because that would it would clog different steps and you had to watch to make sure that.
That everything looked good the whole time. And yeah, so when it was gone, I was quite happy.
And a picture of the Tui, the deck of the Janus has the deck where words like a support.
And then I had a photograph where I'd taken all of that deck.
Where off? And it was clean. Space.
And I took a photograph of it. And I like to tell my friends, it's nice to be done.
And so by that time had the lab opened up again.
Other people come in to do research so you could start you could restart the work you were doing on the cancer.
Yes, it was kind of slow getting back up and going, but it was good.
So when when are we roughly now? This was spring 20, 21.
Me, because it was the year that the lab and the Wellcome Trust was supposed to be ready in November,
and it was supposed to be ready in December and it was supposed to be ready in January.
So I did go home that Christmas to the U.S. I just.
I hoped it was, you know, all going to be done by the time I got back, but it wasn't.
So where to? Research assistants were running the assay while I was gone back.
And then we had a few more months.
After that, you know, we went to the building, the university had its covered policy, and then each building had its local building policy.
Our own policy was a bit more stringent, I think, than the university.
So we had to be very careful and the numbers of people that could come into the building and we are a collaborative facility.
So we work our our work is done with scientists that come from around the university.
My own research projects started back up, which were, which was nice because we had creek was good enough to give us an extension.
But, you know, it was clear after a year that lots of scientists wanted to get their research up and going again.
So we had to be very careful about, you know, how projects came back in because there were still,
you know, policies in place to limit exposure and the number of people in a particular space.
And, you know, the lab is a big open labs, but you have to maintain two metre distance.
And if you were working very closely, you had to track the number of, you know, the people that you were working next to.
So things that we had taken for granted for many years became, you know, very, you know,
difficult to continue to track because you could become so used to just people coming in and out and,
you know, two or three students looking over your shoulder, you had to track all of that.
So so the transition was was slow.
But I would agree with Stephanie. There was we did our bit and it felt very much like we had done our bit.
But it was really nice to go back to the research that we we are, you know, most qualified, I think, to to do.
And that that was that was very nice. And Stephanie is absolutely right.
I mean, a lot of the research we we we do a project and we move to another project or we focus on different aspects of our projects with COVID,
serological testing, it's it's basically the same, the same assay that's done.
Is it almost as a diagnostics? We're really not that type of scientist.
So it was nice to to to have it moved back out and to return to some normality I think was
something that we recognised more from the previous ten years of research versus that year of.
COVID. Mm hmm. But do you feel proud of it?
Actually, yes, very proud of it. I mean, I think it was a proud for several reasons.
One, that, you know, there were so many scientists who came together to develop the actual platform.
Scientists from the SGC, from Stream B, from the J are from diamond light source.
Scientists in the biochemistry department at the John Radcliffe all came together to build what was
a really well developed assay tracking NHS samples from start to finish moving samples efficiently,
both physically and their data around.
I mean, these things don't normally have been, you know,
as from such a diverse set of people in such a large pipeline, it really turned into a big platform.
That's something other people I spoke to have mentioned that normally academic life is quite competitive,
but a lot of these coded projects that had to be that kind of multidisciplinary collaboration, you know, and how good that felt.
Yeah. And that was really nice. And, you know, we were we were actually generating what I think is very impactful data.
You know, I, I, I've, I've published quite a lot of papers in my scientific career and I would,
I had hoped, you know, at some point to get a proper Lancet paper or a paper.
New England Journal of Medicine paper. And we ended up getting six or seven of these really high profile manuscripts that generate you know,
they came out of the research that we were, you know, right up front doing so as an academic research.
And so you don't often see your your research translated so quickly.
And I think that was what we were most proud of.
At least what I was most proud of is is that something we were doing was making an impact almost immediately.
It was impacting the governmental response. It was telling people, yes, you did have COVID, you weren't crazy.
You know, you you know, and you survived it.
And, you know, you did you know, you're now healthy again.
I mean, all of these things were really we're really amazing in it.
