Okay. So can you just give me your name and your title?
So I'm Richard Cornel. I'm the Nutty Professor of clinical medicine and head of the Department of Medicine.
Okay, so without telling me your whole life story, can you just give me a sort of the headlines of how you got to where you are now?
Yeah. So, uh, so I'm from the Isle of Wight, so I went to a local school in the Isle of Wight.
And, um, then when I was 18, I went to medical school in Cambridge.
I went to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Um, and then from uh, Cambridge I came across to Oxford, um, and I was at Baylor College here for three years as a clinical student.
Once I qualified, um, I worked here, um, in this attached actually the same department to David Weatherill as a houseman.
And then I went to the junior medical jobs in London, and then I came back here and did a Ph.D. in Dphil in in genetics, in the genetics of diabetes.
And that then persuaded me to become an immunologist.
So I, after I'd been back in London for another couple of years, um, training at Hammersmith as a,
as a doctor in general in renal medicine, I went to Stanford and I was a, um, something staffer for a few years working in the laboratory.
Chris Goodenough So was that a purely research post or theory?
I wasn't doing medicine, and then I came back here.
I was funded to do that by the Wellcome Trust.
Then I came back here and I um, and I finished my clinical training, became a consultant, an honorary consultant on the religion.
And, um, and then I became a welcome senior fellow clinical fellow in the department with an interest in autoimmune diseases.
And you know why the, the body doesn't attack itself.
You know what controls friendly fire.
So, yeah, so let's just unpack that a little bit more because you said earlier that that doing or developing diabetes meant becoming an immunologist.
So for the benefit of people who don't know. Yes. Why what has diabetes got to do with immunology?
So the thought of diabetes, I was interested in my my supervisor with John Jonathon was interdependent type one diabetes,
which is a disease typically in young people where the body's immune system destroys the the
beta cells in the pancreas that produces the and as a result you're not producing any insulin.
And and so you've become diabetic and you can't control your blood glucose levels.
And so I was interested then in the in how in the genetics of that.
And we had a kind of fairly simple idea that there would be relatively few genes causing this.
And so we were modelling this and it turned out by the time I'd finished the three years that,
that it was clear that there were lots of genes involved in making people susceptible to to diabetes.
And it seemed to be a very complicated problem.
And so I decided that rather than studying the genes, I would like to study the mechanisms that that causes.
I thought that would be a better way to understand autoimmune disease.
And to do that, I needed to move from genetics to understanding the immunology and, if you like, the pathology of the disease.
And so that's why I went to to Stanford to train in immunology.
And then when I came back,
I tried to combine the two bits to make models of of autoimmune diseases and the pathways involved in those and study them using immunology.
And so I continued that. I basically continued that through.
And I still I'm still working on that, on that problem. And, you know, I've become a bit more translational as the time has gone by.
So, um, and now, uh, or recently with Simon Davis is a colleague of mine.
We've, we've, we've started to create new drugs that might, we think, ameliorate some of these diseases.
We, we started a company to make that happen. And yeah.
So what of the mode of action of those drugs?
Well, so, so one of the big discoveries in medicine in the last ten years has been the the way
in which you can treat cancer by blocking receptors called checkpoint receptors.
And this has transformed some cancers like uh, um, malignant melanoma for subpopulation of people.
It can be curative for people even with widespread disease.
Um, and so the way in which those work is that these receptors are on white blood cells and they interact with, um, uh, uh, receptors that are on our.
Issues which are basically a kind of not eat, don't eat me, don't destroy me, signal on our own cells.
And when they interact with the receptors on the white blood cells, they give a signal to the white blood cells to turn them off.
And cancers expresses the the the proteins that bind these receptors and white blood cells in abundance.
And so if you so it was discovered that and this won the Nobel Prize.
If you block those those interactions with an antibody, so just disrupt those interactions,
then the white blood cells no longer get the signal to be inactivated. They get activated and then they can kill the cancer.
And that's how this checkpoint antagonism works.
And so that's very exciting in that it really transformed the way we think about cancer.
So what we thought was Simon Davis and I was I mean, it's really an idea that came from Simons.
This is really his idea that if you were to activate those inhibitory receptors with antibodies,
you could kind of do the opposite and you could actually mimic the cell,
the the proteins on your cells and turn off the white blood cells therapeutically.
And that would be useful in inflammatory diseases or autoimmune diseases,
because you could take somebody who's got an autoimmune disease and you could just tickle the immune system into a new state of slight inactivity,
which might then prevent getting the disease. Because at the moment,
the way we treat these autoimmune diseases is we we give them pretty much blunderbuss treatments
that turn off all the immune response and that that makes them very susceptible to infection.
So we want more refined and specific treatments.
And one of the interesting things about these these protein protein interactions with the checkpoint is that that
there are around about 70 of these different receptors and they're distributed in different tissues and so on.
So there might be possible there could be quite like that you'd be able to turn off.
If this works, you'll be able to turn off specific responses in different tissues.
And so, so yeah. So it's a, it's a wonderful array of potential targets.
And so we've been trying to work on that. But that's really the, the, the product of all these years of working on different models.
Um, so in the case of the collaboration with Simon, he's the sort of, he,
he is the originator of this idea of working on proteins and in my lab has the models in order to develop the ideas.
And so that's how we have, we've got to where we are and by more consuming lab based lab based models and mouse models.
Yeah.
Well, so that you mentioned in your title at the beginning that you also had a department of this department and of the Department of Medicine is,
I read, the largest department of medicine in Europe.
What made you given that you had such a busy and productive research career, decided you wanted to step into an administrative role like that?
Well, I started taking on different administrative roles before this.
I, um, I've been director of graduate studies and then I was the deputy head of the division.
Um, and, and I, you know, enjoyed that.
I mean, one of the things that I really like is I really love other, you know, discovering about other people's research,
you know, the, you know, the problem with your, the problem with being a, uh,
in a principal investigator in your own lab is that you can quite easily become, feel limited as time has gone by,
you know, become much more interested in collaborating with other people and doing more and more things.
Um, and so, uh, it seemed a kind of natural progression to sort of be the easiest way to get involved with more other activity is to take other roles.
And, you know, the being, the number of professor of medicine is just a fantastic opportunity to interact with a whole lot of people.
I don't know that we're necessarily the biggest department. I mean, we're probably the biggest department by research income.
I mean, we have, um, we have around about, uh, probably around about $1,000,000,000 of Grant Holdings, which is,
which is big for a department, it's not for company, but so it's because most of those will be rolling over a five year period.
And we have a research income now, which is around about £220 million a year.
And it's growing a lot, you know, and when I, I became a professor in 2019, you know, before the pandemic, not long before the pandemic in July 2019.
And, and, um, you know, I see that Peter Ratcliffe was the last one.
And at that point I think our income's about 150 million a year.
So. So the department's growing a lot. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's certainly the, the department which has the,
the biggest global projection, I think, of any Department of Medicine in the world.
Yeah. I was going to ask you what? Kind of range of things. Does it include?
I mean, there are some as you say, it's part of the medical sciences division, which has other departments in it.
Yes, but the Department of Medicine by itself has got lots and lots and lots of different units that cover quite a wide range.
Can you can you just give me some sense of the breadth?
Yes. So, I mean, the the we went to 16 departments, but just happened to be the biggest department in the university.
I mean, the the breadth is both in the clinical kind of specialities that we cover.
That's a that's a very traditional way of looking at the department for the breadth is
also in the range of research activities from basic research through to clinical trials.
So you can look at it both ways. So we do very fundamental research and we do clinical trials and develop drugs.
And on the clinical side, we cover specialities that range from respiratory medicine, renal medicine,
gastrointestinal medicine, general medicine, infectious diseases is one of the things we're most famous for.
And as part of that is, is tropical medicine, which, um, you know,
has been one of the distinctive features of the department since Sir David Weatherall was another
professor of medicine and established these overseas units in the overseas units in in the 1980s,
essentially four or five. There are there are there are three main units, one in a in in Kenya, one in Thailand and one in Vietnam.
