So I can just start by saying your name and your position here. Yeah.
So, I'm Dr. Adam Ritchie. My job title here is senior vaccine program manager at the Jenner Institute.
I'm also a lecturer in human science at St Catherine's College. During the pandemic, I was still associated with the Blavatnik School.
So normally 80% of my time was Jenner and 20% was at Blavatnik as senior admissions advisor.
But things got very busy. So. So eventually I gave that up and I guess 2021 we worked through that.
So that was what I was going to ask next was give me a quick rundown of how you got from how you first got interested in science to where you are now.
What were the main how I first got interested in science. I don't know how I'd going.
Going back that far is tricky. My family's not academic or anything like that.
I was the first person in my immediate family to finish high school, but I went to an academically selective school in Sydney,
so a bit like a grammar school here where, you know, I sort of flitted around.
I wasn't the best student, but I did.
I was good at science. And perhaps an interesting thing, which is a has been a bit of a subject of conversation in Australia in recent months,
is in when I was in year ten, so I guess about the age of 15 I topped Australia in a in a non orthodox science exam sort of thing.
So this is one of these, it wasn't like the year ten exam, not like the GCSE equivalent,
it was this national science competition thing which most of the kids at my school did.
So I just did it one day. Yeah.
So I topped Australia that and got a perfect score which sort of made people wonder a little bit, maybe science might be interesting.
And so they connected me with a graduate student at one of the local universities who I then sort
of did work experience with in year 11 and would spend some time with sort of doing things.
So that's what got me into science, I guess, as it were, and then went to university maybe to be a palaeontologist.
I was always into dinosaurs. This is pre Jurassic Park, you know, Director Park.
It sort of came out actually around the time of the science competition.
But I dinosaurs were my thing from, you know, like some boys are, you know, some boys just loved dinosaurs.
And I was one of those, so I went to uni, not really sure what to do.
I liked evolution, I liked biology. My parents were keen on me doing sort of petroleum engineering type stuff cause I had at the end of year 12,
top the state I came from in the geology final exam at the end of high school.
So the A-level exam, I guess, and that, you know, not knowing much about science,
that was something where they heard you could make a lot of money sort of thing. So so that had some appeal.
I didn't really want to do that. I studied geology and biology and maths and things, chemistry as an undergraduate,
and then slowly moved away from where I started, which was more of the palaeontology side of things too.
Hitting, you know, palaeontology has a big evolutionary component, so I was interested in that, but I got more and more interested in diseases.
So I guess I sort of ended up over more really interested in how humans and pathogens
interact and how viruses and things like that evolve compared to how we evolved.
And yeah, and I did, I did honours and a PhD in Sydney at the same university.
So University of New South Wales where I went, which I enjoyed,
sort of studied the effects of molecules produced by a bacterium called super bonus on,
on our immune system and how it might be at a phase in the immune system. And then I was I was coming to the end of that.
I started looking for overseas opportunities, thinking, you know, I want to be a scientist.
So maybe good chance to go overseas. My my then girlfriend was also about to finish her doctorate also at the university I say then girlfriend.
So she's now kind of like my wife. So we sort of picked the UK for a combination of reasons.
She's good at languages, I am not so English speaking was a bit of a limitation of mine and we were both keen on football sort of thing.
So, so the UK over say the US or Canada or somewhere like that jumped out to us.
So I got a post-doc at Oxford. Yeah. So you came to the UK, which.
Yeah. So I came to the UK in 2005. So my first day of work was Valentine's Day 2005.
I remember I made a slight mistake in sort of, you know, it was a Thursday.
I had to do my thesis in Sydney and I got on a plane on the Thursday night and made it here on the Friday,
started work on the Monday sort of thing and then two weeks later was quite exhausted.
So I needed a break. Nothing bad happened. I was just a bit tired while far from home for the first.
It's time to have you working. So I came to Oxford from the start, so I've been at Oxford now for 17 years straight.
I originally worked, came over here work on risk of a basically mad cow disease to the national blood supply.
So I worked at the jail hospital on a research project looking at that.
It was for the NHS, was it? Well, no it was, I mean physically it was based in the it was the blood and transfusion service.
Right. But it was part of the university sort of thing.
So there's a lot of university departments obviously embedded around the John Radcliffe Hospital.
So I did that for about three years and took on another project to do with Malaria Diagnostics, again, quite blood supply orientated.
And then in 2000 I moved to the Weatherill Institute, which is on the John Radcliffe site, to do T-cell immunology related to HIV.
So not not vaccines as such, but trying to understand the immune response to HIV to try and inform vaccine design.
Um, in 2011, while I was still working there, this odd thing came along,
which was a blavatnik school of government, was looking for a lecturer in science and public policy.
You know, my whole time at Oxford and before that, I was I was known as someone who was enthusiastic about teaching.
It's not really a big thing at Oxford, that enthusiasm for teaching.
But I had what I was a postdoc here. I had picked up some teaching type things and had come to specialising in teaching genetics,
evolution, medical genetics to students who are not going to be lab scientists generally.
So on the Human Science Programme, which is a big interdisciplinary programme where I still I still teach to this day.
And so when and I also teach a science course in the summer for non-science majors, so people studying other things.
And so when this big job came along,
I thought I sort of throw my hat in the ring and see and I was very young and relatively inexperienced compared to what I was expecting, very wanted.
But I did get offered that role, which was great for that.
And it teaches a master's in public policy. That's essentially the main reason for it.
Exactly right. And they wanted to have science as part of that course, which is quite unusual globally.
Yeah. Yeah, that is unusual globally.
It's open to historical interpretation.
So science is no longer part of the course. So I understand. Yes.
So it was part of the course for the first five years during which time I also began
the it became the academic coordinator of the the whole master's of public policy.
So, yes, science no longer included, but it was quite a fun little mission at the time.
As you say, it was unusual. And the decision to drop science as a core component was basically a marketplace decision, so the others don't.
So there was a concern that some potential students who were very good, who might come here,
who didn't want to do science, would choose Harvard or or Princeton or wherever else.
Now, to me, a mistake, but a decision that was made.
And if I if I was to point out one thing that I consider a failure in my career, it was that happening.
That's the only thing I would point out as a failure in my career today that I couldn't couldn't keep that alive, as it were.
So, yes. So after that happened, I decided I you know, I'd spent five or six years in a social science department.
I'm a scientist. There's a really good reason to have that embedded and have that those communication channels open between the different groups.
The silos in academia, I guess, in policymaking and in general are dangerous.
But for me personally it became a bit tricky to justify why I didn't spend my career, that there was an opportunity potentially for me to stay.
But, you know, I had sort of tried my hand at a little bit of social science,
of science research, and it it was a little bit too far out of my wheelhouse.
It was interesting, you know, with capacity building and science in low and middle income countries, I was really interested in.
But when it came to sort of doing actually what we're doing here, the interviews and interpreting interviews,
I found that just so far removed from what I was actually trying to do, that I felt like starting again as a as a student all over again.
So I thought, let's, let's come back and, and think about going to science.
So Chance came up to come here to the Genner to work with Sandy Douglas, who you've spoken to previously, and what was the nature of the role.
So that role was to come and run a programme on rabies vaccines, which is what I now spend probably still the majority of my time on.
The thing that drew me to that particular role was there was an element to the project that was about stabilising or thermo stability of vaccines.
So stabilising vaccines outside the cold chain. Which said that they can be used in countries that have climates that are not like coffee.
Exactly right. So whether, you know, in an ideal world,
you'd love to have a vaccine that you can just store at 40 degrees for six months and know what that doesn't care.
More realistically, what you're talking about is sort of cold chain storage to hubs like capital cities and stuff like that, or regional centres,
and then sometimes what they call last mile delivery on the back of a donkey or
whatever sort of thing where it doesn't need to be in a fridge or a freezer.
So the last few, last little period and it's not going to suffer from that too much.
So yeah, that's no longer the primary focus of what we're doing, although that's what got me interested here.
We came here and it's been a really, you know, that rabies project.
I think without the rabies project, the Oxford-astrazeneca vaccine probably doesn't exist realistically, or it exists,
but it didn't get used in the way it did because one thing we came up against was just part of the thermal stability.
Part of the project required us to think about new processes for making a vaccine,
not so much for what is the vaccine, but how do you put it in vials in the right way in a medically graded facility?
