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We start by saying your name and, of course, your titles.

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Yes. I'm Dr. Nicole Raab. I'm a visiting lecturer at the University of Oxford in the Department of Physics,

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and I'm an assistant professor in the medical school at the University of Warwick.

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Okay, that's lovely. And you before you went to you went to work in I went to work in July 2020.

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And before that you were here? Before that I was in the Department of Physics working as a Royal Society Research Fellow.

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And before that, I was a Ph.D. student in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, also here at Oxford.

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And your main interest during this time is being well, you got quickly got interested in viruses.

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What what is it that appeals to you about viruses? So I, I moved from South Africa when I was 17.

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I went to study microbiology at Imperial College London,

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and I quickly realised then that viruses were really fascinating and I specialised in that in my final year.

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And so when I was sort of towards the end of my degree, I was looking around for a Ph.D. and I knew that I wanted to work in viruses.

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And then there was a great opportunity to do Dphil in the Dunn School at Oxford.

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And so I was really, really lucky to be offered a dphil working with somebody called Professor Irvin Fidel, and he's an influenza biologist.

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And so I spent four years with him, which is a really super time.

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And and by the end of that, I had a pretty good grounding in molecular virology techniques,

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and I was absolutely of sold that that's what I was meant to work on and that's what I was going to continue doing after that.

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And so it is sort of slightly surprising that you ended up in that department of physics.

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How did that come about? Yeah. Yeah, it is.

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So I was looking around for for a postdoc position and this really great opportunity came up to work with Professor Kelly's company,

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this in biophysics and here at Oxford.

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And what sort of interested me about that was that they were working using something called single molecule techniques.

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And this is a relatively new field at the time.

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And when I heard about it and what it is, is and ways of studying it, rather than studying large complexes or large things like a cell all in one go,

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you isolate it, small parts of it, so you isolate proteins or molecules and you study the behaviour of just those individually.

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And, and that's, that's got a number of really great advantages.

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So if you rather than looking at the average behaviour and the average properties of millions of

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molecules in one go like you would just with the traditional biology or biochemistry techniques,

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you're able to see the individual behaviours of single molecules and that would otherwise just be lost in the crowd.

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And so, so and I went over to his lab and started learning about all of these really fascinating techniques.

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And I realised pretty quickly that not only were they really interesting on their own,

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but they're also a great way of studying small things and in particular studying viruses, which is what I was interested in anyway.

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And can you just explain how you managed to get these molecules separated out from one another?

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Because normally they'd be part of the bigger. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

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So. So normally what you'd want to do if you if you want to study a protein, for example, which is sort of a small molecular machine within a cell,

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and you would isolate that protein and you would try to ascertain its structure so you would do something,

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X-ray crystallography or criterium, and you'd figure out the structure of that protein.

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And from that, you'd try and work backwards to figure out the proteins function.

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But techniques like that, you, you fix the protein, you take a sort of a static snapshot of it.

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And that's really informative, especially if you can sort of take a series of static snapshots of that together.

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But that's also quite tricky to do. And it doesn't give you any dynamic information.

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It doesn't show you the protein in the process of binding to whatever its ligand is.

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It doesn't it doesn't show it actually working.

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And what single molecule techniques do is they allow you to isolate that protein and look at it with a microscope in its native state.

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So you can add its ligand, you can add nucleotides to make it copy DNA, for example,

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and you can actually watch in real time as it's doing the work that it would normally do.

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So you can get a lot of kinetic and dynamic information that would otherwise be lacking.

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And how do you do that? You use a microscope.

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So so you use a sort of a customised microscope that's designed to try to look at just small single molecules.

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And and there's two main ways of doing that.

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So the first way is you take your protein of interest and you label it with a dice that can be seen on the microscope,

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and then you dilute it down to peak, very low concentration.

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So this is very, very, very dilute. And then you flow each use of flow your solution through the microscope.

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And because the proteins are so diluted, you see one at a time as they fly past you detector and the dye and the dye,

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the dye is a fluorescent dye, so it gives off light.

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When it goes past, you detect and you can see that light and you can infer things about what the proteins do from the light that it gives out.

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And the other way that that and the other thing that you can do is you can take a protein of interest, label it, and then stick it on to surface.

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If you could stick out to the surface of a glass slide and you use a microscope that then scans around the glass side but only looks at a very,

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very small area at a time. So it only picks up one or two molecules in one go, and we watch them that way.