You could see your work almost immediately, which, like I said, is is actually from an academic research standpoint, it's really quite rare.
You know, usually maybe at the end of your career or, you know, ten or 15 years into your career, you would see the translation of your research.
This was almost immediate about what was Stephanie's role in getting the whole thing.
So I can say unequivocally that it would not have happened without Stephanie.
I mean, there's no doubt about it. I mean, Stephanie is, you know, who is it is a trained scientist who is is an expert on the robots and who,
you know, certainly saw that what needed to be done and just did it.
You know, I think, yeah, it's it's just it would not have happened without that heavy, heavy support.
Right. I. I could do a lot of the research, but I couldn't.
Certainly couldn't have done. Done this without Stephanie.
I was just going to ask you the same question of whether I know it was extremely stressful, but are you proud of it looking back on it?
I am. It's hard to do.
It's hard to think of being part of history.
You know, you always put your. My heart feels really small, but.
But then my brain will come back and go. But but you you developed this essay because we developed it from, you know, from you know.
Almost nothing. We worked it up an automated and I worked.
I worked a lot. I worked, you know. Ten or 12 hours a day for a year, you know, a year and a half.
And it was really stressful. Yeah, but yeah.
Yeah. Because at one point my both my oven and my washing machine had broken and I was washing my clothes in the
bathtub and I couldn't take a day off to get this fixed because nobody else was going to run it on their own.
The essay.
So yeah to having to spend and it was a few weeks of washing my clothes in the bathroom before I got one day off to get somebody in to get it fixed.
But. No, it was worth it. I mean, we keep saying, you know, I learned a lot.
I learned a lot about myself, you know, what kind of science I wanted to do and where I wanted to go with my career,
you know, that I didn't want to go and manage 16 people, you know?
It was very happy that Alice wanted that job and it made me do it.
Yeah, but it hasn't put you off working in the level together. No, but it's made me clear about what I do and what I don't enjoy.
I really like doing a bunch of different projects and I really like the robot and I like fixing things in the lab, you know?
Yeah. Our lab has a lot of cool stuff, a lot of equipment that is, you know.
Very interesting. But it only works with the people who understand it.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
So you said you thought you had COVID early on. Did you run your example of.
You know, I always wanted to. I kept thinking, especially because they the samples were obviously visually positive or negative.
You know, they would be pink.
And it was thought it would be very cool to have my own sample in there and to know which well it was and have it come out and go, Oh, that's me.
But now. So you still don't know if you actually had COVID or not?
It sounds pretty likely that you did it. Yeah.
And then I had something else in January which may have been code, but the lateral flow tests were negative.
But it had. Loss of taste.
So I thought that. So both times it's been like this January that's just gone by.
Yes. I wonder if did you use the short flat, the nose only lateral flow test or the throat?
And I always just want. Well, you know, I figured that'd be through.
Yeah, yeah. But yeah, yeah.
So so this is just again, something I've been asking everybody how scared where you by the infection itself and the possibility of, of catching it.
It was it was stressful because we were running the assay, you know, 9 hours a day and.
I was by myself a lot of that time.
There was like once I went to the supermarket and half the employees had the map, their mask below their nose and mouth.
And I went to the customer service desk and I was you know, this was important to me, not just for the general public, for myself and our lab.
And I was like. But can you ask you just can you ask your employees to wear your mask, wear their masks above their nose?
And he looked at me like like he was about to roll his eyes.
And then I was like, well, I was just trying to ask nicely, but now that you've rolled their eyes at me,
then I made a formal complaint and the head of the supermarket,
they actually rang me at home and told me, you know, we're going to you know, we're going to do things that are safe.
But it's. It was very upsetting to think.
That that I could get sick. And, and then because I'd been in contact with everyone else, that the whole lab would shut down.
So not just like I couldn't come to work, but it would everyone I would have interaction with,
you know, couldn't go to work and then it would shut us down. That was very upsetting.
And then to work all that time and then to see people not wearing masks, you know, or not being careful.
That was yeah, it was stressful.
And we have people that in the lab that have different levels of rule following and we have at least one person that that was very strict.