So what we call GMP, good manufacturing practice facility, we have a small facility here at Oxford,
the CBF, you might have spoken to some people from there. Kath Green being the head of the CBF, which Sandy were both involved in,
sort of convincing her to take on while we were working on the rabies project.
But what we were looking to do at the time was get something into the CBF that was new and novel.
So we spent a lot of time, what, 2 to 3 really solid years thinking about how you manufacture these sorts of chetak vaccines.
The rabies vaccine we have is not on exactly the same platform as the COVID vaccine, but one that is very similar COVID vaccines.
On Chadox1, we're on schedule to basically just a different strain of chimpanzee adenovirus.
And so what we were working on was, was ways of of changing the manufacturing process, firstly to allow similar stability to happen.
That meant we had to do some slightly different things. So we have to think laterally about how this would work.
At the same time, we were also thinking about why we're doing the rabies vaccine, because we're doing the rabies vaccine.
But there is a rabies vaccine that works perfectly well, but it's quite 100% protection if you take it well protected.
Excellent. Yet tricky. Tricky is it's multi dose.
It's really expensive.
And in most circumstances, even if you've had pre-vaccination, you need post-exposure prophylaxis, basically vaccination again just to be sure.
So because it's so expensive,
it's not used like a measles vaccine is used where kids are giving it when they're young in India or in Nigeria or wherever, you know,
across the world, the only people who get it a people like vets or people working in or people in the West who are travelling,
who can pay for it just in case.
So we were trying to we've got a vaccine candidate that we want to make cheaply and we want to give us a single dose vaccine.
And the same process has happened there that we think that with so much stability, you go with what's the actual challenge and how do we overcome it?
The challenge is getting it made for low cost per dose.
And how do you do that? Well, we need to have develop a process that we can use here at a small scale,
but then very easily scale up to a large scale so that you can make it cheaply at a facility like the Serum Institute of India,
which is for us always our sort of model partner institute because of Adrian Hill's association over the years,
working with them and thinking about malaria vaccines and stuff like that.
Yeah. So we spent a few years working on getting this new process up and running in 2019.
We used it for our rabies vaccine and in our facility here where normally you get 100 or 200 doses from a batch,
we got thousands from from the same amount of starting material.
So showed that, hey, it works really well.
We only used half the process here at this end because we weren't quite ready to get it all into the GMP facility.
So we had used what we call the downstream, how you take the vaccine from the cells it's produced and then get it into something pure in a vial.
That was old year where we hadn't used the bioreactors.
So the bioreactors are probably one of the keys to scaling up at a big,
big scale where you just growing a lot of these cells, cells that make the vaccine.
Exactly right. And so, you know, we've got there's one sitting up there that's a little three litre one.
There's one of them in the history of Science Museum. Well, they have it in their collection.
That's a three litre scale one at the Serum Institute of India.
They've got 2004 thousand litre ones and you might obviously scaled up.
Amounts of vaccine from something much bigger.
So, yes, so we had sort of set this in place for rabies with a bit of a sort of where we've done it on little scales in the lab.
We did half of it on a small scale here in our facility.
In theory, it should scale up, but we don't know that that just in theory, it should have should all be fine.
And then that's what happened next, right? Was COVID happens.
And then we get to find out. Can I just get you to clarify for you what your role as running somebody who runs the program entails?
So, I mean, I think you've you've told me what all the challenges were and and how you met them.
But I think what I'm trying to work out. Do you mean for the rabies program?
Well, for it, yeah. And I'm going on to the other program.
What what is it that needs doing that you do as opposed to what Sandy does or what say someone like Carina does?
Okay. Sure. So it's bit funny because my my role in particular, the sort of job title I have,
whether it's project manager or program manager that captures all sort of see, you know, all sorts of jobs fall into that category.
Right. So the so the, you know, you've got to be slightly careful of sounding like an ass when you talk about this stuff.
I think Sandy would describe what he and I do is creative sort of things.
So and and the thing I always think about in what he and I do is use judgement sort of thing.
So they're the two big things. I do them across a whole range of areas.
So normally this isn't necessarily what I did for COVID, but normally, you know, I occasionally go into the lab and do lab work.
You know, I'm an immunologist by background. That's my expertise. So I can do the sort of lab stuff people do for immunology.
It's better for me now to tell other people to do that and stay out of their way.
But I'm involved in it almost. I mean, it might sound too simple.
Almost everything now. Sandy. And what Sandy and I do is closer together than what Carina and I do.
So Carina is really technically expert in manufacturing processes.
And while I understand all the big picture stuff of that, I don't know how to run the equipment for that.
You know, I can run a Eliza's, I can run Ellie spots,
which are assays we do to test immunology for different sorts of cells and different outputs like antibodies.
But you know, without spending probably a few months working out how all the equipment works and how to put it all together and make it do things,
I can't do what Carina does. So normally I do things, you know, I work traditionally.
So pre-pandemic is probably the easiest way to think about it.
So pre-pandemic I did things like, you know, work with postdocs to design and analyse experiments and look at data and think about what it all means.
So for instance, we had a postdoc who was setting up the bioreactors and he and I would sit down regularly to look at
his results and sort of talk it through a bit like a that's a bit like Sandy does with with his team.
I'm doing that a lot less now just because so much other stuff has happened.
I'll miss it a little bit, actually, if I'm honest, I do things, you know, working with Sandi somewhat,
I'm bouncing ideas around, but I'm the one who then put pen to paper on designing the clinical trial and things like that.
So a rabies clinical trial, you know, Sandy would have an idea of, you know,
things like dose escalation, like we want to do this and he's a clinician, right?
So he's got to take responsibility for certain clinical things.
But I do most of the sort of actually designing, setting up, thinking about logistics challenges, at getting it to actually happen,
writing the documentation, which again, you know, because for both of us, it was our first trial, the rabies trial here in the UK.
So, you know, he and I spent a lot of time reviewing examples of documents and redraughting our versions and he and not human eye pulling it apart.
We have a terrible good habit depending where you're sitting and not just copying
and pasting stuff too much and not just listening to the way the system works going,
well, we'll just do that. We don't try and reinvent the wheel, but we do where if we run into that's not quite the way we want it,
we do try and fight it sort of thing, I guess.
Sandi and I have an oddly close relationship.
I think it would be fair to say he and I are much, much closer.
There's a certain level of trust there that probably doesn't exist between most PIs and a and a someone in a role like mine.
There are very few people like me in a world like mine around here and one or two others I can think of who have had roles like this,
where they're very much in their area of expertise, where they have a doctorate and extensive postdoc experience.
So they're actually, you know, able to to think quite deep.
We about things. I look after all the money because, you know, as I said, my parents didn't finish high school,
but they'll buy small business people and I inherited that from them. I think if you are Sandy Watts,
Adam Goode at the first thing you might jump at is getting more money than say
they can get it from someone and keeping it and and working out how to use it.
So, yes, I've sort of there's part of me that's the scientist part, you know, designing trials,
helping look at experiments, things like that I really value I think is super important,
is like making decisions and working with experts to make decisions on what we might call a drug specification for the vaccine.
You know, so the so, you know, going to the regulator,
speaking to people at the MHRA about this innovative idea we have and bouncing it back and forth.
Actually, a little while ago, they just before the pandemic, actually,
they did a the innovation office at the MHRA did a promotional video where they invited me in and talk about my experience with them.
And then that went online to the three weeks later, it was all covered this case with that sort of thing.
So yeah, so, so you know, my job is big and broad sort of thing and some of it is, some, you know,
like, like most people, I guess some of it's sometimes stuff has to be done sort of thing.
And if no one else will pick it up on the person who gets it done when it needs to be done.
So, you know, I've recently led a big space review of the Jenner Institute and stuff like that because you needed someone senior enough,
but no one really wants to do it because it's a lot of effort for no real reward sort of thing, except it needed to be done.
So I'm the person who sometimes does that, that sort of thing.
So, so getting, getting it done and getting something delivered is important to me.
So yeah, so that's sort of what my job was. That's, that's really helpful.
So let's finally arrive at COVID. So we're just talking personally for the moment.
Can you remember where you were when you first heard about COVID?
There was something happening in China and I know and was asked me that one before.
Now I really I can't. What are your first memories of it?
So my first memory, which I have of a very strong memory, but it's not the first memory of COVID,
but it's a very early memory of COVID, of being in this room, which used to be Sara Gilbert's office.
Um, this is probably because of the area I work in, like, you know, about stuff that's happening, you know, with waves.