But then they have subsidiary units which are also fully staffed by A&M Oxford staff in, in Indonesia, uh, in Lao in Cambodia, um, Nepal, um,
we even have a unit in Myanmar, um, and we have other units in that that are, we have one, we even have one in the, in the, in the, in Kinshasa.
And uh, and we have a unit in, in Bangladesh has a lot of activity from those units and we have around about 2000 staff associated with those.
And, and somewhere around about, uh, one and a half thousand staff in Oxford.
So you can see the preponderance of activities very is both, um, and we,
we have around about 150, I think 153 research collaborations with separate overseas countries.
So in addition to that, there's just a lot of other activity.
Um, and the other thing that I think is distinct about that is that each of those overseas collaborations is a partnership with,
with some other organisation entities.
So for example, in, in Kenya, we, our partnership is with the Kenyan Medical Research Institute,
which is a government run organisation for medical research in Kenya,
in, uh, in Thailand our collaboration is with Marriott, all the university that's a principal collaboration.
And then in Vietnam our collaboration is one with, um, a hospital for infectious diseases, um, so, you know, essentially a government run hospital.
And so each of those is, you know, some sort of collaboration. We don't we don't in the department do a clinical delivery.
Well, pretty much not. We do a little bit, I must say, in on the the border with with Myanmar, where we where the Korean are.
And we we do both research there and there is a bit of a clinical delivery, um, which, which we kind of manage.
But the general principle is we don't do that, we, we collaborate with the NHS or other health care delivery organisations.
I think that's a really important point actually.
Um, so we do support the teaching, the medical students and we do our research and our teaching elsewhere.
Um, but we're not directly involved in, we partner up and we also partner of course with a lot of other organisations,
including commercial organisations and advise governments and so on.
So there's just a huge amount of activity. The number of prison department imprints for investigators is, is around about 200.
Um, I don't think that seems like a large number or not, but for me it doesn't feel like a large number because I,
you know, I know pretty much I know many of them very well.
I know all of them. Um, and so the department is divided up into institutes, centres and units.
Um, and so the overseas would be separate units in the department.
And then we have a series of units in Oxford and uh, they, they each have a.
Director. But but my sense of the department is that it's quite a flat structure that and I think
this is typical of the university as a whole that we we we are not terribly hierarchical.
I mean, I don't think that would ever be tolerated in Oxford. It was quite devolved anyway.
It is. Well, the devolution is another important thing about the way in which we operate.
And in talking about the pandemic, that becomes really important because speed of action depends on on,
you know, your loyalty to acting and having that devolved.
And one of the most important things and things that distinguishes us from other universities, for example,
Cambridge, is that the overheads from the grants, which is essentially what we depend upon for India,
95% of our income comes from research that that's very atypical from a medical
department because most of the medical device rely very heavily on teaching income,
but also just 5%. And, and so the money that we, we can deploy in support of activities comes from the overheads, from our grant.
And what happens in many universities is those overheads are absorbed to the centre
and then the departments apply for a budget each year against the strategic targets.
What happens in Oxford is that the money flows to the department and then we decide on the
strategy directly directing the central university charges for our utilities and other things.
And so that gives us the flexibility to decide what our strategy is.
And we're not always being pushed back by central concerns or the other,
but it's the eat what you kill principle that Sir John Bell you know he was also so so
last but one national Christmas with John Bell before he became the richest professor.
And I think he was kind of really responsible for the eat what you kill principle, which is which is actually is really important.
John's done a lot of great things for the university, but I think almost his most important contribution is that because it means that we, you know,
we're able to respond quickly and we don't have to go through some central hierarchy with the with people who don't understand the science.
So when that happens, the the strategic imperatives are not driven by the scientific or in our case, the, you know, the medical need as we see it.
It's it's driven by well, often just by the need to balance the budgets, you know, and competing interests from other departments.
I mean, we still have to balance the budget. And if you're a deficit department, it doesn't help you for the for this department,
because we keep on growing and generating more things then and taking risks.
We were able to continue to grow our income and it enables you to take risks.
So if you, if you have a, um, in order to grow and be successful, you've got to take risks.
And this system in Oxford allows you to take some risks, and that's important.
And that also played out in the pandemic.
We took risks in order to support things, um, which, which, which, if we had to refer, we would never have been able to do so.
Yeah, that's right. We're just coming to that. So we finally got to due to the pandemic.
So, I mean, you were obviously extremely well placed to be alert to what was going on in China.
Just tell me the story of how you first heard about it and and how the department very quickly became involved.
Yes. So. One of the we were all we were all somewhat aware of it, I think, in early January, some more than others.
Um, the, the, the key thing for me was, was I saw it, which is, you know,
an organisation that was originally set up by can be fairer with Peter Horby and
perhaps to spell that out I have interviewed Peter so I've got it somewhere.
Yes. So, yes.
So I. Sarich is the international Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium.
That's it. And yeah, and it was founded around 2009, thereabouts, by Jeremy and Peter.
Peter Horby then became its director when Jeremy moved to the to the Wellcome Trust.
Peter's an interesting person in that he was, um, when Jeremy was the director of the, our unit in, in Ho Chi Minh City.
Peter was a director of a sort of subsidiary unit in, in Hanoi.
And Peter had, uh, had worked on the first pandemic, and he'd also worked on bird flu.
And, um, and so he, he had this long interested in pandemics.
It came in, so he became Director Vasari. I saw that notion around.
I saw Eric, which was a a collaboration of people in multiple countries,
was to develop pre-pandemic preparedness and to and so when it when a pandemic struck,
you wouldn't be able to put in place the the the protocols, the governance, the trials and everything else.
And so you needed to have that ready to go.
And so when the when the the the current pandemic, the current source of virus hit Wuhan, that they started using the SA protocol straightaway.
And so Peter, the director of our site, was very closely connected with them.
And in fact the first publication that came out of, um, on the, on the, uh, on the new virus, what were, you know, the publication use the protocols.
And the first review involved. Peter was a co-author of the first review.
So he was, you know, had that, that entry point from Peter.
And so I think it was around about it was it was around about the 20th of January or something like that that Peter came and said,
you know, it's just not going away. It's escaped. And so we needed to take some action.
And so that's when we, that's when I kicked off the, the, um, meetings, you know,
in the department and I, and of course I involved other departments as well.
But we had a meeting on the 30th of, of, of January.
Um, and just yes, I'd like to know more about that meeting.
Yeah. Everybody I've interviewed has mentioned it. So. So who, who did you invite?
So, um, it wasn't a very big group.
The people who went. Where did it take place? It took out all this stuff. Yes.
Okay. So so I wrote to everybody on the 20th of January, I think,
asking everybody to come or a group of people to come together to to work out coordination, resources and, you know, communication.
And, you know, what we were going to do, um, and, uh,
and so the meeting was held in the conference room at the Welcome Centre for Human Genetics and at the, the, the,
at the meeting we had Peter Horby who was going to tell us about had trials and W.H.O. and database and so we had Sara Gilbert,
um, Alan Townsend, um, has long interested in vaccines, you know,
Alan probably Guy Thwaites, who's the director of the unit in Vietnam, he was over here, so,
so he came along and Derek Crook and Tim Peto, who were both in the NDA but also practising in the hospital,
came to talk us about, um, you know, preparedness within the hospital at that time because,
you know, there wasn't any nothing, there'd be no action in the UK.
And we had Dave Stewart and Yvonne Gaines from Structural Biology at Tao Dong.
You also had connections with China, um, Christoph Fraser and John Todt, because we knew they were interested in pathogen sequencing.
Christoph Fraser had done a lot of pathogen sequencing for HIV in Africa, so he had a pretty than that.
And then Gavin Scruton, who's at the Medical Sciences Division, came and John Bell came to that meeting.
And I think we, we, we had other people from the divisional office later with the, there, um, um, and.
I think Alison Brindle was there from, um, from, um, from divisional comms.
Anyway, we, we met and um, Chris McIntyre was also there from the comms team.
So we met and we just had an hours meeting and just one hour and just whittled through,
um, uh, the status quo, you know, where we were at and what we could do forward.
And I might the, the, the things that were key,
I think at that meeting that came out of that meeting was the were to first of all, Sarah told us that she'd been staff.