And that's actually good. You know, it's good to have someone around that, you know.
That lets you use them as an excuse to like you have to wear a mask and it's because this other person, it's going to bother them.
And you use this excuse to get people to be quite careful.
You. So what about you then? So it was interesting because I had volunteered for the vaccine trial and I was actually number 26,
which always got a kick out of the people at the vaccine trials. The whole, you know, for 26, 25 people out of you.
And so I ended up getting, you know, the injections from the from the vaccine trial,
you know, whether it was a really no, no, I wouldn't give in, but we didn't compare.
We sort of came back here and compared notes as, you know, what did your shoulder feel like?
And I was convinced that I had gotten the vaccine.
And I, I followed all the rules pretty rigorously for the very reason Stephanie was saying,
is that if anybody had gotten ill, we would have had to properly shut the lab down.
And that would have been, you know, at least catastrophic for the the output.
So it was really interesting. So I, I felt almost like, okay, I'm definitely I've been vaccinated, so I'm I'm fine.
And then when it came time to actually get the proper vaccination through the NHS, they unblinded the people who were in the,
who were in the trial and I actually had gotten the placebo so I meningitis B vaccine and it was just very funny because I sat thinking,
you know, I just walked around very cavalier thinking that I'm, you know, I'm impervious to this thing,
still following the rules and, you know, cleaning my hands every, you know, quite a lot and wearing the mask and everything.
But yeah, I just didn't really. Just didn't really think it was going to happen to me for.
For that reason, I mean, pretty naively and kind of stupidly.
But I mean, it's I did it was kind of the way I thought, you know, I've been vaccinated, so I'm fine.
So. Yeah.
So what, you. I'm just running down the questions. Think a lot of them you've kind of answered in passing.
So it would be too. I don't need to ask them. Um, but you've moved back to both, move back to doing what you were doing before.
Um, has the experience of, of working on the serology tests changed your approach to the work you do, taught you new things?
Yeah. So it was interesting because as as a principal investigator,
there's a natural progression that you move away from the laboratory because you're responsible for all the papers coming out of the laboratory.
You're responsible for generating the income, the research income, disseminating the results of your labs and going to meetings.
And that leaves very little, if any, time to go into the laboratory anymore,
which is a shame because I quite like the laboratory and I like to say or think that I was actually fairly good in the laboratory.
So when COVID came, I would write, I went back into the laboratory, which was kind of an interesting thing,
having been out of it for six or seven years and I realised that I actually quite liked it and I missed it.
There were some aspects that I didn't miss but you know, you take the, the better for the, for the bad.
So what it's changed for me is now I'm, I try to spend as much time in the lab as I can now on my own projects or on projects to help some people.
And he's not saying anything about his science but the mess.
Yes. So so I had gotten better at the mess.
I do leave a bit of a wake of mess behind me, but I've gotten better.
So this is kind of like cooking, isn't it, how different people are in the kitchen and whether they live there?
I guess so. I think you got used to. I don't know.
I don't know other people cleaning up.
You know, you've definitely got a lot better because I think the rule, it's hard to remember the rules of, you know, and the facilities have changed.
The system here had changed where we ended up having to do a lot more stuff ourselves.
We have to empty the autoclave bins, you know, for the lab waste because they just had too much work to do.
Yeah. So, yeah, so I've gotten better.
But I think that's the one thing that I would say has certainly changed, that I've actually rekindled my love of being in the laboratory.
So I actually tried to get into lab at least a couple of hours a day to just to do the research that I kind of want to do it.
It kind of it spills over.
So I have to spend a little bit more time doing the admin in the in the, in the other things that I just have to do just to keep.
To be a principal investigator. But I it's a trade-off that I'm willing to make because it just it's just fun for me.
And Stephanie. But is there anything about the way research is managed in the kind of hierarchy of research from the, you know,
heads of department who kind of decree what should be done and the people who are actually
doing the work that you think in the light of your experience could be improved.
I mean, do you think you have enough of a voice in saying things like, once I started started joining the ADA and meetings?
