HIGH FIVE! Vaccine team led by mum of triplets celebrates saving the world
AS her staff celebrated by posting pictures of themselves high-fiving, the leader of the Oxford team revealed her unusual training for saving the world.
Professor Sarah Gilbert credited being a mother of triplets with preparing her for the effort involved.
The scientist, whose triplets are now 21, said: ‘When you have young triplets, that’s all there is in your life because that’s all you have time for, so that’s all you do.
‘When they were younger, I cut out anything that was not essential, and it has been exactly the same this year working through the pandemic. You cut out anything not essential and you work, eat, sleep and work again.
‘I know it is a relatively short period of time out of my life, and this too shall pass.’ The Jenner Institute at Oxford University has vast experience with vaccine research and had already started work on a treatment for a new type of mutant flu before Covid-19 even emerged in China.
It uses a virus which causes colds in chimpanzees to get the vaccine into the human body. This chimpanzee cold virus, which cannot make humans ill, is able to carry the partial genetic code of any human virus scientists needed to tackle.
Once the code was inside someone’s body, their cells would churn out copies of a protein on the human virus, so their immune system could learn to fight it off.
The vaccine went on to be tested on 330 people, for diseases ranging from flu to malaria, tuberculosis and another coronavirus, which came from camels, called MERS. Then, in the early days of January, news of the virus in Wuhan emerged.
China released the vaccine’s genetic code on January 10 and the team was away.
The core of the Oxford researchers include Professor Gilbert and Professor Andrew Pollard, a keen mountaineer who has scaled Everest.
Professor Adrian Hill, an Irish vaccinologist who led the Oxford ebola trial, is director of the Jenner Institute.
The three have not been in a room together for eight months, over fears of passing on coronavirus to each other – rul
ing out congratulatory hugs or even elbow bumps when the vaccine was found to be a success.
But they have worked solidly on the Covid jab – with a lab on site at Oxford University starting manufacturing their first trial doses of the vaccine as early as February.
On April 23, they started putting it into the arms of more than 1,000 people aged 18 to 55 in a small- scale ‘phase one’ trial – having screened them ahead of time for speed. The team started with a scramble for money, and Oxford University still has an online form requesting financial donations ranging from £25 to £5,000 to help crowdfund research.
In May, the Government announced £65.5million of funding, following £2.2million promised in March. In April, reportedly spurred on by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Oxford University signed a manufacturing deal with British pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, which promised to work without profit throughout the pandemic, with a commitment to supply more than three billion doses worldwide, including to low and middle-income countries.
Yesterday, the hopes from the Oxford team were realised. Professor Gilbert, who aims to get a shot of her own vaccine as soon as possible, said there may be a party next year to celebrate the breakthrough. But asked for the best thing about a return to normality, the scientist, who had been awake since 3am, said: ‘Some sleep would be great.’