From Wimbledon to Oxford Lab..!
Last weekend marked the ending of one of the most prestigious tennis tournaments with the Tennis legend Novak Djokovic winning his sixth Wimbledon title and record-tying 20th Grand Slam Victory. I have always been a fan of grand slams and usually try not to miss the opportunity to watch the finals. I still remember the 2019 Wimbledon final in which Djokovic defeated the tennis titan Roger Federer in the breath-taking match. However, this year’s Wimbledon was special. Not just because of the mind-blowing performances but because of what happened on day one of the Wimbledon.
Day one of the Wimbledon 2021 commenced with the loudest applause and standing ovation for the players and some special guests in attendance. Wimbledon 2021 kicked off with a special announcement –
“Throughout this coming fortnight, the club’s chairman has invited to the royal box individuals and representatives of the organizations who have contributed so much in the nation’s response to the pandemic and who have helped to make this Wimbledon possible. Today they include leaders who have developed the anti-covid vaccines…….”
And one of the cameras zoomed in on Dame Professor Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford, England.
This extraordinary story of astonishing denouement started on New Year’s Eve of 2019. Like any other regular day, Prof Sarah was working in her laboratory past midnight when she got an email about strange pneumonia in China. She was about to finish her work and head home as early as possible as her days always begin at 4.00 am. As she was about to leave, she got an email from her colleague in China, which described four individuals’ death due to strange pneumonia. This email was a turning point in her life and the course of research in her lab..!
The scientific journey of Prof Sarah Gilbert began in 1990 as a young postdoctoral scientist at a Brewing Research Center right after her doctoral studies to manipulate the brewing yeast. Later she joined the University of Oxford in the mid-1990s and started to look at the genetics of malaria, which eventually led her to work on malaria vaccines. Her early research was focused on the host-parasite interactions in malaria. Later, she was involved in developing and testing the universal flu vaccine that could be effective against all different strains of flu. She didn’t want to settle at utilizing the traditional vaccine technologies that stimulated the antibodies’ production. Instead, she wanted to develop a vaccine that can trigger the human immune system to create T cells specific to influenza. The idea behind this was simple — traditional vaccines are not effective for older people as the immune system gets weaker with age. She wanted this ‘universal’ vaccine to be such that it won’t need reformatting after specific intervals, thus eliminating the need to take flu shots every season. To develop this universal flu vaccine, she decided to genetically modify the regular flu virus to use it in the vaccine to create T cells in the body. Simple as it sounds, it took her almost ten years to come up with this technology and hence develop the associated vaccine.
In 2014, when the MERS Virus (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Virus) struck, she developed the vaccine for this strain of Coronavirus. (You read that right, Coronaviruses are an entire family of viruses and have been around for about 10,000 years.) Having a background in coronavirus vaccine research, she knew what she had to do after reading that unfortunate email at midnight of 31st December 2019. Her idea about the strategies to create vaccines became clear just as Chinese scientists published this Coronavirus’s genome structure. It took her few weeks to develop a vaccine that worked against covid in the lab. The first batch of the covid vaccine went into manufacturing by early April 2020, after which clinical trials began. It blows my mind that within 100 days of learning about the genetic sequence of the Coronavirus, Prof Sarah and her lab were able to create a vaccine that could go in for clinical trials. To create a COVID-19 vaccine, Prof Gilbert took a common cold virus from chimpanzees and inserted it with genetic material from the surface spike protein (the ring-like shaped corona that we see on the virus) of the SARS Covid Virus to trick the immune system into fighting back. The chimpanzee common cold virus stimulates both antibodies and high T cells that help the immune system destroy infection due to covid 19.
Later, in March ’21, she was recognized for her work as the Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) during the Birthday Honors by Queen Elizabeth II for her service to science and public health in Covid 19 vaccine development. However, she was indeed recognized and appreciated by the world for her achievement when 120 cameras and lakhs of spectators worldwide saw her during the opening ceremony of the Wimbledon 2021.
On 1st January 2020, when the world was busy welcoming the new year, a team led by Prof Sarah was busy developing a highly effective vaccine, cheap and easy to use for the catastrophic disaster that is about to come in the next few months. What started with an email from China resulted in designing the vaccine against a virus that hardly anyone had heard about, which led to saving millions of lives across the globe. Even after attacks by Americans about the trials data, an accusation by French about the lack of effectiveness, and hesitation from Germans regarding the usage of vaccines on old and young people, Prof Sarah was confident about her research and the development of vaccines.
I wanted to share this story with you all because Prof Sarah Gilbert is the developer of the famous “Oxford — Astrazeneca Vaccine” — the vaccine which is commonly sold under the brand name “Covishield” in India. As a young researcher in the field of science, I think her story is highly inspiring. Very often, such heroes go unnoticed. We don’t hear about their journeys in finding solutions to problems that profoundly impact us all (solutions that we depend heavily on, even in our daily lives). This blog was an attempt to give you all a glimpse behind the closed doors of Research Laboratories; where Science evolves every day, allowing us humans to collectively do what we were brought into this world for — to ensure the survival of our species and hopefully enrich our lives while we’re here.!!!
Till then, happy reading…!