I can't remember if I'd emailed you about this, but anyway, we've been dragged, Sandy and I both and dragged into the Ebola response test.
Lam has a candidate vaccine for that, and we're working with the Serum Institute to manufacture one batch for clinical trial,
hopefully by the end of this month, which is again, very tight timeline.
Um, what was I talking about that. Yeah.
Oh yeah, yeah. So yeah. So look, I had known about it in January, in the middle of February, it started to look serious, um, to us.
Well, maybe, maybe about the 10th issue, February, a week or two after that.
Um. Sara Gilbert Test, lab test grade.
Sandy, myself and on the phone, um, Amy Boyd, who is, who was Sara Gilbert's project manager.
We sort of had an hour and a half conversation about some slightly touchy things.
You know, decisions have got to be made if you want to respond fast. Some slightly risky decisions have to be made early on.
So for instance, we've got a little the CBFC has CBC.
It wasn't sitting there doing nothing, just waiting for COVID to happen.
Right? That's not its job. Those things don't exist, right?
It was making something else and there had to be calls to go, Well, let's stop making that and stop making the COVID vaccine.
No money. We had nothing from anyone.
We just knew there was a problem.
And in that same conversation, you know, Sandy started putting forward ideas that actually the whole program needed to accelerate.
You know, they were, you know, obviously separate tests that sort of started with the program in mind.
But at that point, every day, things were looking more serious.
You know, it's a little bit like where we are with Ebola at the moment. It's sort of like, does it outbreak in Uganda?
There is an outbreak in Uganda. The vaccines, it's a different strain to the West African outbreak in 2014.
So the vaccines that were developed as part of that are not working. So they're trying to get a vaccine.
And Tessa's vaccine is one that has potential.
Um. But but you don't know right now.
You know, is it going to peter out a normal non vaccine,
public health measures going to keep it under control like like contact tracing, isolation, lockdown.
Is that which are all happening in Uganda.
Is that going to keep the outbreak in check, in which case you might look back in two months time ago, we wasted our time.
But today we don't know either way. And that's where we were.
We covered, right? It looked a bit worrying, but we didn't know it was going to be a problem we just had.
So with imperfect information, you've got to make a call. And I think some of those early calls have been pivotal in the the success of the vaccine,
because you had to sort of act as if you knew it was going to be a huge pandemic and make decisions in those early weeks and months on that basis.
And things like the decision to to start a large scale manufacturing program,
the decision to accelerate really aggressively accelerate the clinical trial program,
not to do a safe clinical trials, not to do what's safe manufacturing, but to basically push ourselves,
anyone who could get to work with us to do things where normally we're juggling priorities.
This was just this is the only priority and this is all that matters and everything else stops,
which is, of course, tricky because that's not the way we work. It's not what we normally do.
So, yeah, so I really acutely remember that meeting in this room and sort of the.
The feeling that it was something about it was just a throwaway comment right at the end about I would manage the the program as it were.
So which seemed like a good idea at the time.
And then a few weeks later, it's exploded and there's hundreds and hundreds of people involved.
And we splinter into effectively what I think of as six teams.
Some of those teams are quite interrelated, and Sandy and I basically lead one of those teams,
a large scale manufacturing with Katrina as the technical lead in that thing.
So the three of us basically read that we weren't in this building at the time.
We were over in a different building over at the Welcome Centre, which was actually quite good because we could just take over a lot of space there.
It was good. We weren't competing with the immunology and other teams here who were obviously doing vital work as well.
But Carina was able to take over extra labs and just lay out equipment and things and experiments and stuff.
So yeah, that's my sort of early memory. I remember March the fourth because it was my birthday.
It's easy to remember that I was there was also sorry to interrupt,
but there was a 20th February meeting where Sandy presented the ideas that
you'd come up with at that earlier meeting to the medical sciences division.
Yeah, I saw I didn't go to I didn't go to that meeting. I'm I'm aware of it.
So that meeting is, is whatever date that was, it's one of these things we, you know,
we we were just so much needed to be done so far as what dates of some of these things are not all that clear in my head,
but that's after this meeting I was just talking about this. This meeting was a much more informal meeting where I you know,
and then ideas about getting over and and be polite and stuff involved, which obviously then didn't.
I ran with that getting the clinical trial running with help from the clinical trial stuff.
Yeah. So, so I wasn't at that meeting but I knew what was presented at that meeting.
So what was the focus of your team at that point?
What were the key, urgent things that needed doing?
Well, we sort of like literally started the Sandy and I sat in my office and tried to sort of like,
I don't know, bright, I guess, brainstorm issues, you know.
So our team took because of our experience with the manufacturing and basically, you know, CBS had their manufacturing approaches.
We had been a thorn in their side for years going, Hey, do it this way, do it this way, do it this way.
And something like the CBA, you know, we're academics, right?
So we we sort of, you know, change and innovate a little bit.
And Sandy and I are of a particular way and the general in general is is quite a driven
academic environment in that change as a driver as opposed to let's think this all through,
we get it perfect academically and write a beautiful paper. This is let's go, let's go.
People's lives depend on this stuff cause I talk about that.
So I do lose my train of thought these days a little bit. Well, I was asking you what your focus was and you said, oh yeah, yeah.
So, so that, so the CBF were doing their manufacturing thing but we very early on went let's we're
going to do the large scale manufacturing because you know we sat and went what,
what's the actual problem here.
And it has been said, um, you know, by, by others in industry that the difference between our program and the other academic programs,
none of which got any meaningful was, was Sandy and the large scale manufacturing program.
Um because the academic question is generally how do we get a vaccine that works and the rest is none of our business.
We don't worry about it.
But because we are worried about for rabies, we'd been thinking about this and we went actually the goal was not a vaccine that works.
The goal is a vaccine that works in people's arms. Not if you get a vaccine that works and there's none of it around, you might as well not have it.
What's the point?
So yeah, so we sat down, thought about that, thought a lot about stuff like broadly economics, you know, and this is probably where for me,
you know, my experience at the vet, Nic, was quite helpful because I spent those years thinking about things like this.
We colleagues who who aren't scientists who think about politics and economics and stuff in that office, we were talking about things like,
you know, if we've got the vaccine that works and there's not enough of it, people are going to want it.
People are going to try and steal it, you know. So we were talking about do we need military support?
You know, we talked about, um, vaccine not.
Nationalism I love was that was obvious to us, really obvious that was going to happen, you know,
and it is probably the single proudest thing I've done in my life that that I was involved in getting distributed manufacturing to work.
So not only a process that makes that worked at scale, that was technically risky.
We thought this probably works in theory but didn't know it would work.
And it did work, which was amazing. Our first time it worked, I cried sort of thing just at my desk.
It just cried and cried and cried.
But the thing that really I'm most proud of is that we made a process that you could share with almost anyone with the right technical transfer,
tech transfer, which is an easy and the right facilities at their end and the right human resource that they read.
You could transfer anywhere to anyone and that before AstraZeneca came anywhere near us,
we were rolling it out already to five different manufacturers.
And when AstraZeneca took it over, they kept doing that, which I was very, very happy about.
I was nervous about that because I thought they might do what Pfizer did.
You know, this is our toy and we going to charge a fortune for it.
But they were really good at getting more and more manufacturers in different countries.
So we had India, China, two in the UK and wanting the EU in the early months.
And yeah, so we talked, you know, and these were all decisions we made that that sort of allowed us to, to get a vaccine out.
That was made in a lot of places,
have been used in a lot of places that when one because it's obvious when if one country's making it and gets nervous and holds onto it.
Well, we can't stop that. And how do you stop that? You de-risk it by making it in other places so that others step in and share and whoever.
So it's not all just so power isn't just in one place. So yeah.
So that was, that was some of that stuff I guess.
So one, I'm just wondering if there are any kind of anecdotes you remember at the time.
I'm just thinking of one that Kareena told me, which was it was about you.
So I quite like it. Which was about having to take a vessel.
Yeah. To Portsmouth. Yeah. So that's absolutely.
So tell me. Tell me that. So I'll tell you about that. I'll tell you. I tell you I'll tell you one other thing first just quickly.
So I. I froze.
Probably still February might have been very early March, but I had a I had a it was just before lockdown happened.
I had my last beer at a pub. So for a couple of years almost and I had I visiting was a former undergraduate student of mine, Peter,
who was then studying medicine and in town also was another former student of mine from the same degree human science.