We knew Sarah had been working on the, on the, the nurse, uh, vaccine.
And so she told us that she'd got, that she got, uh, a, you know,
a prototype vaccine for this underway, she and Teresa LAMB But, but it was her really driving it.
Theresa LAMB was also in India at that time. She's actually next post-doc of mine.
And so, um, and so, um, so they, they'd got that underway, but they didn't.
The key thing was they didn't have any, um, they needed to, they hadn't got any funding from Cepi.
So Cepi had had had funded protein and RNA and, and a viral vaccine.
I think they had three come across cepi before, but we should just spell that again now.
It's like, you know, the Coalition for Epidemic.
No, um, excuse me. For something else. I'm sorry.
I'm. I'm blanking, too. Um, this is where we need to pause.
Never mind. I we have talked about setting a lot in the past years.
Other people. So I do have it. I have a notebook somewhere. Yeah, I'm embarrassing.
Anyway, anyway, he had not. It's a anyway it's a body that funds vaccines.
Exactly. Yes. And so and so. So Cepi had not funded areas, in fact she had no she had no funding for so her vaccine.
And so we but she needed to to fund she needed to fund the the the she needed to get manufacturing in line.
And there was a there was a big concern that, that we wouldn't be able to get, um, the way everybody was wanting manufacturing capacity.
And so she wanted to fund it.
She needed to sign an agreement with a company called Advent, which was in Italy, and that was going to cost you £1,000,000 to sign the deal.
Um, and so we were kind of confident as a group that we would be able to, um, that she would be able to get funding down the line.
But we needed to keep the step so that one of the key actions was we agreed that she
should have £1,000,000 of funding from the department to to underwrite the contract.
So that was it. That was one of the key decisions. Um, of course, you know, we, that money came back later because we got funding.
So, but, but that's an example I think junior of how that, that we were to take action quickly.
Um and so the second thing that, that we did on that meeting was we knew that um, that the de Stuart told us that the,
the, the National Synchrotron, the, for looking at the protein structures in China was being maintained.
So they didn't have that capacity.
So he, he turned over a diamond to looking at the structures from the virus in collaboration with his longstanding collaborators of people in China.
And so we were getting the sequences now. I mean, it's very different from the first source because from my perspective, you know,
the Chinese were very open about this and they were communicating with the world very rapidly.
Um, in fact, the head of the China CDC at the time Centre for Disease Control Account was George GAO, you know, who's a former student.
Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, I used to share a I used to share an office with George GAO back in the day.
And, and so he was when the data was flowing.
And so we were able to make the proteins and what they was and then they were running those on Diamond.
So those are two kind of strategic decisions at that meeting and and not much else was going on anyway.
I mean, we were a bit, you know, we were we were a bit perplexed.
I mean, I wrote straight one of the other things that was I was I wrote to Jeremy Ferrer after the meeting,
uh, you know, he said, Oh yeah, we, the welcomes on the case. But actually there was no funding coming from anywhere at that time.
Um, and yeah, so that's how we kicked it off.
And then we agreed that we would have weekly meetings. So, um, we had, we had a meeting in a week's time and, and then those meetings continued.
Um, I mean, I mean this for a year, I think after a year I stopped caring them and.
At that point, Peter Horby took over because at that point we decided we needed to make something more sustainable in pandemic sciences.
And it seemed right. But at the peak, we were getting sort of 50 people or so, and they were to our meetings once a week.
They were fantastic, actually, the collaboration, because it brought everybody together.
And so that was a small nucleus.
But then they grew to yeah. And uh, yeah, that was, um, that was a high point for me, those meetings.
And after the meetings, you know, came a whole series of, a whole series of joint activities.
So we had, um. I mean, we had, uh, I mean, we had the vaccine, um, and quite rapidly we pulled in 90, pulled out because we did the trials.
Um, so he, he, he, I mean, he, he let that be.
Sara said that the vaccine thing, you know, I think that went, um, we, of course, we were involved in, in the, the planning for the manufacturing.
But it kind quick, quickly became clear to me that we were never going to be able to, to do that.
I mean, not at the scale. I mean, at the Sandy Douglas, he's one of the junior investigators.
He he did a fantastic job putting that together and that that then translate was transferred to AstraZeneca.
So they had a huge advantage because he put all the the core manufacturing in place.
And and we're one of the I mean, this was on top of our own clinical BIOMANUFACTURING facility, which was being run by Cath Green.
It must have. I've interviewed Cath and Sandy and and Carina Jo.
Yeah. So, so and I, they were lined up.
I mean they're all really special people and they just did a fantastic job.
So, um, you know, the clinical biomanufacturing facility, you know, that played a very special part in getting things underway for us.
So. Yeah. So the, the vaccine thing was, was going very well.
There were, um. It soon became clear, though, that we wouldn't have the capacity, I think,
to do it and that that out of that came that the negotiations with AstraZeneca.
And were you involved in. No, I wasn't directly involved in those. John Bell really led those.
So I was very peripheral to the negotiations.
What I was more in for. I mean, you need to talk to John and I have three times.
Yeah. I mean, he will have his own perspective on all of that.
And what I was involved in was and I remember after that,
the whole issue of the contractual issues with the with AstraZeneca that fell back on the department.
And so one of the one of the things the best things I did was I brought in Richard Wicky, who, you know, previously ran research.
He's retired. He's retired. But he ran research services for the to the University Medical Sciences.
You know him, I think he, uh, he and most, um, in from my perspective, brilliant.
I mean, he, when, you know, he ran, we had the best or we probably still do the best research services in the country.
And a lot of that was put in place by Richard.
And so as soon as I could see this whole thing just coming to pieces in what I mean,
there's always an issue with the department is that the things that we do well are often on a small scale with individuals trying to
put together these big things that at speed was challenging for us and and the aim of any department could do it because of our size.
But but even then it became rather challenging.
And and so, Richard, we brought I brought Richard in to help us to organise all the contractual issues,
because that's what he did in research services in relation to AstraZeneca that completely transformed things.
So then we were able to get that that underway. So I would suggest, you know, Richard is a good person to, to, to, to speak to.
[INAUDIBLE] have his own perspective on these things. And so he sorted all that stuff out and he was, he, he was a, um,
he was a person of trust within the university so that a lot of the issues relating to who was doing what and so on,
he could sort it out without me getting involved. So that that was just the transition to A-Z.
The other things that came up in the, um, around the vaccine, there were, there was a, there was a significant number of people in the,
in the sort of, if you call it the oversight group or the collaborative group who were concerned that the vaccine might make things worse.
Uh, uh, Sara Gilbert and Adrian, um, were convinced that there would be no harm to it.
It would be just absolutely fine. But there were a number of people because when vaccines were developed against the first cells virus,
that some of these viruses had adverse effects in models.
Some of these vaccines. Yeah. Yes.
And so there was an idea that that which wasn't completely unreasonable that the vaccine might somehow, uh, create immune complexes.
It might the antibodies might bind to the, to the, the vaccine and in some way trigger an autoimmune process or something like that.
Everything within that first six months seems very compressed.
But but I think, you know, the delay did play out in that, um, that Andy wasn't able to complete the trial within the first wave.
So the that, I mean, he, he had Andy will know the people she referred to Andy's conversations with you.
But, but, you know, he'd set up various sites in the UK, obviously, but South Africa and other places.
And as it turned out, the trial was not completed at the end of the first wave.
And then we of course, it had gone away and then we waited.
And although he was the first we were the first to get going with our trial.
The, uh, you know, Pfizer Biontech, they did it.
They started later. They hit a different wave in different countries.
And so that meant they came, their trial results came a few weeks before us.
So I think it did have an impact on, you know, I guess who came first introducing their data.
But, um, yeah, it was a safe way to proceed, I think.
Um, I suspect that, that, um, that if you asked Adrian Hill that he would still say, well, that, you know, it was obviously going to be safe.
But, but, but anyway, that, that I remember that being one of the issues, um, and quite, quite contentious between some different people.
Um, so that was a kind of vaccine thing.
The other, the other thing that I remember early on is that we were scrabbling around for ideas to try and control things.
