THE IRISH SCIENTIST WHO HELPED CREATE THE JAB
TERESA LAMBE
PROFESSOR Teresa Lambe, one of two women who helped design the Oxford vaccine, is from Nicholastown, Kilcullen, Co. Kildare, where her parents, Anthony and Mary, still live.
She attended Cross and Passion College, a Catholic secondary school in Kilcullen, and remembers being fascinated by biology as a teenager.
In an interview with Bridge magazine inKil cullen last March, she recalled :‘ I somewhat plagued my biology teacher at CPC [Cross and Passion College] with neverending questions and remember being told, “You’ll find out about that in university” – so I did.’
She studied at University College Cork before doing postgraduate work at Oxford and working with Prof. Adrian Hill at the college’s Jenner Institute, which specialises in developing vaccines for tropical diseases.
She worked on vaccines for Ebola, Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever, Lassa fever, Nipah virus and MERS.
She is now an associate professor and investigator with the Jenner Institute, where she has been working on developing the Covid vaccine since January 10, 2020 – a month before the virus was even officially named.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio yesterday, Professor Lambe said the team were ‘elated to have got this far this fast’.
‘At this stage it is very important to focus on getting as many vaccines as we can out there as one vaccine cannot cover the whole world,’ she said.
And she added: ‘ There is some confusion around the quoting of 70% and 90% efficacy It simply comes down to two different types of regimes – why we are seeing the different results.
Prof. Lambe also said the process has taken its toll on her personal life.
‘I definitely miss my family and friends. If truth be told I have been a bad daughter and haven’t been in touch with them as much as I should have been,’ she added.
‘It’s been seven days a week. There has been no break. It has been relentless but luckily it has paid off.
‘I have never worked as hard or been as driven.’
ADRIAN HILL
PROFESSOR Adrian Hill, originally from Ranelagh, Dublin, is director of Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, which developed the vaccine for US firm Moderna.
Prof. Hill, 61, first became i nt e r - ested in malaria and other tropi cal diseases as a medical student in Trinity College Dublin in the early 1980s, when he visited an uncle who was a priest working in a hospital in Zimbabwe. ‘ I came back wondering, “What do you see in these hospitals in England and Ireland?”’ he told The New York Times. ‘They don’t have any of these diseases.’ After training in tropical medicine and receiving a doctorate in molecular genetics, Prof. Hill helped build Oxford’s institute into a non-profit vaccine research centre, with its own pilot manufacturing plant capable of producing a batch of up to 1,000 doses. His coronavirus research had a major boost when scientists at the US National I nstitutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana i njected six rhesus macaque monkeys with single doses of the Oxford vaccine last month. The monkeys were
Expertise: Dubliner Adrian Hill then exposed to heavy quantities of the coronavirus.
More than 28 days later all six were healthy, while other monkeys at the lab had contracted the virus.
Dr Stephen Hoge, the head of US firm Moderna, is said to have ‘grinned ear to ear’ after learning data suggested the vaccine protects against Covid-19. Dr Hoge, president of the biotechnology business based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the news that its coronavirus vaccine may pre - vent 94.5% of people f r om getting the disease came as a ‘ stunning realisation’ to the company.
‘When we got the news from the data and safety monitoring board, I’ll admit I broke character and grinned ear to ear for a minute,’ he said.