Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Oxford Summit 2021.
I think the past year, of course, it's been horrendous for all of us and for the whole planet.
But I hope and I believe we've learnt lots of lessons.
So what I'd like to do is just share with you some of the lessons I've learnt over the past 15 months or 18 months,
et cetera, with five brief stories. But the big message is I'd like to give is that sort of across the planet?
We're facing some major challenges. And the only way to come up with solutions to these is by working together.
And I do believe by working together, we can do the impossible.
So let me share these five sort of narratives and apologies for the fact that they are largely Oxford based.
So the first story, of course, has to be the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine.
So the story there is sort of back in March last year, a couple of our senior academics Adrian Hill,
Sarah Gilbert, both the household names now they had created a company called Vaccine Tech about four years ago.
And then last year, when the pandemic hit us, they got together with senior faculty in the university.
In fact, I read Professor John Bell, the vice chancellor Louise Richardson and head of medical sciences division Cabinet agrees.
But they also pulled together colleagues from the UK government and the UK regulators from the funders, but importantly from AstraZeneca,
a large global pharmaceutical company and in particular their CEO, Pascal Soriot and the head of R&D many penguins.
And together they said, How can we generate a vaccine for this pandemic as quickly as possible?
We're not worried about making money. We need to identify a vaccine that's going to get the world out of this mess.
And it is absolutely stunning what my colleagues have done in the space of 10 months, something that would have normally taken them 10 years.
So the big lessons for me from that are that if we get all the stakeholders together and we create one goal,
one vision, one focus, then I think we can do the impossible.
And here, you know, we had colleagues from government and university, from industry funders and then of course, from the regulators as well.
And together they had this one single vision that's generating vaccine as quickly as possible.
So the key thing? Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. The second thing I would say is that in all of these organisations,
the people who came together are great leaders, the great innovators and their great entrepreneurs.
So inside AstraZeneca, Pascal and many inside the university, inside government, inside the regulators, inside the fund.
So it's about people. People make these big things happen.
The third lesson for me is being that sort of, you know, the reason Oxford was able to do this is that in the previous two decades.
There had been sustained investment in some major infrastructures, so the Jenner Institute,
set up by Adrian Hill, the global health institutes at Oxford, has in Kenya and Thailand and Vietnam.
The clinical by manufacturing facility that we have here in the university. All of these enabled us to pounce on this problem quickly.
I think it's also fair to say that members of the public society they all recognise now,
I believe that science is incredibly important and the universities are incredibly important.
You know, April, May last year, everyone was looking to people like Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill to get us out of this mess.
So that was the first and the second story is the recovery trial.
So this was headed up by a couple of my clinical colleagues, Martin Landray and Peter Hornby.
And together, what they've done with lots of clinicians across the NHS, across the UK working in many,
many hospitals, they tested a number of existing drugs to see if they would be effective against.
And they've shown that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective, and they've also shown that lopinavir ritonavir were also ineffective.
But importantly, they showed that three existing drugs are effective.
Dexamethasone, a cheap, generic anti-inflammatory found in all pharmacy stores, was shown to be effective.
More recently, they've shown tocilizumab is effective, and most recently of all,
they've shown that this Regeneron monoclonal antibody combination is also plenty.
So again, the lessons from that are in the UK,
the NHS is a wonderful resource for us to sort of help generate new therapies for patients and improve the lives of patients.
It's a wonderful resource. I think the second lesson for me is that.
The regulators here have been absolutely remarkable. So dexamethasone, you know, in June 16th last year,
the prime minister announced this at one of the lunchtime presentations that he was giving to the nation.
And by that night, it had become policy.
By the weekend, it was already saving lives and that one drug, dexamethasone, has saved more than a million lives in the past year or so.
Remarkable success. The third story is a programme called the Moonshot Programme.
So this was set up by Dave Stewart, Yvonne Jones, Martin Walsh, Frank Blundell.
And what they did was they took the main protease in code, which is a potential drug target.
They screened it against a library of compounds.
They identified a number of chemicals starting points, and then they didn't keep those chemicals starting points for themselves in Oxford.
They shared them with the whole world.
So they had colleagues in all parts of the world, in South Africa, in Australia, in Brazil, working on these chemicals,
starting points, optimising them, making them more potent, trying to convert them into drug molecules that we could give to patients.
And literally, within a few weeks, they identified nanomoles a potent culprit.
So again, the lessons for me from this story are that open science sharing all your data and knowledge accelerates science.