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Mm hmm. So you began to use the same technique to look at viruses.

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What particular questions were you? What were you? Just developing the technique.

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Could you help us? Yes. So. So we realised that this this would be something that's potentially really great to apply to viruses.

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And as far as we knew at the time, nobody had even tried to study.

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When you flew proteins in this way.

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So because that was what had worked on the phone, because we had collaborators, which was my previous supervisor in the dance school.

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This is the obvious thing. Thing to, to, to try.

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So. And what we actually did in the end was we managed to carry out the first single medical studies on influenza virus.

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And so we concentrated on a protein of the virus called the polymerase, which is the protein that copies the virus genome and makes more copies.

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So you make more viruses. And we isolated the polymerase.

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And we then showed how it bound to the viral genome and how it changed the shape of the protein and when it bound to it and in order to copy it.

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And so that was a pretty exciting time. And it was a really nice collaborative project with lots of people involved and

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really exciting because we were showing things that hadn't been seen before.

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And so that would normally be happening inside the infected cell.

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Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. But in this case, you just you take that protein out of the cell, out of the virus,

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and we we stuck it down, and we then gave it a fluorescent version of the genome to bind to.

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So you could see the binding. And then by looking at the changes in, in, in the signals that you get or from the different dyes.

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And so we used something called French Way and which is it stands for something complicated bit.

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And what it does is it gives you a measurement of how far away two days are from each other.

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So if you have two days on your, you know,

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on your protein and on your RNA and that are in AIDS and very close contact with the protein then and can get very high signal.

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And if it's very weak and no signal, so and then you can actually watch that signal changing over time.

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So that's the technique that we used. And so what does that.

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Where does that give us up to in terms of time? So I would I worked as a postdoc with Achilles and from 2011 until 2017.

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And so we established the single medical system for flu.

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I had two career breaks during that time, so I had my two eldest daughters during that time as well.

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And and then that for me to the time when I was thinking about what to do next.

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And so I applied to the Royal Society for a research fellowship and which I got some started in 2017.

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So this is my first kind of independent funding to start my own group.

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I got my first PhD students and and yes, so I started setting up my own lab.

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And that's something that's sort of reflects all of the things that interest me.

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So we're a interdisciplinary group of people from all different kind of backgrounds, ranging from physicists to biologists and few things in between.

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And and I thought that what I'd like to do is use these amazing techniques that I've learnt these biophysical techniques and

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apply them to study viruses and to study how viruses replicate themselves and and also come up with ways to detect viruses.

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So from around 2015 or so and we started to think about using fluorescence,

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which is the way that we label what we're interested in and microscopy as novel ways to detect viruses and to diagnose them in samples as well.

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Is diagnosing viruses difficult? But I mean, yes, because they're small.

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So it's a traditionally virus diagnosis and it started with culturing virus in cells in a lab, which is extremely hit and miss.

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So and you know, in order to grow up the virus, you have to have it in the right conditions, in the right cells.

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You have to wait about a week to know if it's worked. And then and then you need to another way of sort of identifying that it's that specific virus.

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So. And traditionally, people turn to electron microscopy to do that.

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So you try to image what you've grown and you use sort of what it looks like to try and classify what it is.

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So you can see there's lots of probabilities of that. It doesn't happen in any timeframe that's useful clinically because, you know, someone might.

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Come in with an infection that's very serious, and then they can't wait for an entire week to know what they've got.

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And also, so technically, it's got a lot of challenges as well and it's not standardised.

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So it is pretty hit and miss.

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And so so that's sort of the history of of diagnosis.

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Of course, we have much more modern molecular techniques now, which obviously thanks to COVID, lots of people, everyone is very familiar with these.

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And so and there's PCR or PCR where you amplify up small fragments of the virus genome,

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which is the kind of gold standard for viral diagnostics and has really come to the forefront during the pandemic and which is very, very accurate.

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And that also has some downsides. So it's not particularly timely.

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It takes several hours and you need a lab to do it.

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So you need to get your sample into the lab and you need to extract that viral RNA, the virus genome, in order to carry out the assay.

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And so something else that sort of happened over the last couple of years of COVID is, of course,

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return to other types of tests that can be done in point of care at home, which is natural for assays, since they're nothing new.

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But they've never been sort of ruled out on this kind of scale before.

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And yes, so and that sort of at the start of the pandemic and even today is sort of what we have in our arsenal for for diagnostics.