Um. I didn't think that the the the screening, the DNA, you know, the the sorry, the sorry,
the, the viral genome sequencing and sequencing was, um, was was very effective.
Um, and. You know, the the the concentrating that in these in these laboratories, it didn't seem to be working to us.
We were asked to, um. This is the Lighthouse Labs.
The Lighthouse Lab? Yes. I mean, they essentially did serology. Well, it wasn't serology.
It was the it was the the just screening the screening the virus for the virus itself, the antibody tests.
And so those, those, um, we were asked to supply our equipment to help them to do those.
They were basically using PCR. So we, we sent over the equipment.
But I and so we, we didn't try to replace that.
The crick, for example, they made a there was quite a big fair amount of publicity from Paul Nurse about how they were doing the.
Yes, they were doing their own, you know, sequencing detection of the viruses as a contribution.
But, you know, to my mind, that seemed pretty paltry. Um, you know, it needed to be done systematically and, and at scale.
And so we, we decided not to get involved in that.
And, um, instead we, we decided that we would try and do something with serology because immune responses were a thing.
I mean, it's to actually to step back a bit. We did do a lot of sequencing later, um,
and we did a lot of sequencing for the government and we did a lot of sequencing for a lot of the initiatives that were being done around the country,
including I remember once having to, to do a whole load of stuff the following Christmas Eve in another, you know, to bail people out.
So we did quite a lot, but that wasn't I didn't feel that was the main thing we could contribute.
And so we decided that we would try and do the antibody responses.
Um, and so we triggered, we, we initiated a subgroup, uh, um, which again, I chaired initially,
um, and, and, and later on Yvonne Jones chaired and I stepped back from that.
But for the, but the idea was that we would create um, and allies a platform so an enzyme linked so, so that we could, um,
so we could detect people who'd been infected initially, um, and count the number because it was, it was unclear how many people were being infected.
Um, and, and then we could track the response to the vaccine later.
And so we, we said this is one of the things which I don't think has been really emphasised enough in the, in the pandemic.
So, um, we, we brought together a group of people who were interested in, in data management so that Brian Marston was interested in data management.
So he, he put together a platform that would take samples from the,
the NHS um and we'd work out how they could be processed and then the data could be analysed in
such a way that that confidentiality and so on was properly observed in their proper government.
So he put together that there were patients who were coming in and these were these these were going to be samples that would be sent,
but they could be patients. But these are samples. So this is not the onus.
This has this is the way. Yeah, this is and it is the onus.
Yeah. Yeah. So so yes.
So one of the approaches stepped back about the Office of National Statistics Survey.
That was that that was being run by Sarah Walker. Yes, I've interviewed her.
And so, uh, and yeah, she rightly got an OBE for that.
I mean, she's, she's still doing this survey, you know, exhausted, I think that she's still doing it.
Um, and so she was running a survey looking at the frequency of the, of detection of the virus, and then the serology was added to that.
Um, so, but, you know, offsetting that up was, was not just motivated by trying to help Sarah.
It would be was, it was this kind of separate enterprise. But of course, you know, it was part and parcel of the same.
And so yeah, we put together. Brian And then the other key people were Derek Crook you have done him.
So Derek uh, Derek was doing a ton of other stuff, so he was testing all the lateral flow tests for, for the government.
And the thing that made that possible is that we were collecting samples.
So one of the junior doctors he called, Alex MENSAH, was charged with collecting samples and he was in charge of that.
So he was collecting samples from people who've been infected.
Um, and, uh, and then Derek was taking those and using them to, to, uh, to test these different, um, devices.
Um, we were. We were. And,
and and so then Derek was able then to provide us with samples for of people that we knew had been infected in order to test the serology platform.
So that was important. The other people involved were Gavin Street.
And so Gavin had started to, um, to.
So we, we'd asked Gavin could because he'd been working on dengue and made antibodies,
we decided that he would be the right person to, to start making antibodies against, uh, the cloning, our antibodies.
So he started doing that and then those antibodies were then used as standards for making the, the platform.
And the other thing that we were able to do was make proteins because as I mentioned before,
the structural biologists were making these proteins anyway to study the structures and they Stuart was doing that.
And so he made the, uh, we, we made proteins and so we had the ingredients for making these tests.
And so we started, we, we trialled the proteins that were being made with proteins from the very specific.
Yeah, they were the spike protein, the thing, the spike proteins on the surface of the virus that we wanted to, uh,
which in an effective vaccine we thought then later turned out to be true, you could block that interaction and stop the virus infecting you.
That would be the basis of the immunity against the virus. And so and so we the test is basically put the, the, the, um,
you cover plates or little wells in plates with the on a microscopic scale, the, with the, the protein.
And then you come in with the serum from the patients and see whether they've got antibodies that bind to.
And then you take those and you, you make it that as a fluorescent output.
And so, um, so we passed that and then we want to do it at scale.
We, we partnered up with a company called Thermo Fisher Scientific, which is a,
which is the biggest supplier of, of, of medical equipment and reagents sort of worldwide.
And we were very lucky that because, um, John Bell put me in touch with, um.
Mark Stevenson, who was the chief operating officer.
He's a he's a somebody from the UK, but of course based in the States.
And we already had a collaboration with him because we were thinking before I was trying
to set up something before the pandemic with thermo fisher and structural biology.
So one of the really into technologies is I'm going to go a bit long here,
but that one into technologies, I don't mind the deadline because I think so.
Yeah. So one of the, one of the interesting technologies that we're trying to develop is something called cryo electron microscopy tomography.
And this is being developed at the Rosalind Franklin Institute in on the Holywell campus and in other locations.
And these machines are these are electron microscope,
special electron microscopes with special platforms that can look at the structure of cells in 3D.
So electron microscopy, you know, classically is in 2D. But these look at the structure in 3D.
So you can look inside cells and look at viruses and all sorts of things in their life.
So it's going to be transformative and very expensive, like Venus, like millions of pounds.
But we wanted to do this because one of the special things that structure biology does here is we can look at pathogens,
you know, in a containment lab, and we want to do that.
And it's still it's still an aspiration for us, but we're moving towards it.
So in order to do that, we decided we would team up with Thermo Fisher anyway because they make their microscopes.
And so we already had a bit of a collaboration going with an official. So when it when this serology thing turned up, we thought, well, well,
I thought we will contact Mark Stephenson and see if they can help us out and, and particularly to, um, to automate the process.
And then that brings me to another person I should have mentioned called Daniel Ebner, who runs it.
You talk to him? Yeah, he runs a robotic robotics for us and he helped us to set up the the to automate it in its early stages and but you know
we realised we would have to be running this 24 seven sort of service in order to survey the whole of the UK population.
And so we talked to Thermo Fisher. Thermo Fisher helped us in two ways.
They helped us to set up two robotic platforms.
So this is another thing where the weather department deployed its resources, you know, at risk.
So we, we, we, we signed off £2 million to buy the robotics at discount from Thermo.
And they helped us to set the robotics up in a sort of in a somewhat contained system.
And we ripped out some of the lab spaces and put this robotic thing, which is still working, still being manned by the staff.
And we did it so that we could we could measure the spike protein antibodies get spike protein, which is the target of the vaccine.
But we also wanted to target the nuclear protein as well so we could look at people who were the nucleoprotein isn't part of the vaccine.
So if you've got antibodies against a nuclear protein, you've had the bona fide infection.
So we could we could look at the two. So we had both of these platforms running. So every sample came in, we, we'd run.
So the samples came in through the, the hospital.
I was a big, I was a big fan of the NHS and I thought that the way to do these tests on a national basis was not proven Lighthouse Laboratories,
but to engage the NHS hospitals in this and to do a more dispersed model.
I mean clearly getting that organised might be problematic, but I thought the way to the NHS,
so I wanted to demonstrate partly, you know, how the NHS could do this.
And so I and so I got, so we cut the deal with the local trust that they would receive the samples.
These were blood tubes that been taken by the off the knife artistic survey people and they would be sent to the hospital here.
They would sort of barcode them, register the data in an anonymous way.
And then we would they would then ship those to us just down the corridor.