I Oh no. And she was sort of doing a bit of a, a bit of this and that and applying to med school.
So she wanted to go and study medicine anyway.
So we had a chat and I was like, Oh, this programme has gotten out of hand. It's huge, it's exhausting.
And and afterwards I went home and I slept and I woke up the next morning I went,
I, oh no, I just sent out a message, said, stop doing what you're doing.
You come work for me. Yeah, nicely.
You know, I'd really like you to come work for me.
And normally, you know, it's a university you want to go to normally do advertising and recruitment and stuff.
And I just this was one of the good things about the programme, which was even the big department in the Department of Medicine,
medical science division of the university were quite adaptable with normally that they're not.
And so I was just allowed to hire someone and she worked with us for for over a year.
In the end, the reason I mention I owner is because I needed someone in the car with me and it was Iona.
So yeah, one day. So, so we have the process in our lab here, right.
And it's a process that requires the vaccine seed, which is a virus, and it grows in cells.
And one of the bottlenecks when you think about how long is it going to take to get the end product,
is the cells are frozen in tiny little vials and you saw a vial put in a flask,
grow it up for a week, transfer it to a bigger flask, grow it up for a week and then bigger until you've got a bioreactor size.
And so we were trying to show for the first time that that this process in our lab would scale up to a bigger scale and down at the pool facility.
So pull or a supplier of things like bioreactors and equipment and consumables, they have a facility down there that does sort of scale up testing.
I would describe it as so they work with various clients who are developing processes and so much like what happened at the CBF,
we kicked out whatever they were working on and put our stuff in there and thought
occurred to Sandy that actually if we took instead of shipping them of vials of cells.
We had cells growing in the lab and lots of them. For all our experiments, we could take a flask of the cells and that would save two weeks.
And that's really valuable because we definitely had a mantra at the time that every day mattered.
And so, yeah, one afternoon we decided to do that.
I called my car insurance company to go, Hey, I need business cover for my car.
And I told them why? Because this is now in lockdown properly.
And they said, we will just extend that for you. Remember, because it wasn't going to cost a lot.
I said, if you're doing that, we'll just cover it up. And then we had to get letters from the head of the department,
not Adrian Richard Cornell, head of MDM, that basically said, I can't find the letters.
The museum wanted them and I didn't know where they've gone. But it basically said Adam and I owner, we had one each actually.
So everyone said Adam who said it is on official university business, part of the vaccine programme.
This is international importance.
Please don't arrest them because you know, we drove down to Portsmouth and the only other thing on the road was lorries and not many of them.
So the it was eerie theory. I went to a hotel, sorry, a holiday once and then it called Cornwall in January and it felt like the world had died.
And this is the only other time I've ever felt that it just was eerily still and quiet.
Yeah. So I was in the front driving. Iona was on my back seat, you know, because the flask is quite large.
And so she's got a huge where, you know, we saw that we carried her in the morning, huge, big Styrofoam box for a bit of temperature control.
We have ice and keep things cold. We don't normally keep things warm.
We want the cells to be warm. So I'm sorry. Carina filled up a bag with hot water, which we put at the bottom and then put the cells on top of that.
And then I had an alarm that went off every 2 minutes and every 2 minutes the alarm would go off.
She'd open it, pick up the cells, swirl them around, put it back in, put the lid back on every 2 minutes for the whole drive down to Portsmouth.
So we had them in the facility sort of thing, and we actually did that twice because they did a 50 litre run, which was the first thing.
So we do it like a three litre scale, maybe a ten lever scale.
In the lab they did 50 litres and then they did a 200 little one.
So I actually did the drive twice with with I same drive.
We did tape. It's not this is not something I've advertised, but I'm happy happy to say it to you.
We had a bad moment on the way down, but we took a wrong turn sort of thing, which cost us about 10 minutes.
So a lot of things still because we went the wrong way.
This is a disaster as this happens. Yeah.
So that's that's one of the sort of interesting, I guess, interesting little, little anecdotes.
And you talk I mean, you talk about funding. And how about this meeting?
You didn't have a B? No, we didn't. And we we sort of we Sandy offered off offered up sort of 50 K out of our funding for
other programmes to sort of cover like the first week if no one ever came up with money.
The big thing was n the M gave the gen a sort of what they call a pre awards.
So like that like a basically I think it might have been £50 million, quite a big underwrite because they thought money would come one day.
We shouldn't say £50 million. I think I'm mixing that up with something else, a different figure.
But they gave a lot of underwrite, much more than has ever happened before.
And normally they give zero just on the promise that money might come one day and that this was important, you know.
So we yeah, all sorts of stuff happened say, you know, Sandy's the odds person.
Make no mistake Sandy's ideas Korina is technical and I'm delivery sort of thing.
So, you know, Sandy had most of the ideas and we would, you know, he bounced a lot of them off me.
But, you know, he was writing financial sort of economic financial pitches,
which I thought were really, really very good sort of thing, just about, you know,
talking to government and the civil service about how if you put up this amount of money and it's not just about us,
this is do it for London as well or anyone else who's got a candidate, you know, but we need it yesterday sort of thing.
And if you do it, you know, put up, you know, if you gave everyone 50 million, you know,
your the the return potential is off the charts because of lockdown sort of thing that,
you know, a week of lockdown you'd pay half a billion for because of the economic cost, a little like the human cost sort of thing.
And he was also involved in talking to people at the World Bank and stuff like that through through some colleagues
at the Blavatnik School of all places where where I dunno how much he said to you but his partners based there as.
Um. So, yeah. So. So we had a without we haven't quite got into the detail of some of the other stuff I was doing, but that's the March.
The fourth thing I remember was that's Pre-lockdown.
I was at the Blavatnik school because of my admissions role,
and around that time each year we have a meeting where we decide on who we're making offers to.
So I was down there for a whole day meeting for that. Um, I had done most of my work on that pre the pandemic taking control of my life.
But I went down for that day.
But in the middle of that day, we had a, we had a panel for the students and for staff on is this what is this thing that's coming?
You know, because it was immediately by I think it was in Italy by the 4th of March.
And so there was nervousness about it was was picking up. So the the the deanery would myself Kate Auken who's who's a sort of, I guess,
political scientist and one or two others sort of had a panel all it was coming.
And one or two thought I was a bit of a novice because I said, look, we think given where we are,
there's a better than 10% chance of 10 million people dying from this thing.
Like, that's the reality of where we are. And some people thought that was a bit over the top.
Well, he's history is he's prediction is a mug's game, right.
The exactly the same position you might have like like early on in SaaS, for instance, you know, you have thousands die, not millions.
But at that point, you can't really tell the difference. You don't know. But the risk was there.
I mean, that was the fact. It was in Italy, you know, SARS-CoV-2, Canada, but it was more out of control in Italy than SA's at that point then.
So I was able wasn't kind of it um and obviously it spread in China quite a quite a lot by that point.
So yes that, that's another early memory of mine that isn't just trying to get the world to work.
And the other thing that's lesser is that and then the other thing that was sort of interesting was,
was Katrina, um, was fairly, I mean, probably Sandy and I were pretty irreplaceable.
I think I was the most replaceable of the three at that time.
I think, I think take me out of the equation.
You probably derail the programme for four months.
They take Sandy or Katrina out. You might derail the programme completely.
But you know, Sandy and I really did feel Katrina was the most important post on the planet because for most of the others,
anyone else doing a development like this had a team.
She was a person, and we pulled in a couple of scientists from other groups in the Gener who had some experience in the area, just bought them in.
The rest of our team were just helping her wherever they could and one of my let's call it my lower level job.
So at the same time, I'm having calls about how we're going to, um,
what are the qualities we're going to do to release the vaccine at a large scale to trials or to emergency use?
You know, the same day I'm trying to feed Carina so she doesn't go anywhere near her shop sort of thing.
So, you know, I, I had an Australian friend, Gianni, who I didn't know from Australia, I just knew him.
Our daughters went to school together in Boston and his wife Sarah.
They had run a catering business for quite a while now that, uh, they were going to run that down for personal reasons anyway.
But that really got wound down very fast at the end because of the cause of the pandemic.
But we got them in the early times just to feed us sort of thing.
So we, we, and luckily I was able to pay them in the end because we had some money.
But yeah, they would make us three, you know, so like three big meals sort of thing.
And I would bring them in, I'd pick, I'd pick them up twice a week and I would bring them in.