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And so what I did I did interrupt you to ask about whether it was difficult to diagnose viruses,

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but he was telling me about that they and that the work that you were doing in your life when you first.

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Yeah I mean so so when we first started thinking about this, we could see the problems that they were with the technology that was available.

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And we realised that what we have is a way that you can see single viruses because this is what we'd been doing.

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And so if you can do that, then you don't need to go and take a sample and try to amplify that sample that to detect it is very sensitive.

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So you can see just a few particles and you don't have to purify anything out.

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So so we thought this could be very sensitive and this could be very fast.

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And so it's something that happened over, over quite a few years.

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But we started first with thinking about how how we can visualise these viruses in a clinical sample.

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So Heidi labelled them so you can see them and we explored lots of different ways of doing that.

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And so the way that we discovered something that was pretty exciting,

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which was that you can use and short in ways that very short labels that are

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negatively charged and remember the surface of a virus is negatively charged as well,

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and you can use a positively charged solution to bring those things together.

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And so we call this cation mediated labelling.

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Isn't that enough of a bit.

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And what we discovered was a really,

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really quick way of adding a fluorescent label to any virus in a sample a much quicker than anything else that's known out there.

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And it's instantaneous. You add your labelling solution and you put your sample into a microscope and you can see it straight away.

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So the have DNA matches the the genome of the.

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No, it doesn't know. It's just a charge base essentially.

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So that the bit of yeah. That base of DNA and it has to be it has to have some features about it.

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It has to be a certain length and it's just to maintain enough negative charge and fit.

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It's it's a universal label. So you add it and it can label any pathogen in the sample.

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Well, so why is that useful if you I think if you've got.

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Yeah. So code to that right. So so that was the first thing that that we discovered and you're absolutely right.

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So what do you do with something you've got a really good universal label for Pathogen, but how is it useful in a diagnostic setting?

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So so we actually spent the the year or two before the pandemic and trying to turn that into a diagnostic assay.

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We were focussed on flu and we were thinking of and thinking of ways that we could do a quick screen for seasonal flu strains.

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It was going around and and what we realised is that if you label your virus in a sample, you look at it on a microscope,

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you take a quick picture or two and by when you look at those pictures, they're really, really hard to tell apart.

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So you can have two different viruses. They're going to look the same by eye.

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And but if you do something clever, so if you take a computer,

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you take an artificial intelligence neural network, what you can do is you can show that network,

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the pictures you've got over to viruses to learn the features that are specific to each virus family that's in there.

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And then you go back and you shoot a third picture of an unknown virus.

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It will tell you which one it is. So that's another whole area of research, isn't it?

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Yes. Intelligence, absolutely. Yeah. Involve some collaborators.

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So this this is a complete stroke of luck.

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I had a first a summer student.

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His name is Nicholas Shyness.

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So if it's a summer student and he then stayed on and did his master's project with me in the lab and he then stayed on to do his dphil as well.

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And he was the one who his his master's project was basically bring this about.

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And and he's he's a very brilliant scientist.

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And and he managed to he he he designed the neural network and showed that it works with this instance.

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And so so we reached that this is a I've been doing that works I think it's very it's

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something that's what the word is but it's it's essentially created in a computer.

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It it's a computer algorithm that you train to recognise images of features of changes because is absolutely yes.

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So he did physics undergrad at Oxford and he knows all about maths and coding and he came up with this and so,

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so I mean we thought it was pretty exciting and, and by the end of 2019,

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we, we had shown that it worked pretty well and flew and we could actually differentiate

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flu strains even quite closely related to flu strains using this technique.

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And we'd spoken to Oxford University Innovation, which is the technology transfer company for the university about here,

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and protecting intellectual property and thinking that perhaps somebody could find it useful.

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But, you know, someone might want to license it and turn it into a diagnostic test one day.

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So that and and that's pretty much where we were when, of course, COVID started.

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So the question of asking a deputy, when did COVID start for you?

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When did you notice there was something happening and realised that you could get involved?

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And so so for me it was almost was right at the beginning.

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So I think so being a virologist I was interested in this kind of thing.

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And actually what I've been doing is I, I've been teaching pandemics and,

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and how viruses cause pandemics and to the medical students for quite a few years until this point.

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So so it was something that always interested me in that I knew a bit about.

