The optic study is the Oxford protective immunity from t cells in health care workers and this is a study of immunity to COVID.
The way it started was several of us at doctors were working on the wards here at the John Ratcliffe,
including Ellie Barnes and John Prater and myself and lots of our healthcare worker colleagues were coming up to us and saying, We've had COVID.
Would you like to look at our blood? Because they knew we were immunologists and nobody knew anything about the immune response to COVID?
At the beginning, we didn't even know if we made T cells.
There was a lot of interest in antibodies, but we're T-cell immunologists.
And so we started taking blood using an ethical framework that was pre-existing with the GI Biobank.
And the study grew from there. And it ended up being part of a national study that myself and Paul Klenerman have co-led called Pitch,
which is in a number of other university hospitals in the UK.
And we have recruited 700 people locally in Oxford.
We're so grateful to all the health care workers who take part in our studies and we've been able to answer quite a lot of questions with this.
First of all, we've demonstrated the healthy immune response to the virus in healthy people.
We've looked at antibodies and t cell responses and we've shown that infection brings about immunity.
And these samples that we took from healthcare workers were used by the Oxford Vaccine Trial Group because they always wanted to
benchmark how the vaccine was doing - this is summer of 2020 when they were developing the vaccine and it was in early clinical trials,
and they wanted to see if they could get the vaccine to induce an immune response like infection would,
so our samples were really crucial for demonstrating that.
So they played a crucial role in the development of the Oxford vaccine.
We also used our samples compared to patients in the hospital and a big study called Combat,
came out showing how severe disease immune responses are different from healthy people who get the virus.
And then after that, the vaccines appeared at the end of 2020, including the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna vaccine and the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine.
And these were rolled out for health care workers. And this very much changed our study, and we switched to looking at the response to vaccination.
So we've always been very proud of how agile we've been,
very grateful to all the participants in our study who've been able to work with us
and donate their blood again and again to answer questions that were rapidly coming.
We benefited from a lot of funding initially from the Department of Health, and they were very keen for answers as fast as possible to shape policy.
So we had a lot of calls with the Department of Health where we explained what our data was showing based on these health care worker studies,
and we were able to show that previous infection and vaccine gave the strongest responses.
So if you were previously infected, you still benefited from being vaccinated because that definitely boosted your immunity.
And we were able to show that two vaccines was better than one, and then later three vaccines was better than two.
We provided very key evidence that the longer dosing interval for the Pfizer vaccine of
ten weeks or so actually gave better antibody responses than the shorter dosing interval.
And the Department of Health used this to set policy and to keep the longer dosing interval.
And that was important because the vaccine had been licensed to be given 3 to 4 weeks apart.
And there was a lot of concern from the UK population at the way it was given out in Britain.
So we were able to show that was indeed a good strategy. More recently the problems continue with COVID.
So you might think we're all sick of it. We're entering into the fourth year, but actually the questions continue.
So we're currently looking at the role of booster vaccines. Are they necessary and when should they be given and what is the Bivalent vaccine,
which also covers the Omicron variant contribute. The Omicron variant has meant that just about everybody has been infected.
But we're now trying to look at a group of people who think they've never been infected because these people are very interesting as well.
And some of them will have evidence in their blood, in their t cell responses that they have, in fact, been exposed, but they never got sick.
So it's very important to study these people to understand how to protect people in future and how to make future.
Vaccines are even better. We all know the vaccines don't fully work against some of the variants like Omicron.
So there's a lot of work on what we call second generation vaccine to try to improve on the vaccines we have.
We also see new challenges. There's challenges in the health service, challenges in the hospital.
We're very interested in winter pressures and we see the impact of winter in terms of the admissions at the front door and how overwhelming it is.
And so we've got ongoing funding from UKRI and overall we benefit greatly from NIHR funding.
So the Oxford NIHR biomedical research centre, this study is a major part of the life saving vaccines theme.
I'm personally funded by the NIHR professorship.
And so what we're trying to do now is continue to look at immunity to COVID,
and we want to look at it over the next few years and see how it wanes and see how it's impacted by waves,
future waves of the virus and also by further vaccines.
We also want to look at other viruses.
So, for example, flu and respiratory syncytial virus, also known as RSV, which are big problems for the hospital in winter.
And we want to look at immunity to that as well.
And there's so many people involved in this study. It's involved many, many teams across the hospital and the university.
The study actually came out with an initial study set up by the Infectious Diseases Department to screen health care workers by PCR.
And this was before there was a lot of screening available nationally.
Overall, it's been a massive team effort. We've really enjoyed the way people have really pulled together during the pandemic.
It's really brought out the very best in people, especially all the health care worker volunteers who've given their time and their
blood and their patience and all the people across the university in the hospital.
And this has made a big contribution to UK science.
We've had many publications,
I think we're up to 40 publications in the literature and many conference presentations and sharing of our data and nationally and internationally.
So overall, we feel this has been a huge effort and we're very grateful to everyone involved.