We had a fridge in the welcome centre where we were.
I'd bring them in and put them there and then they would just pick meals that we of course we would,
you know, Carina would be there sometimes 20 hours a day. You know, she was almost sleeping there.
I never caught a sleeping there. But I wouldn't be surprised if she sometimes didn't go home at all.
Called a sleeping bag like that would have been naughty. Not usual, but it happened, so.
Yeah. So just stuff like that. You know, we had to keep Korina were alive and healthy.
It was because Korina of Korina was sick for two weeks. I mean, that's Kareena.
Being sick for two weeks could have killed half a million people. Um, you know, save your eye being sick.
We can sort of do it from home, and we just lose a bit of function.
But. But, but Kareena being sick as the lead lab person who's actually testing ideas and
working out the parameters for what we need to tell Paul to do based on that,
what we're going to tell Oxford Biomedica to do and COBRA and Serum Institute of India and all that stuff that was all all pretty.
Um, it pretty vital. So you you mentioned that when the first batch process worked, you reduce you to date.
So it works. I get slightly confused about the sort of sequence of events.
So how far did you got with the manufacturing? When the clinical trials started.
Right. So clinical trials.
So they started in April? They did. Yes, we did.
So there's two there's two manufacturing streams.
Yeah, right. So there's small scale manufacturing and large scale scale manufacturing.
We, of course, are two teams that talk to each other quite, quite a bit.
And of course, we did already.
So small scale manufacturing used to start the clinical trials and the most urgent first few hundred doses come from the CBF.
And then doing a run that is followed by a a batch that comes from Advent in Italy.
So I remember, you know, so we from early on were talking to Advent a couple of times a week,
you know, because we were we were doing our large scale stuff.
Cath and Sandy and I would talk to Advent regularly about their parameters, what they were doing,
make suggestions and stuff like that about what they were doing was still small scale and bigger than CB's,
but not as big as what we were heading towards sort of thing. So they were making thousands of doses.
We were at that point we've got tens of millions of doses, right?
Turned into billions fairly as a plan for billions fairly quickly.
So yeah, so the trials start before with manufactured.
Let's go manufacture our first batch but you know we're having.
You know, we're very acutely aware of the timelines for how quickly they're going to run out of those small scale batches,
because the clinical trials were ramping up so fast, which was I mean,
and we were acutely aware that Sandy was the first one to really push that idea that the phase ones can roll,
you can just roll into each other rather than having distinct trials.
That's how we were going to do it quickly, which then that was actioned then led by by A&E and others.
You know, in a different world, like in our rabies project, Sandy and I do all of this stuff,
like we do everything I'm told about breaking into teams is all done by us
sort of thing where this was just impossible for any one person to to do it.
We would talk on a Friday as a team, like maybe 25 of us who had reasonably senior leadership roles within the whole program would get together
and sort of give updates on where we were or what we were worried about and all that sort of thing and,
and stuff.
So, yeah, so, so our first batch, which comes from Cobra, I think it was, was the first batch goes into the like phase two, three clinical trials.
And after that I guess technically that went under.
AstraZeneca has oversight into the trials in May.
I would think so. That's another step. Yes. Is when they came in.
So where's Cobra Cobras? Up north. They're the ones at Keele UK.
Yeah. Yeah. So that was the one that made you cry? No, no.
So the one that made me cry was not a clinical batch. All right, so this was the pull batch.
So pull sort of did have practice runs.
So this stuff is normally done sequentially, right?
We were doing it all together, right? So so normally what you would do is we'd have a process.
We'd work with Paul for a year or two to get it up and running and show that it works at scale.
And then we talk to a manufacturer about onboarding it at their facility.
We would go to that manufacturer with like a full specification of everything that we had developed with suppliers at that point.
You know, this was the very weird thing where we were having calls, so like these were cause I was leading on quite a few of them,
basically, Sandy and I running these calls, some on the process, some on quality.
So process we needed generally. Carina Maybe so Sophie was another post-doc who was pregnant at the start of the pandemic sort of thing.
So, so she was coming in doing what she could.
But but as that progress went more to the report writing and technical side of the process quality and then tech
transfer calls about how we're going to get all this stuff aligned at all the different places we're doing this.
And we had people on those calls from competitive companies who would normally not talk to each other,
but we would just we had this NDA that we were trying to update all the time that was getting, I think, who we were in charge of it.
So like stuff non-disclosure. Non-disclosure agreement. Yeah.
So, you know, starts with sort of three or four of us on it.
Then a new company joins. We had ended up with eight or nine on it and I don't think everyone signed it all the time and stuff,
but it was just we've got to get it done sort of thing. So, you know,
we're talking to people at manufacturing facilities who normally do not on board processes that are not fully complete and tested to the nth degree.
This is what we're saying is we want you to onboard a process that we have not ever tested, and we're doing it at Paul next week for the first time.
That's what we want you to on board. So it's it's like we do this back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
And, you know, obviously, obviously, somehow it worked.
You know, there were times, you know, I remember Korina, you know, will come to this, I think, more at the end, she said.
But, you know, there were times we were all exhausted and broken.
I remember Korina going, Why do I have to keep doing this?
And I was just like, We will. We don't know if this is going to work. We will do our best.
We will do good science. We will trust everyone else to do good science.
Maybe hours of work, maybe it'll be University of Queensland, maybe it'll be Texas, or maybe it'll be London.
Just. We trust them to work hard and do it well. We'll do it well and then hopefully we can get out of this mess that we're all in.
But it was it was exhausting. At least before AstraZeneca joined you could we were the last time everyone else was the other way.
So the day started very early but it did end at some point was AstraZeneca were involved they were ahead
America we did have one collaborator who was in California who met who were manufacturing some reagents,
but we didn't have to involve them in many calls, thankfully.
But once AstraZeneca were involved, it felt like my day, which used to sort of calls would end.
Six. And then I'd do like three or 4 hours more work before bed.
If I was lucky, maybe it was 6 hours. But.
But now the clocks would be down to nine or ten at night.
And then you trying to do work after that? It was a little bit ugly. So.
So, yeah. So the AstraZeneca deal, to what extent were we with your bit of the team involved with that?
So in terms of the deal, the deal is effectively nothing to nothing to do with us know that the agreement itself was done at a very, very high level.
Yeah. And, and I just think over the management of the both manufacture.
Yeah. Yeah. So that, that, that we were heavily involved in.
And at the time that was a little bit painful because it added we were already beyond capacity, so it added more stuff to do into the system.
I remember the early weeks after AstraZeneca, they needed stuff to get for them to get up to speed like we had to send.
We were sending things all over the world, right, to get manufacturing to happen.
If you're going to manufacturing need cells, you need seeds for quality control, you need outputs from assays.
You can use the standards and things like these poor runs which showed at work the first time
we ended up using them as standards in assays later on to show the other things were working.
So like AstraZeneca, I'm getting requests from them for shipments of all these things.
We made all this stuff and I'm getting it from different people and it's unclear if they different requests.
Some of the requests look the same. Do you have two different teams who need the same thing or actually people just not talking to each other?
And it but that was the nature of something so messy and so intense.
And much like when we had started, you know, we were just bringing people in and trying to get it to work.
And there was a lot of overlap and redundancy just to make it work.
But this was AstraZeneca going through the same the same process with us.
So yeah, and I guess that was that was I guess that was, I think formally signed in mid-May.
I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so formal.
The two week negotiation period I think started right at the end of April because in that window we were talking to AstraZeneca about things.
Yeah. Mm hmm. And and how when when the I'm jumping really to the when the clinical trial results finally came out.
How, um, personally did you feel that as a as an achievement, I know you weren't running the clinical trials yourselves,
but yeah, I mean, you know, very different to the because again, I'm talking to the clinical trial people, but yeah,
so normally I'd be running a clinical trial when I'm this involved in a project that's normally sitting with me,
not in this case, obviously, that was a big and I'm normally running a little clinical trial, just for the record.
Nothing like nothing like this. 12 people I like that that I can handle, that I can handle, amongst other things.
10,000, I think is too big a thing to to to do on your to do without a huge team.
Um, you know, obviously, um, a satisfying I mean the the early results obviously had that element of, um,
there was a dosing issue with people having got in different doses, um, that, you know, in terms of messaging was problematic sort of thing.
Um, I always, which is very unfortunate.
I always had the impression that there were players out obviously outside the university,
players out in the global environment who, who sort of wanted, wanted this not to be successful.