We would have a robot, would cat would take the capsule for them and array them in these 396 world plates.
So and then we would freeze those and then we would bring them over to our robot and we
would run them on and then we would report the data back to the Office of Statistics.
And that was where the data flowed once and so quite complicated and took a lot of meetings.
We were meeting, I think, every other day or every day at one point with very good support from various people in in statistics.
David Eyre was a particular person I could pick out who was a junior researcher.
Who. Yeah. E. Y. R e.
And and he would he did a lot of statistics helping us to to quality control things because quite often we were finding work.
We'd have to repeat it. You know, the and and so, yeah, we set that platform up.
Thermo helped us to create the, the robotics.
And one of the, one of the, another issue of the serology platform was we needed to, um, we, we needed to sort of see Mark our client,
mark our platform to show that it was obvious quality and that was part of the requirements of the government.
And of course, we, we, we didn't really do that terribly.
That was not what we particularly did, although Derek was still doing, was doing that for the, um, for the allies of platforms.
And so we, um, we got, we, um, we, in collaboration with Thermo,
we were able to sort of take that process forward and with their support because that's the kind of thing that they did all the time,
is developing tools.
And then Thermo Fisher, uh, decided that they would invest in a new factory to make the, um, or refurbishment of their existing factories.
I think it was in Swindon or somewhere like that that, that would manufacture these plates.
And so they were doing all this at cost, um, or of, for free basically to help the effort, you know, driven by Mark Stephenson.
And so they would then in the end they manufactured the plates for us with the,
the proteins which we were previously making and we shipped just a lot of protein to them.
And then they used that and they,
those plates would come and we'd get the samples and then we would run the allies as important to the office, enough to autistics.
And I'd have to check.
But I think, you know, we've done I mean, I don't know the latest data, but, you know,
we've done millions and millions of these samples from um, the last I think was over 3 million,
which when you think that, that, um, of the complexity of doing those assays, um, and so in the first hand,
once we set that up, we agreed that we would do a £50 million contract to, to supply this data.
I was a bit anxious about that because it was a big commitment that could end us in a lot of trouble.
With the government. Yeah, with the government, yes. I mean but there wasn't any flex.
There was I mean, they were very helpful, but we were not a commercial enterprise doing this.
And it was a big risk to us because when as happened occasionally it didn't work and we had to repeat things.
And these were millions of pounds. We were, were costing us millions of pounds to do this every, uh, you know, every month.
Um, I mean, a good example was not in early on, but later on we decided to change the tapes.
I remember for, for big it was must've been a supply issue, which is another thing we would doing the supplies.
So we changed the tapes that we used in the in the robot that's. Yeah.
And the pipettes and, and everything went, everything went haywire coincidentally.
And so we traced it back to the pets.
And then Dave Stuart took, took some of these pets and put them in the electron microscope and they were just full of gunk,
you know, they're just not properly manufactured.
But it because we had to repeat all of that batch in order to produce the data for this, essentially for Sarah Walker to process.
And you know, that that that, you know, that just cost us millions of pounds.
So, you know, we were I was all we were always on a knife edge with this thing.
And Sarah, who's, you know, was kind of just feeding it back data say, well, the data doesn't good.
Oh, there's been a step change in the data. So we're all the time chasing to do so.
And I think that it's now settled out for that. But that was kind of quite an unnerving.
But but the yeah, I was, I was very proud of the way that came together because unlike the vaccine, um, it came together completely from scratch.
We, we, we'd never, we knew, had to make a, um, you know,
and we knew how to make proteins and antibodies and so on, but we'd never brought those people together.
And some of them had never met each other before. And, and I thought that was really good.
We started with blood bottles and then we went to fingerprint tests.
Um, and then we had, we thought about doing blood spots.
We didn't really get round to doing blood spots, but um, I actually funded, um,
some work in Thailand because I thought the blood spots would be great for collecting blood samples in low and middle income countries and,
you know, large populations for trials. And so we're actually trying to work that out now in Thailand.
So we provided we got we with we bought from thermo again at a discount the robotic
platform which we shipped to Thailand so that they could do serology there as well.
Excuse me. The blood clots go onto some kind. The position paper.
And then the idea was you punch those out and you, you, you take out the antibodies from them and yeah.
And I thought that would be a great way of, of, of doing similar roles of platforms for different diseases overseas.
And so, yeah, we're trying to get that working. Um, that's a sort of a sort of spill out project from that, um, yeah.
So that, that we were so yeah, super, super pleased with the way that worked out.
So we did serology, not mainly, um, we had a bit of fun with some of the there it crook,
you know, was, is, is, you know, an astonishing person of huge energy.
And um, he really came to the fore.
He's another person. He also got an OBE for his work, which, you know, he was a superstar for me and he and Tim,
Peter and they were alongside Sarah Walker, as you probably know.
And Derek was doing all this, this, you know, testing all these kids.
Um, and he worked with, um, with Miles Carroll.
You know, Miles can be heard. Miles So Miles Carol was the head of research at Porton Down.
All right. And, um, so quite early on, we looked, Miles Carol into, um, into that now and to get the story right just before the pandemic,
a Peter Horby come to me and persuaded me that Miles Carol should have an affiliation with the department.
And so we agreed that he would be affiliated. I think he was he was so he had part of his post where maybe it was 20% or 40%.
We I agreed that he would be part of the department in order to help us to develop our microbiology capacity,
capacity against dangerous pathogens, because that is a government lab that works on pathogens.
Yes, there are two parts. There's a government lab which it's associated with as it was, you know, and uh,
and there's a military part which we haven't engaged with directly on the perhaps now going forward there may be,
but, but, but this is a government labs and it was a containment lab for dangerous pathogens.
And he he ran that. So he he was already part of the department.
So quite early on we pulled him into these joint meetings. Um, and that was useful because he was able to isolate the virus.
When the virus became available, those viruses were available at Portland at Porton Down and, and, uh,
you know, later on we needed those viruses for some of our assays, so he was able to help us with those.
And in fact, now he's a full member of the department. So he works here full time now.
Um, and um, yes, um, so he and Derek knew each other and so that worked out terribly well.
Um, we were making protein as well.
So as I said, fertiliser and for the structural biology, the protein.
But one of the, one of the funny things we were asked by, by the government, I mean often times the government really.
Gumble Who was worth off the licences. Right. So John is basically working for the government, we're running things in Oxford basically.
And so we asked by John supply, uh, protein to different companies and one of them was this company called Abingdon, Abingdon Health.
We had about a third of them. Yeah. Anyway, for after we were asked to supply protein to Abingdon Health because they were making,
um, in a screening, there was a sort of flurry of activity at the very beginning too,
and the Treasury, uh, and government departments were just funding everything without the normal procurement process because it was such an emergency.
So we were asked to supply proteins to these companies and we supplied a whole truckload of protein to Aberdeen Health.
And I remember being really thinking, should we ask them, should we ask Abingdon Health to pay for this?
I was asked, should we get to pay for the for the, you know, contribution to that?
And I thought it's just too much trouble. George DAVIES You know, everything's pro-bono now, so we won't.
And then there was a great big scandal about Abingdon Health that that that purportedly I mean,
I don't know the ins and outs of it, but that that they didn't actually manage to produce anything.
And so at that point, I was actually became rather relieved that we had never, um, you know, we never took any payment for anything.
It was all for free for us. I mean, I don't know what the outcome of all those things was, but, but it certainly was in the papers for a while.
And so, yeah, so I was kind of relieved that we would everything for us was just for free.
So that was our philosophy. So yeah, we were supplying protein, we were doing these tests, we were doing the serology,
we were helping out with the screening and those things sort of went on the background.
Um, other things. That we did so early on once once the infection started to come to the UK and you know the,
the then you know we will and the track and trace wasn't really working and the government couldn't screen enough.
And um, and eventually, of course, then there was the, the, the lockdown,
but we wanted to try and find out ways in which we could try to improve the, the tracking and isolation of people.
And and so one of the conversations that came out of the the meeting was, was around the apps.
So Christophe Fraser, he should know. I have.