That's been wonderful. I think the other success has been that sort of some of these infrastructures that we've got in the UK,
like the diamond light synchrotron at Harwell or the Rosalind Franklin Institute or others infrastructures like the Crick,
the Sanger, the these are amazing resources that we can use to tackle some of these big global problems.
The fourth story is a project that we started about three years ago focussed on trying to treat multimorbidity associated with ageing.
So we all recognise that we've got ageing societies all over the world.
A lot of these elderly patients, they don't have one disease. They normally have half a dozen diseases.
They're usually taking a drug for each of those diseases, and then they're taking two or three drugs to manage the side effects of those.
So often these individuals are taking maybe eight, nine 10 drugs a day.
So now we now believe it may be possible to treat multimorbidity associated with ageing with single treatments.
And so this is something that's not currently being done in the pharmaceutical industry.
It's a completely new approach.
So what we did was we set up a partnership with Mike Ferguson, University of Dundee with David Adams and Janet Lawd at the University of Birmingham.
Obviously ourselves here in Oxford, but we also partnered with the Medicines Discovery Catapult in Manchester.
So Chris Malloy. And we partnered with colleagues at the Crick through interaction and together what
we've done in the past three years is we've started to build a pipeline of new targets.
We've come up with new biomarkers, new ways of stratifying patients,
and we're now also looking at how we can repurpose existing drugs, but also what we've done in the past three years.
We've pulled in other university, we've pulled in some biotechs.
We've had conversations with a lot of venture capitalists and patient groups, and we're in discussions with a number of pharma companies.
So we've created this national network to focus on how we can treat multimorbidity associated with ageing.
So the lesson to me from this are that even in this wonderful place in Oxford,
we don't have all the resources and the expertise and the infrastructure. We need to tackle problems like multimorbidity.
We have to partner with other universities with big infrastructures like the catapult in the crick.
We have to bring in industry, we have to bring in biotech, we have to bring in patient groups, et cetera.
And now we're also working with universities in Israel as part of this project.
So the lessons that universities are undoubtedly in my mind, the engines of innovation,
what we have to work together and not just work together in the UK, but work together with universities all over the world.
The final story is a story around rare diseases.
So many of you are aware there are 7000 rare diseases across the world.
If you add up all the patients, it's more than 350 million patients.
30 percent of these kids do not reach the age of five. It can take between six to eight years to get a diagnosis.
For some of these individuals and 95 percent of these patients, ninety five percent have no drug treatment.
So we set up a project with a colleague named Hani Chowdhury,
who did his DPhil here in Oslo that supervised by Peter Ratcliffe, our recent Nobel prise winner.
So Hani is now moved back to the King Abdullah Aziz University in Saudi Arabia, and we're working together to see.
How we can use A.I. to accelerate new therapeutics for rare diseases.
So the big lesson for me from this is that sort of great mentors like Peter
actually helped produce great leaders and visionaries who go all over the world.
And I think together we can continue to work together to solve some of these big global problems.
So five stories, I hope some lessons that you may consider debating over the next three days.
But I think it's fair to say we all recognise this over the past 12 months, 15 months, 18 months.
As a consequence of this pandemic, close to three million people have died, tens of millions of families, their lives have been destroyed.
Tens of millions of people are going to be living with the consequences of long COVID.
They're going to have to deal with the challenges of mental health. A whole generation of school kids have missed a whole year of schooling.
The impact of that, we've yet to feel the governments all over the world have had to spend trillions of dollars literally protecting the vulnerable,
trying to sort of safeguard jobs, trying to protect businesses.
And we're still not yet out of this pandemic. So. It's been a horrendous year, but I hope will a year of many lessons.
I hope we can take all of those lessons and apply them to some of the challenges that we're facing in the future.
Now, in my own space, I care about health care,
so I worry about things like dementia and mental health and antimicrobial resistance and how we can cure cancer,
etc., etc. But across the world, we've got other bigger challenges.
You could argue climate change, pollution, clean water, more energy, food for the population ET.
And the only way we're going to tackle these is by coming together. So I think I'd leave you with the following messages.
Let's come together. Let's be more ambitious. Let's be willing to take risks.
Let's pool our infrastructures and resources and expertise. And I do believe that together we can do the impossible.
So thank you very much. I hope you enjoy the next three days.
I'm sure you will enjoy the next three days, and I'm sure I will learn a lot from all of you.
So thank you.