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So, and when, you know, when the first kind of reports were coming out of some strange unknown pneumonia in China,

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I did I did read about it and I knew about it.

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And, you know, I was coming to a course and it was sort of on my radar a bit.

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And I then go completely distracted because I had my third child in January 2020.

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So so she she and she was born on the 3rd of January, celebrates science exactly.

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With the start of the pandemic. And so I did I did spend most of January thinking about other things and but still keeping an eye on it.

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And I see and I think by the end of January, it was already quite clear that this was had the potential to be something quite serious.

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And so we were already thinking then of, you know,

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our technology and what we could do and perhaps trying to see if it was something that worked for whatever this new virus was the best suited to me.

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And yes, so and what followed after that was a completely mad time where I sort of gave up any thoughts of maternity leave and.

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We we realised that I mean by the time the first lockdown happened, which was in March,

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we already realised that this was something that could be useful and could work.

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And how we knew that was that we had a fantastic collaborator at the Institute and he gave us some coronavirus samples.

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So this wasn't COVID, wasn't SARS-CoV-2, but it was an avian coronavirus.

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So the fit and that's relatively safe to handle and use in the lab.

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So the first thing that we wanted to check was whether we could actually label an image, a coronavirus.

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We haven't even tried that before. So so by then we'd done these experiments and we realised that we could.

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And so. So we knew that there was sort of something, some potential there.

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And I had a small team of people who basically dropped what they were doing to try and focus on this.

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And Achilles was really involved in it as well.

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And then what happened was there was a lockdown and basically the physics department shut completely.

200
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So so we were in this really strange situation where I think we were pretty much the only group in physics that was still working,

201
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still coming in and doing experiments.

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And but we also realised quite quickly that you were quite limited with what we could actually do in the department.

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We needed to take clinical samples and to see if there was any, if it was going to work with those.

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And so again, another of the fantastic bunch of collaborators at the John Ratcliffe.

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And so this is the groups that run the clinical and the research diagnostic labs there at Derek Kothari Group and Nicole Stokes and her team as well.

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And they very, very kindly agreed that we could take one of our microscopes to the jar,

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set it up in the research laboratory, and test COVID samples that were coming into the hospital.

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And yes, so that was a really exciting time because not many people were working,

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but we were working 24 seven and we tried it on clinical samples and SARS-CoV-2 and actually it worked and which was yeah, really exciting.

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Um, and yeah. And then in between all of that, I started to get home and I moved to yeah, moved the lab to work.

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Although most of the team still stayed here, you know, as it was.

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So it cannot sit at the time. And so yeah, it was, it was a bit of a hectic, hectic time, but also very exciting.

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And, and by and by about October time, if we had and they're good enough results that we,

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we wrote stuff into a paper budget online and and it actually it got quite a lot of attention at the time from the press and things.

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So at that point we started to think, hey, maybe there's something in here that we can actually make something that's helpful for people.

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And so that's when we started pursuing the idea of trying to have a spin out company to actually try and take the technology forward.

217
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And then, yeah, so the goal would be to be able to have this set up as a kind of bedside.

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Yeah. So, so if I kind of explain what it is and so we have this way of instantaneously

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labelling a pathogen in a sample and then you take that bit of labelled sample.

220
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He put it on a microscope, take some pictures, and then those pictures just get into the computer.

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The computer does the rest. The computer will have a quick look.

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And and so the advantages of it that you can go straight from your swab sample, you don't need to do any sort of preparation.

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You just add a bit of a label station and you can have your result in a minute.

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So it's significantly quicker than than pretty much anything else out there.

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And and also, of course, and this is still happening in a lab, right?

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So even though we have relatively simple equipment compared to hand PCR machines and extraction hoods and all of that,

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and it is still something that's lab based, carried out by somebody who knows how to operate a microscope, for example.

228
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And so that and you are dealing with live virus, which positively brings its own constraints.

229
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Absolutely. Yes. So one of the the things.

230
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We did it right in the beginning when we're setting up the collaboration of the JRA and was thinking about sort of how to how to go about this.

231
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Because what normally happens is that a subsample will come into the lab and it will

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be inactivated immediately either by heating it or a chemical inactivation step,

233
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because what you want is just the irony of the virus for PCR.

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In our case, what we want is not just the RNA.

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We want to see the actual virus particle. And so those inactivation methods are no good for us.

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And so so what we needed to do was come up with a new way of inactivating the virus that

237
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still left the virus particles intact and obviously rendered the sample safe to handle.