You know, I at one point I looked around the meeting and there were nine principal investigators and then myself and Alison.
So at the time I was like, there's there's all these people, the head of this and the head of that.
There are so many heads of things. And then there was me doing the work and there were only two of us doing physical work,
but I was a part of that and I spoke up because I didn't have time to be shy, you know, I just spoke up.
And one time I pitched a fit and Richard Cornell rang me personally to make sure I was okay.
And by that time, I'd cooled down and I was embarrassed that I had pitched a it.
But it was that was I really felt like I was important to the team, which, you know.
Yeah. It was a big team and we worked hard and.
Yeah. And is that something you think you've got confidence enough to do in future if you think something's not right?
I guess. So you. I am an expert in what I do.
I might not be an expert in. A type of biology, but I'm expert in what I do.
So. You know, sometimes you do have to argue for what you think is best, but, you know, that's.
Yeah. Through the process. I mean, I hadn't I had taught students, but I had managed people.
And then during the process of training two people and managing them, I was like, I want a demotion.
So that that's what I got out of career wise, is that I didn't want to.
I want to be in the lab and training people.
Yeah, it's it is different. That was a special situation.
But I definitely want to be. In the lab, not in an office.
Yes. So, yeah. You like to be in control of what you're doing and.
And doing it yourself. Yeah. Oh, yes.
I always find this question difficult to ask when people have already told me that the work was really stressful.
But did the fact that you were working on something that was so important help to support your own well-being, do you think?
I mean, it's a time when a lot of people, even if they weren't ill, were very down because of the constraints of living under pandemic restrictions.
I can absolutely say yes. From from the PR standpoint, it was as we worked as we were leading up to the COVID shutdowns,
you think about how you were going to manage pain for all of the scientists in your group,
because there's certain level of, you know, just the responsibility that you feel.
You think it's right for the church, the charities to or the, you know,
funding to sort of give you an extension or to furlough or something like that.
But you don't know how it's going to work out. You know, it's just going to be difficult and, you know, it's going to be a lot of paperwork.
So. And then, you know, an idle research scientist, spring is a bad thing because we're trained to to think of the things that can go wrong.
Right. And then we design an experiment to answer questions, but also to mitigate any potential errors.
So my I would have probably focussed on some of those negative aspects of being home, idle or not, you know, into work every day.
So for me, coming in every. The research was absolutely crucial to my well-being.
And if it hadn't been for this, I think it would have been a very, very difficult episode.
What about you, Stephanie?
It's hard to imagine like a heavy state, you know, because I was busy constantly and my level of anxiety was was at the maximum.
You know, it's hard to imagine, but we did have people that were very upset by not being able to help.
And at one point, someone told me I was selfish because I was doing all the work.
And and, you know, when you just you what do you say to that?
You're like, I'm not being selfish. I'm working 12 hours a day, you know, I'm sure I'm sorry I can't share this with you, you know,
and it's it's still hard for me to properly process that different point of view, you know, that.
Yes, it I can understand, but it's hard to feel what they would feel, you know, that they they were upset that they couldn't help more.
Mm hmm. Which must make you even more anxious to have that in front of you.
So, I mean, how difficult have you found it now that we're looking back, you know?
Yeah, almost two years. Just think and talk about that time.
We would talk about it some. But after that, the COVID screening left our lab.
You know, it was kind of I was kind of back in the real world again.
But then when the orderly and they approached us about about our experience and about, you know,
having this interview and about physical things that we could give to the library,
we had a meeting and I, I, I just found I was, I was very upset for a few days.
I was really grumpy and, and I was like, it's like I have PTSD.
And I kind of joked, but then I thought about it and I was like, well, actually it's very like, I have PTSD.
But having had that conversation and brought bringing it all up, it was very upsetting and and just brought back all that stress.
And, and it took me a few days to calm down and then I would get emails about, about, you know, from the library, and I would just not read them.
And that's I'm usually the kind of person that reads all their emails as they come, and I would just leave them unread and I couldn't read them.