Um, and it looks like there's, some of those are political sort of reasons.
Um, some of them are financial, um, some of them are, there's a few that are probably personal sort of thing grudges.
Grudges held in various places. Um.
So yes, I was. Happy, but.
But not as happy as when. Because I was so intimately involved in the manufacturing.
That's where my soul had gone. Yes. Yes. And and everything.
That's that's where I didn't cry like I cried when when we got the the first run results from Poland.
It worked. And that may seem funny, but I gave it some it was an emotional attachment rather than rather than anything else.
Um, and all this was happening under the glare of publicity.
Did you personally get involved in. In any media? Yeah, a little bit.
I mean, we had a we were fair.
It was very limited in scope who was allowed to talk to the media. But I was so I was not restricted from talking to the media.
But did it fairly light handed? Is that was that a new thing for you know, I mean, a slightly I have done a little bit before because my again,
my role of that MC had meant had led to interactions.
I like interviews with journalism about the future of polio.
Um, during the Ebola outbreak, I was invited down to the House of Lords to,
to speak to ambassadors and stuff like that about, about the outbreak and response to it.
Um, you know, so I did have a little bit of experience of that sort of thing, but also training.
So I, in my time at that part of it was we all got training from people who'd been at the BBC on,
on different forms of interviews, video interview and stuff like that.
So I did a little bit, but I, you know, I think it's the best expression I come up with.
I'm second tier when it comes to that stuff sort of thing.
So obviously there's, you know, no one invited me on Panorama, as it were,
sort of thing, but BBC World Service I spoke to a few times Stephen Nolan on the BBC.
I also have a a philosophical position on speaking to the media that's not necessarily
aligned to everyone's in that I believe firmly in speaking to all media sort of thing.
So for instance, I've been on GP news, the spectator in places like that,
which in an academic environment would sometimes be seen as a bit right wing.
You know, I did have someone say I'm not touching that with a 40 foot pole sort of thing.
I said, I will happily do it because my position on that is um, it, it battles the silo sort of thing.
So it's quite nice to speak to The Guardian because they tend to be on your side and they like you.
It's very easy to speak to people who like you. I actually get I think it's more valuable in some ways to speak to people who are vaccine hesitant.
For instance, I'd much rather speak to vaccine hesitant people than people who have already had the jab.
Like, You guys are my friends, I love you guys. We've had the jab. That's great. But if I spent an hour talking to, you know, new people get jabbed.
Yeah, yeah. If I speak in the right way to people in the GB news audience.
Right, go. Because I can I can relate.
We can relate to each other like can't we sort it out? And I found an interview with you on the ABC, which is obviously, you know, your home country.
Yeah, yeah. Where there was a lot of vaccine hesitancy, wasn't there?
There was at times it was.
I mean, you know, it wasn't it's probably not hugely different to Britain with the one difference being the AstraZeneca vaccine here,
because it comes from Oxford and stuff. There was a lot of sort of, you know, that talk.
You hear that some people wanted to print British flags on it and stuff like that.
Yeah. And like I was, you know, there was a so the ABC radio thing was, was fine.
There was a different thing, much more sort of fluff thing on one of the main morning TV programmes called Sunrise.
That was a bit of fun sort of thing to go it to go.
And, you know, it's it's the question is why I always think about why are you speaking to the media sort of thing.
And it's, you know, I don't mind speaking to people, but time is finite.
You know, I had a most notably what I did have was I had a Twitter thread that really did go very viral sort of thing,
which was a very new experience because when there was the dispute between the EU,
the UK and Astra sort of thing, so I, I did, I laid out why the EU is wrong thing sort of thing.
But what that did down the line was that gave me the lead in to a right wing audience who were vaccine who might be vaccine hesitant.
Right. Which is which is, look, the EU a wrong way.
A right. Macron's a fool. Now let me tell you why it's normal that you're feeling hesitant.
But why I think you shouldn't be. You know, it's not you people are really it's because you're vaccine hesitant that's that
feels good and gives you a little rush of adrenaline helps that sort of thing.
So anyway so when did.
Things finally. Well, have things calmed down? You said you're now working more on the thing and the rabies have become.
Yeah, the Ebola is interesting.
I'll make one comment now and you can circle back to it as much as you like later.
Is the Ebola thing has just PTSD as a collective group?
It has been traumatic, just it happening at all and really difficult.
In a weird way. In a weird way. I can happy to talk about that a little bit.
There are people who like to talk to me because I'm a little bit too open about some things, but this might be part of that.
Yeah. Things are not like. Like. Nothing will be like. February, March, April, May.
Those four months I expect to never see like that again.
Things are still very, very, very busy.
But for for slightly different reasons, like work.
I've always been busy at work. I'm a bit of a workaholic.
We in 2021, Sandy led on a clinical trial of intranasal administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which, you know, taking on a new project.
So again, that's another thing where I'm designing the trials, doing the documentation, working with the regulators,
the ethics committees, all those sorts of sorts of things which I really value, right?
Because it's like that's the creative part of my job.
There are versions of my job where you just review paperwork, you don't get to write and design trials and,
you know, propose how you want to do things and stuff like that and bounce ideas around.
So that that took a fair bit of time sort of thing and that panned out.
Long story short, it didn't work, but it's it's in the very specific context.
You know, we had a really specific goal, which was, can you take the existing vaccine,
an off the shelf device and spray it up the nose and does that work?
So phase one trial safety was good, but the immunogenicity like how strong was the immune response to it was patchy sort of thing.
So that's just been published. You know, again, it's the sort of thing where I don't want people overinterpreting what it meant.
You know, if I was if I really wanted to do an intranasal vaccine, I would reformulate it.
I wouldn't just do what, you know, what are the odds that the thing you stick in the arm is perfectly formulated to go up the nose?
Want so to go up the nose. You want it more concentrated.
You know, if you're spraying half a mile up a nose, you know, the volunteers were poor.
It tasted sweet. You're not supposed to be tasting it. That's supposed to be absorbing it in the nose.
That's because it wasn't concentrated enough.
So, for instance, you using the sort of processes we've developed, you could do a more concentrated version and maybe that would work better.
We're not focussed on that. We had a really single singular question.
We're leaving the rest of that to AstraZeneca and others to to ask questions about.
So the rabies, you know, we had our phase one trial here in the UK, which we've expanded just to increase the numbers of.
We've started a phase 1b2 trial in Tanzania with almost less than 200 people, but much bigger than the one here.
And that is ongoing at the moment, which takes a fair, fair bit of my time,
but also based on our experience of the getting manufacturing up and running and our experience before that as well,
working with the MHRA and trying to innovate with things, we've set up something called biped here,
which is a sort of like a small research facility that's designed to help transition lab research into GMP manufacturing.
Is that an acronym? Does it spell out itself? It is BIOPROCESS Process and Analytical Development Pipeline.
So yes, so sort of developing tests to show that something safe helping, you know,
the BIPED team have been helping with the Ebola stuff sort of thing because they, you know,
we have a bunch of equipment we got during the vaccine manufacturing process and we've brought in some new members
of staff who have experience of GMP and or experience of industry sort of thing and how to do certain things.
And so, so we've got a little team here which I'm part of and help manage basically trying to help the you know,
there's lots of good ideas at the university, right. And we showed that you can take a good idea and turn it into real world impact.
Other people have done that before, of course,
but there's a real valley of death between the really good ideas and the preclinical work in the lab and actually getting it to patients.
There's some real challenges there and now our role is to both lab based off to help but also almost like consultancy but not quite.
We wouldn't call it consultative consulting, subject matter expertise, helping people navigate the things they don't know.
Because normally on a project at a university for a clever idea,
you have a postdoc who's a scientist who doesn't know any of this stuff, who tries to.
Get to grips with it for that project. And then when that project's gone, they leave and the next project starts again from scratch.
We're trying to change that so that instead of employing someone on each project,
you come to us, you might employ someone who's a who's an expert in your disease.
That's heaps better work with us. And we have the expertise to fill the gaps that those people normally have, which, as you were saying earlier,
is something that the manufacturers recognised was quite unusual for a university.
To what extent do you feel that your contribution was recognised more widely?
I think that's really difficult. Really difficult because I think.
I think a lot of people and I don't mean just in our time,
I think a lot of people across the whole program probably feel a bit of a lack of personal recognition from it.