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Because you don't want to be doing all of this in a sealed three, that's a containment level three lab.

239
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And so, again, so grateful to so many great people at the time.

240
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And we had some some a group in the recipient, Petya, in France, who actually had a high containment facility and a microscope within it.

241
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And they agreed to test inactivation method for us.

242
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So and we did that and we actually came up with a method of fixing the virus sample so that

243
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it still maintained the virus particles within within it became completely non-infectious.

244
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And we needed to convince the University Safety Office that this is a good idea and which they did and did agree to.

245
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And then we were allowed to carry on with that, the clinical samples.

246
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And so there was a whole a huge team effort from three different people.

247
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And I should also mention that we say we needed a microscope to take to the to the the hospital to work with.

248
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And because the biochemistry department was shut down because of lockdown, they actually had a microscope imaging facility that wasn't used.

249
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So they agreed that we could take that microscope to the data.

250
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So there there. Absolutely. This so many people that all came together to to make that happen.

251
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And yeah, so we we had a method where the samples would come in and then you just add a

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fixation reagent and then they were safe to use in a lower containment laboratory.

253
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Didn't need to be done in the high containment.

254
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And however, you don't need to do that if you just have the sample and just contain it in a little capsule and it just gets image within that,

255
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which is something that we do now. So it's a so the purpose of the the spin out company is to try to move our assay from something that's done at a

256
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lab bench to something that can be done anywhere and hopefully give you a quick accurate results in just minutes.

257
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So have you you haven't actually tested it in a in a clinical setting, even in with the lab based one?

258
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I mean, you've you've tested it to show that it works.

259
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Yeah. But you haven't had doctors actually using this method.

260
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No. So this is something that the company is now taking for it?

261
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Yeah, we haven't done that. So at what stage is the company when was the company set up and where is it?

262
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So we had the idea back at the end of 2020.

263
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It took us a year to raise the funding for it so that the company is officially incorporated at the end of 2021 as what's it called?

264
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And it's called acoustics. And that's how you pronounce it.

265
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Just outside diagnostics for short.

266
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Yeah. And yes. So so it's only been here a short time, but we've already managed to actually build up a really great team of people.

267
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And what's your role within the company as I'm founder, director and I work as a consultant as well.

268
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And you do that alongside your work or do you?

269
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Yes. So it's been a very busy few as the three of us at the moment.

270
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And number three, I have three children that are nine, six and two.

271
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Yes. Yes. So not a lot of free time, but.

272
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Yeah. And I guess it's an exciting time to be involved in things like that.

273
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And and you just motivated by the fact that hopefully one day we can come up with sort of better alternatives for testing that give quicker results

274
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and aren't linked to expensive labs to something that could potentially be useful in other settings where that kind of facility isn't available.

275
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Is the microscope not too expensive? So the microscope is the lab based microscope, of course, is expensive, but you don't need that.

276
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You can use it for much cheaper and simpler alternative as well.

277
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So what's hurdles in front of, you know, when you get to the point where you can actually.

278
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I've learned a lot about spin ups in the last few years and what's different about working for them.

279
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What essentially it's the financial sector. Yes. So it's a bit of a baptism of fire because I knew absolutely nothing about it in the beginning.

280
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But latterly, actually Oxford as a university, a fantastic support for that kind of things.

281
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Not only have they got a UI who have helped us every step of the way, but they've also helped us with internal funding.

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So it pre translational work, that kind of thing as well.

283
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So we haven't at all been alone. We've been helps a lot, very grateful to the university and everyone that has helped us.

284
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And so I think the the knife of a spin out, it's a continuous cycle of raising funding to reach the next stage.

285
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And so that will be the next hurdle that we'll need to cross.

286
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And I do need to demonstrate something else.

287
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Absolutely. And then, you know, we're going we're progressing down the road to actually make a commercially available product.

288
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So there's all sorts of hurdles along the way. And we need to show that our product works and it works well.

289
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We'll need to get regulatory approval for it and have you go to a factory.

290
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What do we do? We've got some some it's a commercial company space and the with Centre for Innovation that continue.

291
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Yes, right. Yes. Yes, I did support that. Yes. Yeah.

292
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And and and various kind of business partners and stuff as well.

293
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And we do some aspects of it so and.

294
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And this. Yes. So this includes both the the labelling, the microscopy and the like aspect.