Okay. I've talked to Vista. Yeah. So I've got the app story. Yeah.
Him so. Yeah. So I to tell me all of it but yeah.
No but, but so Christof came up with the app story and told us that he had this idea about doing the apps and yeah.
And I think that really capably big lift because it was a time when we didn't have the vaccine and you know,
we wanted to do something and I, I, I thought that was, you know, that just gave everybody well, that's such a smart idea.
And, um, you know, it should have worked better.
Um, there were issues that weren't there about which way it should go and the issues including the data centrally or distributed.
Yeah. And um, and then the negative, the negative press was, you know, just, it was awful.
And I. I mean, the apps were rolled out in other countries.
You have such an original idea. And I thought that, you know, Kristof deserves a lot more credit for that, really.
And I you know, against everything else that was done and of course, it was,
as with many things, is slight negative, negative connotations that happened.
I think that just, you know, slightly seemed to diminish it in the public.
But I thought that it was a great idea.
And even in theory, you know, it would have controlled things, um, and it would have controlled things without,
without all the need for, you know, you know, the, you know, the same degree of lockdown and everything.
But, but, but persuading the population that they to accept that was obviously, you know, just too much.
Um, I mean, it's, it was impressive the way the U.K. population accepted the vaccine compared to other things.
So that that's great. But that, yeah, the apps was just, you know, although it's clear,
save thousands and thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of lives was the estimate.
So I mean, it did do a lot of good, but that was a that was the thing before we got to the vaccine and before we got to recovery and and other things.
So recovery was the, the other big thing that we did in the first six months, um, and Peter Horby was again the initiator of recovery.
I mean, there's a lot of stories about this, but, but basically Peter was the person who,
who initiated that and then he roped in Martin Landry to help him with the talking person tomorrow.
Yeah. He brought in Martin to, to help him to organise the, the details of the trial because that's something that do very well.
Um, and they made a great team in, and there were other people, Richard Haynes and others were on the course.
They were also in the Department of Population Health.
And so that, that, that then recovery kicked off and you know, that game was an NHS initiative really.
So another great example of how you can get the NHS to work.
They were quite a lot of people though I have to tell you, who thought that, that, that that was a, not a very smart way to tackle things,
who actually felt that that the trials that we should be focusing on were the special reagents,
antivirals and other things that it was a damn thing to do to, to be, um, you trying dexamethasone and these sort of cheap things.
I mean, how is that going to work? You know, you need a specific targeted treatment and that we shouldn't be spending time on that.
But I disagreed and I thought it was important. So we we really pushed ahead with the recovery and it turned out that was right.
Yeah, well, those the showing that dexamethasone did work, but also for showing that lots of things that people were claiming worked didn't work.
Yeah, yeah. And yeah.
So that's been a, that's been another terrific output.
Um, and yeah, I mean, I hope that that will continue.
There were a lot of other trials that we were involved in, a court catalyst, so on and so forth.
There were lots of them and there was a lot of.
Yeah. Anyway, there were a lot of trials and they're all, they're all kind of on record.
Um, so, um, one thing that I think is sort of slightly mentioned, but obviously you needed funding for all this.
And I've seen elsewhere that you've talked about philanthropists. So, I mean,
how much of a hotline did you have to the Vice Chancellor and council and that that was just
sort of central university administration and the fundraising effort that was going on there?
Um, that's a good question. I.
I don't think that. The the philanthropic fundraising made much difference in the first real wave.
Um. And in most of what was funded was funded at risk by us or or funded.
I have to think back to how we funded the this role.
I mean, the serology platform, for example, was funded at risk by us, but then funded by government.
Yeah. Um, the, the vaccine stuff was funded by government.
By Cepi. And, um. Gates and other people feel pretty sappy and then taken over by AstraZeneca.
And so I don't have the impression that the philanthropy made a very big difference in the first wave.
And then when it did start to come, um, you know, a lot of it was directed towards the vaccine.
So if you had to look at what, where the money came, a lot of it came towards the vaccine, which, you know, had more profile than anything else.
Um, and in event eventually funded posts. So it funded posts and, and tests and other people.
Um, but I don't, I don't think in the very early phases it was a critical thing.
Um. Um, and our relationship with the fundraising.
A lot of the fundraising. I mean, Carly NEARY, who was very early, who was in the medical science division.
She played a big role in our meeting, so she was looking for opportunities and so on through that.
Um. But no, I think I'm talking about the Rapid Response Fund, which Patrick Grant oversaw,
which he gave me to understand that they barely had to ask them.
It's just that we're donors who were just saying, What can I do?
His money. And they had. So they had a fund that they could.
Yes. I didn't believe very about it.
Well, in the in the detail of all the different things that we were doing there, I'd have to go back and have a look.
There may well be things that that were that were assisted.
I mean, for example,
I remember that that Gavin's great and needed money to assist with with making antibodies and so and and quite all of that money was that money.
A lot of it was philanthropic. And so we, we disbursed money to Gavin to, to do that.
Um, I don't know how much came from a rapid response fund for, for endowment.
I have a feeling that most of this money came directly from philanthropists to us through.
Through Carly. But clearly, there were instances like that where we funds were useful for, for making proteins and other things.
Um, so let's just turn to your own lab.
You know my lab? Yes. In my lab.
There. Anything? It did do a bit, didn't it? I found a few papers.
Um, well, I got put on papers by people who thought that I'd coordinated things, but my lab, my research assistants,
went to work doing for other labs during the period because my lab doesn't do infectious disease wasn't closed down.
So my, my, yeah. My contributions were more in principle instead of organising.
Right. Um, yeah, I.
Yeah, I think that that's, uh. Yeah, yeah. And my research assistants helping out elsewhere.
Um. Yeah. What else?
I mean, so I think we've got to pathology, I suppose we could talk about, but other antiviral discovery.
That's another thing we did. But, but, you know, we could go on for hours, probably the, the moonshot test.
I was very keen that we made antivirals and we weren't very we didn't managed we managed the moonshot which is this a crowdfunded today.
Yeah. That's a good example isn't it. Yeah. But, but that, that was funded,
that was operated by the lab in Ukraine that made the antiviral drugs and then there were people around the, the, um, and.
Scientist medicinal chemists who were out of work because of the pandemic contributing structures and so on.
And that did end up, of course, with a with a lead compound, which was then which is now funded for a phase one trial by.
Welcome. It was a it was a bit slow, though. You know, it was it was a great idea.
And it would. But there was no IP attached to intellectual property attached to it.
And so I, I became anxious that that that was not going to be you know, that wasn't the right route to make stuff quickly.
It was it was too slow. And I, I think that's still right that, you know,
there were other companies that can make pharma would make antivirals like Pfizer and others quite quickly.
Um, and then they would, they would have market value because they had intellectual property.
So I wanted to try and use our capacity to create drugs as in the way in the manner
the moonshot with our structure biology make the diamond to make antivirals.
But it failed really. And we made lots of pitches to Gates and others to start something up, but we never got much traction with that.
And then now that's evolved to try and look at other pathogens.
So we weren't successful in getting I don't think we could have done better with that.
And we should still be able to make lots of antibodies against other families of past threats.
And you just need to be systematic. So that wasn't successful. I was we we looked at the pathology.
We did the combat study, if you know about that. It they've done the combat.
So this is this is led by Bill Poole.
Clansman was the person who really led the immunology for us. Um, but the combat study was,
which was a sort of multi-omics study of cells from people who had COVID or other forms of sepsis trying to identify what the signature disease was.
That that study was led by Julian Knight in the world.
And so that was a kind of huge study which was published in Cell last year.
Yeah. And I was a co-author on that and, um, and.
I mean, that was I mean, that's a kind of a landmark study of comparing different approaches.
But again, I personally felt were you know, it took a long time to get going.
Yeah. I remember often talking to Julian, ask him to engage with the enemy faster.
And in the end, because I don't think it would made any difference if he had.
And in fact, in the end, he did this kind of beautiful piece of work which which I think is, you know, will inform what we do next time,
which, you know, a lot of this my sadness is that a lot of these lessons will will just be forgotten.
But that was what I was going to come to, was what how how have things changed as a result of this?