But but then when it was just wait for Daniel to respond and then I'm like, I'm fine doing it.
But I also didn't want to do this interview by myself because I didn't want to come across that it was an awful time, you know?
But it's better when other people around and and it more becomes a conversation instead of just me venting and me complaining and,
you know, talking about how how stressful it was.
You know. You know, whenever I don't know, whenever I complain and it's like I can complain a lot.
And then the last thing I want to say at the end of all this, you know, is that, you know, it we learned a lot.
I keep saying we learned a lot. And I was glad that I could do something to help, you know?
Well, I really hope that the experience of being interviewed doesn't lead you to be grumpy in doing this for another couple of weeks,
but you seem a little more relaxed. Yeah, I did find my notebook.
So after the library asked, you know, if we had anything, I did find my lab notebook, and I was like, Oh, no, I couldn't.
I couldn't. But it is interesting. It goes from, you know, like the dates go the dates and, you know, the meetings that we had.
And then the next day it has a date and make solutions.
And that's all I have in my lab notebook. And then it becomes more involved as as we get.
I got to do more. But yeah, it's kind of personal for me that they could possibly scan it.
But anyway, yeah, for me, I remember that August there was a little tiny window when we were actually able to travel
in Greece was open and my partner Louis and I went to Santorini and we spent I think,
six days there and we got there.
And, you know, Greece is really pretty, very warm.
And on day three, it was like it was like it was within like 20 minutes.
It felt like I was completely deflated.
Um, all the, you know, all that the stress of the past several months just came flooding out.
And it was very it was just an unusual experience because you are under a fair bit of stress for some time.
And then you go on holiday and you, you know, you relax and that's exactly what holiday is.
But I normally on a holiday, you sort of just read into it and it becomes nice that what it was like almost at some point,
it was like somebody pulled out, you know, a drain plug and it just all drained away.
And it was an interesting experience here. And I remember on the plane coming back,
there was sort of been elation to to come back and see how things had continued to go and felt, you know, if there were any problems.
But, you know, the closer we came to the United Kingdom, the more you sort of think, oh, I wonder how it went.
Were there any problems? What do I have to deal with?
Um, so that was.
You could feel that, you know, the stress was was focussed around what are the problems and what do we need to do to to solve them versus,
you know, the excitement of, you know, what was been discovered and you know what?
You know, what would what can we put into a paper? What can we really, you know, investigate?
Very different. Experience of returning back to that.
After holiday versus normal research, which is usually when the scientists continue to do their research on their projects and they come in excited,
they tell you we did this or we did that, or we completed this screen or This has been published.
It was kind of coming back to potential problems versus something instead of coming back to sort of exciting results.
But it's got to be more about the site, you know?
Now, you know, like you said, it took a while, but then now you can be excited about science again.
Instead of working to do a bit project on this, you know, we have.
All kinds of projects going. It can be.
It's interesting again. Yeah. And I think it's it's in now it is sort of an exciting chapter, one year chapter in our research lives.
And it's seen, you know, and interestingly, a lot of the data that we generated at the time is still being analysed and looked at.
In generating manuscripts. But yeah, I think we now I think it's now, you know, really become very clear that,
you know, COVID, at least that platform really won't return to to our laboratory.
And it's it's nice for probably a few months I was thinking, okay, we're, you know, at some point we're part of the business contingency plan.
So if the robots over there go down, they can come back here.
And that's was like sort of like for if it ever came back here, it would have to be a massive juggling, you know,
my own research be massive juggling exercise and you know, we would just be thrust straight back into that.
Um, but it's clear that those robots are really robust.
They're running reliably.
They have Allison, who is more than capable of making sure that, you know, they maintain the output that they that they normally do.
And it's kind of like now they get year out from the year, it's just like, okay,
it is looks like it's well and truly out of my lab and and sort of off and robustly doing what it was designed to do.
But for the first few months, yeah, I was, we were waiting for it to break and come back.
In in fortunately. I mean, they're really good scientists over there.
And they made sure everything. Continue to work and.
Produce data. Kept going.
Good. Good.