295
00:34:17,040 --> 00:34:21,300
Yes, it does. Yeah. Yes. So it was also still under development as it will.

296
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Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we're anywhere. You know, we're not near the final complete product, so we still definitely have an R&D site.

297
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And yeah, my lab is still working on aspects of this as well.

298
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Um, from an academic interest point of view, when you say my lab, yes.

299
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Do you mean do you still have a lab here? So I still have is I did one like we all went lab.

300
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Yes. We were trying meetings and things, but I have two students and a postdoc and two master's students who are based at Oxford still.

301
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And as well as the people that are based primarily at work.

302
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Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So.

303
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So yes, going out, it's changing tack slightly now.

304
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And how did working in lockdown impact on what you were able to do quite apart from the fact that you were supposed to be on maternity leave?

305
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Yeah. So so I think, yeah, in some ways we were really lucky that we actually could carry on working.

306
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I really feel for the people that, you know,

307
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the labs just got shut down and actually students and staff that couldn't access the labs and couldn't do the work.

308
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So at least we were able to keep going. And yeah, that was really good, obviously.

309
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And personally, I think a challenging time for everybody trying to work under those conditions and

310
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you're trying to really get things done as quickly as possible kind of thing.

311
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But yeah, they're all they're all great. The whole whole team, the kids and everyone else and students, people working the lab, fantastic.

312
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And I think there was a real kind of a feeling of collaboration and working together

313
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and people helping each other out and so trying to do something for the greater good.

314
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So that came out of it. That's interesting. A lot of people have said that.

315
00:36:27,370 --> 00:36:32,770
Yeah, I do. Did you feel that that was distinctively different from the way academic work normally happens?

316
00:36:32,800 --> 00:36:44,260
Yeah, I think so. I mean, so I think I've been at Oxford a long time before that and there was always a a good collaboration.

317
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You know, people, networks and people work together, but nothing on the scale of what happened due to COVID.

318
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I think that there was really a sense of everybody coming together and nobody was sort of out to do it too,

319
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because they wanted to publish a paper or anything like that.

320
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Everyone was doing it because it needed to be done and trying to help each other out,

321
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providing samples to each other for us, people, helping us by learning us and microscope things like that.

322
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And so so definitely that that's true that that happened.

323
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And do you think any of that will survive in a post-pandemic era?

324
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I hope so. And like, it's a good way to get things done.

325
00:37:29,380 --> 00:37:33,910
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I suppose what it's shown is that that can happen.

326
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And these huge interdisciplinary efforts to solve problems that COVID has has through not I.

327
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I don't think they will disappear any time soon. And I think that, in fact, you know,

328
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there's sort of funding being poured into it and things for groups to work together and try and solve problems that are still not going away.

329
00:37:55,480 --> 00:38:00,790
Right. Things like long pavement, things like that that still need to be to be worked on in research.

330
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And so. So. So I think for you personally,

331
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people personally who researches they've seen how how quickly things can work if everyone comes together and is focussed on one goal.

332
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So I think that will change how people kind of put it together I think as well.

333
00:38:20,230 --> 00:38:25,740
You did mention in passing that you're involved in teaching. So how was that impacted by and.

334
00:38:25,900 --> 00:38:36,690
Well, I mean, so so we all learned very quickly how to do teaching online, which is not nearly as fun as teaching in-person.

335
00:38:38,320 --> 00:38:42,219
But yeah, I mean, it was just just how it had to be.

336
00:38:42,220 --> 00:38:47,290
Right, is just something that we had to do and. Yeah.

337
00:38:52,090 --> 00:38:55,030
And did you again, this is just something I've asked everybody.

338
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Did you were you personally did you personally feel threatened by the possibility of catching the infection or that people around you might do so,

339
00:39:04,720 --> 00:39:09,580
people close to you? I think before there was a vaccine, definitely.

340
00:39:09,970 --> 00:39:13,090
I was I was scared for my parents.

341
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We didn't see them at all. And the benefits of it? No, they're not that they live not far from us.

342
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And normally they help me out massively with looking after my children and I really rely on them for a lot of help.

343
00:39:24,940 --> 00:39:30,220
And I was too scared to to see them, especially because it's going and working in the jail.

344
00:39:30,640 --> 00:39:37,240
So. And yeah, actually, the diagnostic laboratories in the jail are on the seventh floor.