You know, there were hundreds of people involved. And while there's been awards for teams and stuff like that, there's no alternative to this.
I don't have a better answer for it. You know, the heads always go and collect the awards because that's not what that's the way these things work.
Right. But a lot of people work just as hard who don't get that sort of recognition or go to those sorts of things.
I think for us there was a particular issue around this is a very academic, classically academic thing.
I think it should be, but it's not highly thought of.
You know, it's it's it's I think even out in the public you'd go, well,
Oxford designed it and AstraZeneca made it were actually AstraZeneca were only
able to make it because of what we brought to the table through this team.
AstraZeneca had not made this sort of thing before, but generally don't make many vaccines.
They only make one. And so we worked very closely.
It was in the case of, hey, here's the starting material, you guys know what you're doing if you go.
And they were very good. They worked with us really well, and I don't begrudge that.
But you know what? You know, I think we would generally feel the recognition hasn't been very fairly distributed,
but at the same time I recognise that we're probably not the only ones who feel that way.
I think there's probably a lot of people who feel that way around the place.
You know, there's there's probably people who really think I've been quite recognised because I was on second tier,
a couple of second tier news things you know, with most people were not on anything like that it's.
Yeah. A tricky, tricky thing. I do talk to various people about it sometimes.
And, um. Yeah, I think. I think I try not to worry about it too much.
It doesn't. Some people are very upset by it.
Um, you know, I, I did say early on, the general won't survive.
This was how I described it, because you can't turn around and do something like we were trying to do without there being repercussions.
It's not like in terms of interpersonal relationships breaking down.
Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, it doesn't matter how collegiate you naturally are when decisions are being made hard and fast,
they're being made hard and fast, you know?
And there's not always time to explain it to everyone when normally you would there's not always time to engage widely with.
Sometimes you would, um, you know, and I think that will, I think over time for some that will get easier I think.
I imagine they were relationships which are repairable but have many people left.
I've come across people elsewhere in the university who had a really tough time working, you know, ridiculous hours.
You've now got to do something else. Go to work for industry or something like that.
Yeah, look, some, some people have, um, you know, there's been changes in the gender.
You know, they were two of the lead investigators who were in the general are no longer in the job as such, or at least they're not physically based.
You sort of, um, they've moved to other departments.
Um, you know, I would interpret that personally as being part of part of that issue, maybe not fully.
I don't know their minds. And like, I'm sure there's other things in play but yeah it's notable that that has happened.
Mhm. Mhm. You know, but in a wider sense and in a more positive sense, um,
I mean all the work you've done has involved collaboration with other academic teams and with industry teams.
But would you say that the, the pandemic kind of multiply that by.
The Factor. So certainly on the industry side.
So for us in particular, because of what we were doing, we pulled,
but we pulled in industry and industrial partners much more than any of the other sort of parts of the program.
You know, like I'm sure the immunology people, you know, they,
they've worked with some sort of contract organisations who do some assays and who have developed assays.
So there's been some of that, but there's been tons of internal working,
lots of people here doing the immunology where we had a very small team actually doing stuff here for manufacturing but,
but pulled in like experts from, from elsewhere.
So we brought in a bunch of consultancy companies who had some expert in manufacturing to help us out.
We just had no time. And very usefully we brought in some stuff from Vic, the Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Centre.
Oh yes, yes. Which was not set up well. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
But had eight members of staff. So particularly for us John Humphrys He and I talked almost every day and I couldn't have done my job without him.
I think, I think it would have been impossible, but then also all sorts of people,
Bridget and Simon came in and helped with quality and stuff like that.
So they were really, really very helpful.
And then the staff from the companies themselves, you know, maybe there's some different motivations at the top.
Maybe maybe money really matters at the top of some of the companies.
But for the people I was talking to every day, it was really just, let's do this thing.
It's important. Let's move heaven and earth.
Let's get it done. You know, John, John, John, John Humphries.
I think it is possible. The last thing I'll think of before I die is the back of his daughter's head.
And he's he's burnt because I got caught with him constantly in lockdown.
Right. So he's his daughter's at home and she's at a desk on the other side of the room.
So I was constantly just looking at him with her head behind him,
sort of thinking it was just it just became sort of like a background to me for the for the pandemic,
or at least for those early months of the pandemic. Yeah. Yeah.
With that, I mean, that it brings us round, I think quite neatly to talk about, um, what it was, what it was actually like for you to live through.
Um, I mean, we were, you were at home most of the time or did you, were you able to come in?
So I was split. So I was at home some of the time.
I was here some of the time. I live quite close. Um, you know, for me when I think of, I mean, everyone's not even in the vaccine table.
It just, just the pandemic was challenging. Lockdown is challenging.
These are difficult things for everyone.
Um, I did say to some people said the only thing worse than being us is being someone with nothing to do in that situation.
So I was glad we were busy. Given a choice, I'd be slightly less busy than we were, but it could have been worse.
Um, my next question. Really. So what did your days look like?
Oh, I'd get up straight to my computer a couple of hours, maybe breakfast, then either keep working at home or I come in here.
I, I'm at 25 minute walk from here.
I was driving and parking because I couldn't afford that time each day to not be working.
It was too low. That was, you know, that was problematic sort of thing.
Um, because you need that you, that walk is part of wellbeing, isn't it.
Yeah, exactly, exactly right. There's a, there was an article I, a former student of mine who's Danish, sent me a link to it and told me what,
told me what the headline there was an article in the Danish press going it was either the vaccine or the pandemic made item,
which is that sort of thing, because I put on 25 kilos in about three months.
So I think I'm a big guy to start with. I didn't need that.
And it's been hard to hard to shake it, to say the least.
Um, I've been very, I consider myself to be very lucky in on the personal relationship side.
You know, my wife is a professor at Oxford, so she's got a pretty serious career.
She runs huge international programmes on water and sanitation, so, so really, really big stuff.
And we have always had a had a really clear it's not the woman's job to raise the child and look after the house.
She sort of became a housewife during the pandemic because of what I was doing.
And in fact, presumably she her job wasn't regarded as essential to not in the same.
Well, she she kept working, but. You didn't have to be in the office, in the office sort of thing,
like she doesn't have a lab that she has to be at or anything like that sort of thing.
So it's intellectual rather than like, like we have here.
But there was no shared responsibility for like so we've got a pre-teen daughter sort of thing.
There was no shared responsibility for homeschooling or anything like that.
I did not touch it, you know.
And in fact, if I was working from home, they sometimes there'd be a little knock on the door from the daughter bringing me food because I'd forget,
you know, I'd paradoxically forget to eat. But then when I did, I did everything I could touch sort of thing.
Um, it was actually better for me if I worked from home because that food Johnny, my first sort of thing, that was just a big trace.
That was bad for me to have it arm's reach sort of thing, just in the kitchen next to my office.
But yeah, but I, I saw myself very lucky because of that.
There's, you know, and you, you don't know enough about people's relationships to judge it.
But but there's been multiple relationships break down within the team,
personal relationships with partners or husbands lives in the pandemic period sort of thing.
Some are said to lay very strongly at the ground of the work we did.
Um, yeah. And um, the big yeah, there was a big PTSD thing at the moment over the Ebola thing.
Like I think I wasn't sure if I was just having a strong reaction to it and it wasn't, you know,
the amount of work we're going to do is nothing like what we did during coronavirus, right?
The stuff is already that most of it's there. Not that it's not that there are problems in the team that that it's it's the oh god.
Here we go again. That, that yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, I thought you mean.
Yeah, I had a chat with Tess LAMB the other day, who went.
So we're friends.
I've known Tess for a long time socially because well before I worked at the Jenna when I was a post-doc in Oxford, I had a very good friend,
Alex Spencer from Sydney, who was also an immunologist, finished high school and she came and stayed with me while she found her own place.
She worked at the gym up until a few months ago, the whole time she worked at the Dan for 16 years.
So I knew all the Jana people socially, not Sandy.
So when Sandy offered me a job, I called Alex and said, I want to work for this guy Sandy.
She must have said that was okay because here I am. But, you know, I did test and I knew what each other as postdocs back in the day.
But um, yeah, we were talking the other day. I said, you know, this really would have been useful in 2017, 2027.
This 2022 is way too soon to be looking at something like this again.
It just, you know, we you know, I remember we hosted a I little I don't even know what it was, but a young leaders thing, a Franco Anglo thing.
So French and British young ladies program. I spoke for them for a bit about the vaccine experience and what we did.
