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The optic study is the Oxford protective immunity from t cells in health care workers and this is a study of immunity to COVID.

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The way it started was several of us at doctors were working on the wards here at the John Ratcliffe,

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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.

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Would you like to look at our blood? Because they knew we were immunologists and nobody knew anything about the immune response to COVID?

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At the beginning, we didn't even know if we made T cells.

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There was a lot of interest in antibodies, but we're T-cell immunologists.

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And so we started taking blood using an ethical framework that was pre-existing with the GI Biobank.

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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,

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which is in a number of other university hospitals in the UK.

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And we have recruited 700 people locally in Oxford.

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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.

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First of all, we've demonstrated the healthy immune response to the virus in healthy people.

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We've looked at antibodies and t cell responses and we've shown that infection brings about immunity.

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And these samples that we took from healthcare workers were used by the Oxford Vaccine Trial Group because they always wanted to

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benchmark how the vaccine was doing - this is summer of 2020 when they were developing the vaccine and it was in early clinical trials,

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and they wanted to see if they could get the vaccine to induce an immune response like infection would,

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so our samples were really crucial for demonstrating that.

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So they played a crucial role in the development of the Oxford vaccine.

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We also used our samples compared to patients in the hospital and a big study called Combat,

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came out showing how severe disease immune responses are different from healthy people who get the virus.

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And then after that, the vaccines appeared at the end of 2020, including the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna vaccine and the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine.

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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.

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So we've always been very proud of how agile we've been,

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very grateful to all the participants in our study who've been able to work with us

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and donate their blood again and again to answer questions that were rapidly coming.

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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.

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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,

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and we were able to show that previous infection and vaccine gave the strongest responses.

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So if you were previously infected, you still benefited from being vaccinated because that definitely boosted your immunity.

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And we were able to show that two vaccines was better than one, and then later three vaccines was better than two.

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We provided very key evidence that the longer dosing interval for the Pfizer vaccine of

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ten weeks or so actually gave better antibody responses than the shorter dosing interval.

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And the Department of Health used this to set policy and to keep the longer dosing interval.

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And that was important because the vaccine had been licensed to be given 3 to 4 weeks apart.

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And there was a lot of concern from the UK population at the way it was given out in Britain.

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So we were able to show that was indeed a good strategy.  More recently the problems continue with COVID.

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So you might think we're all sick of it. We're entering into the fourth year, but actually the questions continue.

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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,

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which also covers the Omicron variant contribute. The Omicron variant has meant that just about everybody has been infected.

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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.

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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.

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So it's very important to study these people to understand how to protect people in future and how to make future.

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Vaccines are even better. We all know the vaccines don't fully work against some of the variants like Omicron.

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So there's a lot of work on what we call second generation vaccine to try to improve on the vaccines we have.

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We also see new challenges. There's challenges in the health service, challenges in the hospital.

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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.

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And so we've got ongoing funding from UKRI and overall we benefit greatly from NIHR funding.

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So the Oxford NIHR biomedical research centre, this study is a major part of the life saving vaccines theme.

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I'm personally funded by the NIHR professorship.

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And so what we're trying to do now is continue to look at immunity to COVID,

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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,

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future waves of the virus and also by further vaccines.

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We also want to look at other viruses.

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So, for example, flu and respiratory syncytial virus, also known as RSV, which are big problems for the hospital in winter.

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And we want to look at immunity to that as well.

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And there's so many people involved in this study.  It's involved many, many teams across the hospital and the university.

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The study actually came out with an initial study set up by the Infectious Diseases Department to screen health care workers by PCR.

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And this was before there was a lot of screening available nationally.

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Overall, it's been a massive team effort. We've really enjoyed the way people have really pulled together during the pandemic.

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It's really brought out the very best in people, especially all the health care worker volunteers who've given their time and their

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blood and their patience and all the people across the university in the hospital.

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And this has made a big contribution to UK science.

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We've had many publications,

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I think we're up to 40 publications in the literature and many conference presentations and sharing of our data and nationally and internationally.

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So overall, we feel this has been a huge effort and we're very grateful to everyone involved.