345
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So you have to either go in the lift or walk up seven flights of stairs.

346
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So there were definitely times I felt pretty vulnerable doing that.

347
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And, and so I didn't see them. But it was also just a time when it would have been great to have some extra support children and, and stuff.

348
00:39:55,630 --> 00:40:02,440
So. So, yes, I did. I think that vaccine coming along really changed that.

349
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So as soon as we were vaccinated that.

350
00:40:07,750 --> 00:40:16,180
Much more relaxed about it. But definitely for that first year I was worried about I was worried that the children get insane and.

351
00:40:16,510 --> 00:40:27,319
Yeah. And. So do you think the fact that I mean, obviously it was a worrying time,

352
00:40:27,320 --> 00:40:33,620
but do you think the fact that you were working on a problem that could potentially help help to support your own well-being?

353
00:40:34,260 --> 00:40:36,010
Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

354
00:40:36,050 --> 00:40:49,010
No, it it so it wasn't a very easy time actually thinking that you might be doing something that even a very tiny thing to try and help you,

355
00:40:49,040 --> 00:40:52,190
but that that's kind of what drives you to do it.

356
00:40:52,340 --> 00:40:56,390
So, yeah, definitely. And what sort of animals were you doing?

357
00:40:57,290 --> 00:41:10,159
Who said, yeah, we were, you know, at one stage we were doing very, very long hours and here we went without stopping basically.

358
00:41:10,160 --> 00:41:15,200
And that the whole of the whole of 2020 is pretty much a blur.

359
00:41:15,260 --> 00:41:25,280
I don't remember much of it, but they didn't want an owner to say, well, say, yeah, it was a small baby, not the most sleep.

360
00:41:25,730 --> 00:41:35,150
And so I'd often just work at night when the kids were in bed and stuff quick, like through the night and big.

361
00:41:35,600 --> 00:41:40,580
I mean, I'm not the only one who went through that. In fact, I'm sure people went through a lot worse than I did.

362
00:41:41,090 --> 00:41:47,890
And I think I think, yeah, for people that are on the front line of it, this is scientists working on the vaccine and stuff.

363
00:41:47,900 --> 00:41:51,950
I can't even imagine what they've been through. And so and yeah.

364
00:41:53,380 --> 00:41:57,100
So again, this is a side question.

365
00:41:57,310 --> 00:42:01,030
Has the work raised new questions that you were interested in exploring?

366
00:42:01,390 --> 00:42:02,360
Yeah, definitely.

367
00:42:02,380 --> 00:42:11,770
I mean, I think we have a general interest in improving diagnostics and trying to come up with better ways and quicker ways of doing it.

368
00:42:11,770 --> 00:42:17,470
And, you know, was thinking about states. And the only thing that we have on we've got other projects in the lab.

369
00:42:18,510 --> 00:42:29,280
And I think if anything has just just cemented my my aim of trying to come up with better, better ways of doing things in PET before.

370
00:42:29,440 --> 00:42:36,910
So that's something that we will continue to, to, to, to chase after as much as we can.

371
00:42:37,390 --> 00:42:46,510
And do they have a translational focus? Some of them might are the ones that a I think that everything we do is to try and understand

372
00:42:46,510 --> 00:42:53,350
more about viruses and how they copy themselves and how they interact with host host.

373
00:42:53,350 --> 00:42:57,730
And the thinking behind that is that everything that we learn,

374
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:04,719
every little bit of information there helps us to come up with a way to target them or make a drug

375
00:43:04,720 --> 00:43:12,430
that works against that particular aspect of it or is in a new way of of seeing that particular part.

376
00:43:12,470 --> 00:43:18,520
So I think everything we do is driven by a desire to have something concrete out of it

377
00:43:18,520 --> 00:43:24,970
that will eventually help us with all the challenges that the viruses and pandemics bring.

378
00:43:25,630 --> 00:43:34,840
And yet. And has the experience of working through the pandemic changed your attitude to work in any way,

379
00:43:34,860 --> 00:43:38,680
and what other things you'd like to see change in the future?

380
00:43:44,570 --> 00:43:55,520
I suppose it's just been it's been very busy in a period of really, really hard work, but it's not something that I would have chosen not to do say.

381
00:43:56,030 --> 00:44:03,230
And I don't think there's anything that I would change if it was happening in mine.

382
00:44:03,830 --> 00:44:07,630
Yeah. Good. Did that answer the question?