And then we went for a walk over over to Ovid to like near the CBF and stuff and I just tagged along because I wanted to walk.
I had done my bit, I just thought I'll come for a walk and some of them had questions. I would just walk and talk.
But then Tess was over there and I just, I remember this so strongly of her talking about what had happened and her just going,
and next time this happens, we cannot do it the same way.
Course, people, we cannot ask the people involved to pay a price like this, like we've had to pay.
So I know she and I are fairly aligned on the recognising there's a price in what happened.
So would you say there was nothing or not enough in place to support anybody who was struggling with the mental health world?
Oh, absolutely. It's not that's not something that exists and might as well not exist.
It's a sort of thing institutions say they care about.
But there's very little now I'm I'm a bullying and harassment advisor at the university, and I have been for a long time sort of thing.
So there's there's stuff like that around, but there's not there's not a lot there's an email goes around once in a while going,
Hey, you should take care of your mental health thoughts. Hey, read this policy about mental health.
That'll fix that. It's there's not a lot of it.
I had, again, a former MP student contact me and I spoke to spoke to them who sort of does this sort of thing.
It does mental health and resilience and all that sort of thing. I was just like, you should really because I'd spoken.
I said the sort of things I've said to you. You said we should come in and we should help them stop.
And I said, No one's going to. Do it.
It's just not going to happen. Sort of thing. It's not.
I wasn't even, you know, that was before I even thought, well, how who's going to pay for it sort of thing?
Yeah. So yeah, no I don't, I don't think that's been good.
I think the best we hope for generally is that we try and look after ourselves.
We try and tread softly and reasonably on each other.
I must say the Ebola thing, I think, has been a real softly, softly in my from my experience of it so far,
just because everyone's the people who are fragile have recognised that that's not a unique experience to them.
And so we're trying to be a little bit less hard and fast than we sometimes have been in coping.
Um, so yeah, I mean, is there a, I don't know, this sounds awful,
but is there a sense that it's not such a big problem that it's not going to be so global?
And so the urge, the food we would I would genuinely say that a pandemic of Ebola was unlikely.
Because just the characteristics of the disease don't lend themselves to to the sort of spread you see with a respiratory.
I mean, do you do you get asymptomatic transmission or not?
Not really. Not not much. Not much.
There's a little bit, you know, and it's it's not really aerosol transmission transmission.
Some people would try to argue that it is or it can be certainly doesn't transmit like a flu or a cold or a kofod.
And you've not got that sense that we had with COVID, that there's some kind of steamroller coming across Europe and it's going to hit us.
No, no, not at all. Not at all. Odds are we don't get cases in Europe at all.
Having said that, that from a European or American perspective, from an outsider perspective, the position we're in with the Uganda outbreak,
even though the numbers are heaps smaller, is is probably as risky as the peak of the West African outbreak.
The reason being where there are cases which is in the capital which is getting close now to Entebbe,
where the international airport is, and that Uganda is a country with quite,
quite strong international connections where the connection, let's call them intercontinental connections, not just intimate,
not just across Africa, which which just increases the likelihood of it getting out on a plane, basically.
But if it did, the expectation would be very good chance to curtail it wherever it shows up.
You would notice it quickly. I wrote a terrible op ed with a colleague during the West African outbreak.
The only real risk is if it gets to a huge city.
The sort of city I would be worried about would be like a big Indian city, something like that.
I think China would probably curtail it quite quickly.
But just just the way people move around in some of the big Indian cities would suggest it could get a grip there before you curtailed it.
And once that happened, then we probably are in high risk situation.
But that's you know, it's not going to show up in London and then suddenly be a thousand cases.
It's going to show up in London.
And anyone who's met that person is going to be just for, you know, put on quarantine for a couple of weeks and stuff like that.
It's going to be quite and it's noticeable. It's very noticeable.
It's not you don't have mild, big, mild cases that don't look like.
Like it I mean, it sometimes gets confused for other very bad diseases, like severe malaria or something in the early days.
But it's not going to be confused for stubbing your toe or something like that.
Yeah. I think we're I think we're pretty much.
Yes, we believe in. And that's what I do like to talk.
Yeah. No, I like people who like to talk. Um. So, I mean, there must be hundreds.
What? What what are some of the new questions that have been raised by the whole experience that you'd like to explore in the future?
Like academic questions. Or either academic or practical questions.
All political questions. I mean, I haven't we haven't touched we haven't gone anywhere in the policy there yet.
But I've got lots of interesting things, I think.
Call it a call it a a worry. Um, I'm a I'm a big fan of, of not picking winners, if that makes sense,
because we tend to get it terribly wrong and we're very bad at extrapolating situation or situation.
I think what happened here was was good from some perspectives, which is, you know, we have lots of players in the game trying to develop something.
My concern, if I have one, is because of the relative success of the MRA platform, which is good, that's good.
More platforms are better. Pfizer. Moderna. Pfizer, Moderna one.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly right.
There's a there's a risk of homogenisation next time that everyone just goes let's I'm RNA this thing if it works that's great.
But what you what we gain from sort of a heterogeneous approach is we can't really
predict we don't really know against certain diseases what's going to work really well.
The other thing that sort of jumps out to me at the moment as well is there's no reason to think that the first thing will be the best thing, right?
So that the requirements here were that it worked pretty well and we got it fast.
That's what mattered. That's not what matters ten years from now for COVID, right?
It's you know, there's a danger of sort of market position here where, say, someone like Pfizer goes, this is a good one.
This is a good one. They've got a real motivation to keep that at the top and to suppress other options.
But it still has the problem of of needing to be in 81 is 84.
Yeah, that's right.
And again, I mean, I hope that improves over time and I expect it would because it's a relatively new technology compared to the chat boxes,
that sort of platform. Um, but yeah, my, just, my concern is that,
that it will be hard to transition to second or third wave vaccines that may work better and give longer lasting immunity.
Because, you know, boosters are fine. I mean, it's, it's I get a flu.
I just had my flu shot last week. Um, you know, that's fine, but.
But the reason we get a flu shot is because the flu is changing all the time, not because of antibodies waning as such.
So, you know,
it may be that some of the the next vaccines coming through might be even built on older technologies like subunit vaccines or inactivated vaccine.
They may offer longer lasting protection. They might be better vaccines long term.
You just can't get them as fast. So I think both the cold, we've got to be careful of that.
But also I'm worried. I guess what I'm saying is I'm worried about us learning the wrong lesson.
If the lesson is MMR and the vaccines are awesome and I think they are like I'm very happy to do my RNA vaccines,
but I think there's a danger of just doing it.
My RNA vaccines or of any one thing having too much market dominance that prevents something better from coming through.
In theory, clinical trials will get you allow you to show it to show superiority.
But yeah. Market share is market share.
It's hard to fight that sometimes. Yeah. And has the experience changed your attitude or your approach to your work?
Um. Not that I think enormously.
I think it was just sort of like for me it was a really sped up version of what I do.
You know, well, you know, I find science really interesting, but not.
But like I. I don't love reading the literature so much.
I don't I'm not an ideas generator in the way that Sandy can be,
so that I've never felt that I'm going to go down the professor route or at least I haven't for a very long time.
You know, I, I get value from, you know, I've got to keep myself busy somehow.
I'd like it to be intellectually stimulating. I like playing with money and data.
It's like they buy things I have in my job. But the, the, there are two things, a real world impact I like.
So the think, translation and impact has always been a big thing for me. It's why I went to Blavatnik what I figured I could have more impact.
Working with policymakers to understand science would be better than doing a bit more science.
Well, you know, we'll never have this big an impact again.
Like, I never thought I'd have an impact anywhere like this in my career.
Um, so, yes, that doesn't really change my attitude to my work, I guess I'm, I don't know if thankful is the right word.
Like, I hate that it happened. I never want to do it again. That's the PTSD with Ebola coming.
I don't want to have to do this again, but I am thankful that I had a chance to do something meaningful beyond my own sphere, as it were.
Um, which is nice. Makes my mum happy.
She finally understands the impact of what I do, um, and stuff.
And after, after, you know, having left the country and had a grandchild in another country and stuff like that.
After many years of my brother being number one, some son of the month on the wall,
I've managed to steal the title for a little bit, just for a little while.
So, you know, it doesn't really change my attitude. Um, you know, I'm quite happy doing, doing this sort of thing.
Um, but yeah.