And what how do you see the department learning from it and moving forward?
But you think things have. Well, the pandemic science is that Pete is leading.
Yes, I think that's got it. That's got a huge amount of scope.
I mean, I would it's it's terribly disappointing that the government hasn't put any money to it.
And after everything and one of the things that Peter and I did is, I mean, we realised that Oxford could be just the only centre.
I mean it just wouldn't work, you know, within the UK.
And so I wrote to the heads of several of the other medical schools to ask them if they would like to form a, a pandemic sciences network with us.
And I also wrote to the I wrote to, you know, to the to to Paul nurse at the crick and other people.
And they all signed up for this idea. So we started to put together a consortium and then and then Peter subsequently led that.
And but I was also trying to persuade the government that we should.
And I wrote lots of several letters to, um, to the Department of Health Business and so on, trying to persuade them that, that,
that it would be a good investment to put some money both into the network but also into Oxford,
because, you know, most of the other countries were, you know, creating sentinel institutes.
And I thought that would be important. And we never got any traction on that.
And, you know, the Boris came by and visited the Joanna and the story from from Louise with that he promised a lot of money, but it never came.
And yes, that was that was bitterly disappointing to me after all the effort we put in and
and I thought how much we'd contributed that they wouldn't see the logic in,
in, in forward funding.
As for future events, I mean, given the economic impact and of course,
we're still seeing the economic impacts now only and goodness knows how much all this trouble in,
you know, elsewhere would have been avoided if we if we hadn't had the pandemic.
You know, the borrowing is huge, isn't it? So, yeah, I felt that, yes, I am.
The Pandemic Sciences Institute is really important, and it's not just for the kind of stuff that we did,
but it's obviously important for policy and and other issues,
which I think they're going to address with, um, you know, be cautionary words and the, and the blavatnik and so on.
So, I mean, I think I'm really supportive of all of that. Um, and, uh, so I think that that's clearly a big thing that's come out of the problem.
And the philanthropic funding for that has been, has been wonderful.
And it's not just for the building, um, but also the programmatic support that we've had from the MO family in particular.
And, uh, it's been, that's been wonderful. Um, so that's, that's a great success.
The other thing, I mean, I was relatively new to being head of department when this happened.
And so, um, but, but, and so on a personal level, it's been, it's been a great way to get to know everybody.
Um, some people have had a baptism of fire, but that's, yeah, well, it's just a great way of life, like living several years in one.
And, um, I, I've come to, you know, one of the things that I've come to wonder is, you know, as we change going forward and doing more pathology,
many of the things that are relevant to this, you know, what are the other big projects that we should be doing collaboratively within the department?
And and, you know, how could we recapture something of that going forward?
Because, you know, it was it was awful.
But at the same time, it was a wonderful experience. Yes. I mean, you talked about people talking to each other who've never, never met.
Yeah. So, yeah. The contacts between the different units.
Yeah, exactly. It must be much closer than they were. Yes. And so I would like to know what we could do.
It's difficult because, you know, outside of pandemic, it's it you know, we were all individuals.
And in Oxford we. Even more individualistic than others, probably.
And so how you get the people to start rowing in the same direction.
But because we're all very because university also has a lot of very powerful individual rowers.
When they all rowed together, it's it outstrips everything else.
And that's what happened in the pandemic. Everybody came together and started pushing in the same direction.
And it was wonderful. How I would like to know if we could recapture that around even partially around
some projects and get everybody rowing together again and keep that momentum going.
Uh, I mean, I think there will inevitably be some sort of return to normal operation, which is, you know, people working in silos.
And that would be a great shame. So that's what I'm going to try and do.
Um, and, uh, yeah, I, I, that, that's my ambition.
And in the meantime, I'm trying to keep the department growing because, you know,
there are the economic challenges always come back and um, keeping the, the, the devolve structure that we have that's important.
Um, when there were economic challenges, one of the, one of the things that,
that really concerned me at that first meeting in January was that was about the optics for Oxford that,
you know, what would you, how would the public perceive us?
Um, because, you know, we've previously had such bad press for, you know, our elitism and, and everything else that, you know, all those.
I don't think we have that in the same medical school, but, you know, the undergraduate thing, you know,
and you know, my cousins, you know, you know, you know, other people in my you would never dream of coming here.
It's just alien, right?
And, um, you know, I came here, you know, my dad was a student here that, you know, I had some inkling, but, um, and so I was very sensitive to that.
Um, and I remember that at the first meeting and the 23rd on the 30th of January,
the thing that, that most the thing that I said first off in the meeting is, you know,
we've got to do something,
but we've got to be very careful about how we do this or we mustn't let this appear like some Oxford University research bonanza and that,
um, that, uh, you know, the public will perceive us exploiting in some way, you know,
what is obviously a, you know, an international human tragedy in order to,
um, you know, once again, you know, blow our own trumpet or create some sort of vanity project or virtual signalling type thing.
But the, the oh, make money out of the vaccine go backfire.
Yeah. Or. Well that was, that I think was part of it.
And um, so we're super sensitive to that.
And so one of the things that we didn't do early on is, you know, I did write to Jeremy and we did start talking to the government.
Um, but, but I was, I was, I was really anxious not to, not to give the wrong impression and also to our colleagues in other universities.
I didn't want it to look like Oxford doing its usual thing, which was, you know,
seizing the, the foreground and, and, um, and in the end, I think we did that pretty well.
Um, and then the publicity for us has been, has been good.
Um, so, yeah, so there was insensitivities around all this as well, um, personally and, and I think that kind of played out okay.
Um, did you do any press yourself?
No, no, no. I, I, you know, I stick to it.
I, i, i.
Yeah. I thought that was enough. Basically. Um.
Sometimes a bit too much, probably. Yeah. I was surprised by some of the people I'd see.
Oh, that's fair enough.
I mean, some people, you know, some people just brilliant at it.
Um, and. Yeah, I don't.
I don't regret not doing it because, um, it is.
It distorts you, I think just, you know, there's a great danger of distortion.
If you're the head of department, you just need to be, uh, you know, trying to facilitate things.
I think that's your key role is to pull people together and, and hope that at the end of it,
you come out with a stronger department and with people still friends with each other.
And also the the people in the department, you know, they need to respect the direction of travel.
And I think that's all worked out well for me. So I'm, I'm happy with that.
Um, the engagement with the press can be awful.
I think for some people, um, it's awful.
I think it's awful. You know, some people have been feted, haven't they?
It's been quite challenging. I feel if you look at it how, um, you know, how they cope.
I mean, I don't think they fundamentally the people in the department have fundamentally changed or somehow,
you know, have a different opinion of themselves. But it's very difficult to deal with the people's perception of you.
And that just I think they just grind you could grind you down.
I mean, I don't obviously my contribution to this would never be in that category.
But that's just an observation. I have people in the department. Um, um, my, my, my role is kind of less defined.
I mean, I mean, I mean that Peter Horby, for example, I mean, he, he,
he did a fantastic job in charge of Nervtag and they got another acronym New, an emerging respiratory viruses group or whatever it was.
But, but, but, I mean, so he was already doing that. And then he did a, I think a wonderful job.
Um, that, and I saw it and recovery.
Um, and, and he handled the press very well.
Sarah was, obviously was, was, was, um, obviously she's a person most people recognised for the, in the pandemic.
Um, and she is, she is a, you know, great calm way of dealing with the press.
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm sure you've got things to do.
I would like to talk a little bit about how the circumstances of the pandemic lockdown and so on impacted on you personally.
So presumably after that. Well, from March anyway, the meetings were all online.
You were you were working from home where you were. Did were you able to come in?
Yes, I was working from home and I was surprised how how effective it all was,
you know, how how my and this is still true where we're meeting in person.
But but how you know,
how productive it could be working online people not so personal but but if you want to hold a meeting I mean the initial meeting that we had,
everybody could sit around the the conference room table just about.
But then when the meetings really got going and everybody was dialling in for the for the weekly sort of fix of of,
you know, research, we would have we had way too many people than we could have had in a meeting room.
And so the trip was just flicking around people, trying to keep people on screen and everything else.
