Adams-Sweeting Lecture – Preparing for pandemic vaccine development

Speaker: Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert
Lecture Date: Thursday 18 May 2023

Lecture Synopsis:
The 2014 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa, chiefly in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, but with cases spreading to other countries highlighted the lack of preparedness for combating infectious disease outbreaks. The virus was first identified in 1976, but vaccine development had proceeded slowly and no candidate vaccines had progressed further than phase I trials. In 2014 two new candidate vaccines entered rapid clinical development with encouraging early results, but efficacy trials were slow to start. Ebola is only one of many known viruses with the potential to cause outbreaks, and with the support of the WHO in identifying a list of priority pathogens, and the formation of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) to provide funding, vaccine development was initiated with the aim of having vaccines available in readiness for future disease outbreaks.

The last pathogen to be added to the list was ‘Disease X’, to represent a disease caused by a previously unknown pathogen, which would require rapid response employing a well characterised platform technology. In the first days of 2020, the first ‘Disease X’ outbreak, caused by a virus later named SARS-CoV-2 occurred. Vaccine developers found ourselves attempting to put into place plans that were at an early stage of development, had not been funded and had not therefore been tested. Rather than working to produce a vaccine which could then be deployed in the ‘outbreak area’ we found ourselves attempting to develop a vaccine against a novel pathogen that was causing a pandemic whilst we ourselves were in the grip of that pandemic with every aspect of our work affected.

Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert Bio:
Professor Gilbert joined the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford University in 1994 and became part of the Jenner Institute (within NDM) when it was founded in 2005. Her chief research interest is the development of viral vectored vaccines that work by inducing strong and protective T and B cell responses. She leads work on influenza vaccine development as well as vaccines for many different emerging pathogens, including Nipah virus, MERS, and Lassa virus.

Professor Gilbert’s work also focuses on the rapid transfer of vaccines into GMP manufacturing and first in human trials. This is achieved through collaboration with colleagues in the Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility and Centre for Clinical Vaccinology and Tropical Medicine, all situated on the Old Road Campus in Oxford.

In 2020 Professor Gilbert became the Oxford Project Leader for ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, a vaccine against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. This vaccine, tested by the University of Oxford in clinical trials of over 23,000 people in the UK, Brazil and South Africa, is now in use in many countries around the world in the fight against the Covid-19 Pandemic.

‘I have worked in the development of vaccines against infectious pathogens for many years and in the last 2 years have been able to draw on all that I have learned in order to respond to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. I have been so fortunate to work with a very talented and dedicated team who made it possible to develop a vaccine in less time than anyone thought possible.’
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