And, but it was just more effective. So, um, for me, yeah, I, and what I was doing that, that was fine.
Um, from the department's point of view, trying to keep the work going was very challenging for the professional services teams.
And I mean, they did, they did an amazing job because, you know, most unlike most departments, we were we were just as busy.
Yes. So my you know, my lab got repurposed in order to do other people's work for other people.
But there were people coming in and working in the lab. Yeah. Yeah. So there were people coming working in the labs.
People were asking us to prioritise access to labs that they could do their projects.
You know, there's a multiplicity of different research work going on against the virus.
Um, I mean, we haven't talked much about the overseas units, but, you know, they, they did an incredible job.
The, you know, in, in, in, in, for example, in Kenya, the, the, the unit on the coast in Khalifa, run by Philip Bagian, um,
you know, did most of the, um, the viral screening for, for the, in Kenya and the, the director of the unit in, um, in Nairobi,
Edwin Barrasso, who's, who's a, um, you know, you know, his research is in policy and epidemiology of diseases and um,
you know, he was probably the principal advisor to the government on, and so, um, so, you know, that was just in, in Kenya.
And this, the same happened in, in Vietnam.
Indonesia had a huge amount of, of, of activity.
And the director of the unit there, Kevin Baird, you know, he did he did most of the sequencing in Indonesia and set up all the activity there.
I mean, and that you know, that's a population of, I don't know, going to catch me again, but, you know, 100 million or more.
Isn't it huge? So, so the overseas and in Vietnam, uh, Guy Thwaites, they did a lot.
They were much more effective in their lock down in Vietnam. But he similarly did the research there, and units in Thailand set up clinical trials.
And so there's just an immense amount of activity overseas.
Um. You know, ongoing throughout the pandemic.
So, yeah, I, I've scarcely scratched upon.
Then, then, then there were the studies that, that the micro just did in, in locally in the, um,
the first observational studies in the trust that we did, um, that Tim Peto and David Eyre and other people, uh, did.
And um, so there's a lot of, a lot of microbiology work.
I mean that obviously was a speciality for the department.
And did you have to what were you personally involved in establishing the safe working
for that for those people or did you have safety officers that just dealt with all that?
Well, I'm responsible for safety in the department. So yeah, that came down to yeah, to me.
But, but, but taking advice from people, um, say, for example, Miles Carroll, you know,
with his experience at Porton Down, he was a useful person for working at where we could do those studies.
And actually many of them, because I was chairing the weekly meetings or fortnightly, they became.
Um, and so we, we were coordinating with the Dunn School, for example.
And um, so I think, you know, we both those, so William James in Dunn School was doing a lot of the antiviral work and um,
it, and it wasn't an area where we had a lot of capacity in Oxford.
Um, that's partly why Miles was so important. Um, but William was one of the few people who really knew a lot about viruses.
And so we were, we were through those meetings we were linking up with, with him.
Yeah, that was a, um, when I do comes back to me now and uh, yeah, there were other people who were developing, um,
you know, technologies for screening and um, you know, out of that and they were from the, not from our division,
but they were from, you know, engineering like, like SRI for example, and for which we who to, um,
developed a screening tool that then I think then rolled out in Heathrow and he developed a company to, to do that.
But, but our assistance to him again was supplying him with proteins and samples so that he could, he could do that work.
So it was all part of the the big sort of collaborative effort that we built together.
Yeah, it's, um. No, I think what I'm really driving at is what was it like for you?
What? I mean, were you. I'm sure you're someone who works very hard anyway, but were you putting in more hours than you would normally?
No, I probably not. I was very energised by it. So I think everybody who was and then afterwards probably a bit exhausted.
Um, I think the first year was very, was very vivid.
Um, the second year of the pandemic, um, became a bit of a blur to me, I think.
I, um, I was trying to step back from, from, you know, driving every bit of it.
I was handing over stuff to Peter and, um, you know, handed over the serology screening platform to Yvonne.
Um, and, you know, I think this for many people we just became a bit relentless.
Um, I, yeah, I don't think I particularly suffered through it at all.
I mean, it was, you know, my, my family, you know, my wife's a, um, you know, one of the senior nurses here.
So she was working full time. Anyway, I did, um, I did some work on the wards, um, in general, general medicine and seeing some of the renal patients,
I mean that was awful because, you know, getting gowned up and everything just is, it was kind of a horrible experience.
But was that something you went back into or had you done a little bit?
No, I always done renal medicine. So, um, I did do some renal clinics as well as cover.
Um, but then the general medicine at the. John Ratcliffe that's not something I did know.
Um, and a lot of the junior staff here, including people who work in the, a lot of the people in the,
in the, um, in the department who were clinicians went back to, to work.
So, um, that was another big contribution of the, of the A&M to the response locally.
Yes. Yeah. The facilities team, you know, that put a lot of stress on them.
Yeah. Keeping things open. Um, keeping the distancing and so on.
Yeah. Very challenging. Yes.
Anything else you'd like to know? Well, it's just I think it's a final question.
Has the experience, the whole experience, changed your attitude or approach to how you think about your job?
And what things would you like to see change in the future in the light of that experience?
Um. Well, I already knew that that that the medical school was good.
And and, you know, I thought the department was was great.
But it, you know, convince me more than ever how terrific it is here.
And and I mean, I, I always had this, like, concern that I was just prejudiced.
But, you know, this is you know, this is a demonstration to me that it really was special here and that the people I work with a very special and.
Um, so that that that's left me with a kind of an uplifting sort of feeling about everything here that, you know.
And I mean, you know, I was, you know, I remember I was I not this last breath,
but I did the previous ref I was in charge of writing the the research excellence framework report for the,
the, for the, um, medical sciences division last but one.
And that gave me kind of oversight of everything. And I thought very impressive and, and, um, but this on a personal level.
Wow. So that, I think, is something that, you know, now I would like to carry.
I carry forward and, and, you know, have all those friendships with everybody that and and and that sort of more intimate level than I,
I think because of the pandemic, um, which I, it would have taken me ten years to achieve that level of, of, you know, comradeship and everything.
And I think that's true for everybody in the department. So I think that's that's very special to take forward.
And then the other things that are as I said, you know, what, what are the big projects that we could do now and how could we prosecute those?
And, um, you know, could we do something about future pandemics?
Um, how can we collaborate more effectively with industry, with something I was already interested in, which is why we were working with them.
I But, but that I think is something that, you know, I've become more keen on.
One of the things I did in the last year, I, I decided that I wanted to do something more with UK industry.
Um. You need to demonstrate that that the department could could support not just the pandemic,
but could also support UK infrastructure and create wealth for the country.
And it's all part of, I think, for me trying to demonstrate that, you know,
late university like Oxford is not self-serving, but, but actually contribute.
And, um, you know, that kind of slightly comes back to my more socialist perspective and having been to a comprehensive school myself.
And so, and I wanted to show that, that, you know, we, this is what we do.
And, and so, um, so yes.
So I've kicked off more collaborations of industry now and I would like to do more in the pandemic area.
So I'm still hunting down partners to do antiviral drug discovery.
Um, and I, with help from transboundary, you know, who's in India?
Um, you know, I got an introduction for John Simons.
He's the chair of, um, as you know, of GSK because we were doing stuff with AstraZeneca and so we started a joint institute with GSK this last year,
um, with, you know, Tony Wood who's the new, um, uh, chief scientific officer for is British for GSK.
We've got a joint institute going and I'm hoping that at some point we might do buy into vaccines.
And so I'm with them. Um, they're obviously a good partner for us because they're interested in many of the same areas of research.
And so I'm, I've been encouraged to, I'm encouraged by the experience of the pandemic just to start thinking more about how we can do,
we can create industrial partnerships and not only have impact, you know,
have impact in various different ways, um, because that, that joint working was good.
Um, so I think that has also my perspective on that has also been changed.
It's difficult, say change, you know, because I was so fresh to the job.
Um, and so my, my position has not been terribly fixed before this had happened.
Yeah. But it's crystallised things for me. Yes, it, yes, it's, it's, yes, it's crystallised things.
Yeah. Great. Thank you very much.