Leading UK scientist Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, whose research team designed and developed one of the principal COVID-19 vaccines, helping save millions of lives, has delivered the 2024 UCL Prize Lecture in Life and Medical Sciences.
In her hour-long lecture ’Vaccine development during and after the pandemic’, Dame Sarah explained how she brought together a multidisciplinary team to better understand SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and then develop a vaccine at speed as the global pandemic unfolded.
One of the key decisions, she said, was ensuring the ChAdOx1 vaccine - to become known as the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine - was available to the world through equitable access.
"This vaccine was by far the majority vaccine used in low-income countries for a very long time. It doesn’t require frozen storage," Dame Sarah, a Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford, said.
"It was the one that saved most lives in its first year of use and global equitable access is important, because if we don’t protect the whole world, then the virus is still out there, it’s going to come back and get us, so no one is safe until we’re all safe."
Dame Sarah also described the challenges of funding, regulation and how, given future pandemics are inevitable, we can be better prepared and respond faster next time. And she said advances on vaccine ’platform technologies’ (biological/virus frameworks that can be used to repeatedly develop new products) are now in a far better place.
"We’ve seen big improvements," Dame Sarah said.
"But now, what we need to do is build on that and plan how we’re going to do better next time, because there will be a next time.
"I think it’s really important that before we get much further down the road, we make sure that we’ve learned these lessons, and we address these technology challenges so that we are better prepared, so we can go faster next time, so that we can save as many people being infected and dying. And we can reduce the economic costs of these disease outbreaks in future."
She added: "So there’s lots more to do. And for young people it’s a very exciting time to be a vaccinologist."
Dame Sarah delivered her presentation at UCL’s Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre in front of a packed audience, and was introduced by Professor Ibrahim Abubakar, UCL Vice-Provost Health and a Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology.
In his opening remarks he paid tribute to Dame Sarah for her "extraordinary feat" of delivering a vaccine during a pandemic, particularly given how complex vaccine research and development is, thanks to which he said "millions and millions of people have benefited and been saved from the ill effects of Covid."
"Professor Gilbert works collaboratively with a wide ranging and complex team and is able to deliver her research from discovery, to GMP Manufacturing to the production of the vaccine - to get these vaccines to us," Professor Abubakar said.
"She continues to work beyond the Covid vaccine in the discovery of other vaccines. Whether it is influenza, MERS, Lassa fever or Nipah virus, trying to discover the vaccine, that means when those viruses show up, we’re able to vaccinate ourselves and prevent the ill health that arises."
He added: "If science is about impact, and if we want to use science to achieve impact, I cannot think of a better, and more able person, that is deserving of the prize lecture," Professor Abubakar said.
Following the lecture, Dr Stefanie Frank, Associate Professor in Engineering Biology (UCL Department of Biochemical Engineering) hosted a Q&A with Dame Sarah.
In closing remarks, UCL President & Provost Dr Michael Spence said: "Listening to your extraordinary science made me think about the function of universities and how extraordinarily important they are in the knowledge ecosystem.
"Thinking about the long-term preparation of platforms like those that you were able to draw on at that important historic moment, but also thinking about the way in which you were able to use the tools of research and the effective dissemination, along with the intellectual property systems and those commercialisation support systems of the university.
"Universities can draw on international teams and networks that have been established over a very long time and work with commercial partners and with governments. And it’s really in the context of a university that all’of that can happen."
Scientists at UCL work with Dame Sarah and her team at Oxford as part of the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Research Hub (Vax-Hub). This is an academic collaboration led by UCL Biochemical Engineering and the University of Oxford, that comprises world-leading experts in vaccinology, synthetic biology, and biochemical, materials, and system engineering.
This year’s UCL Prize Lecture in Life and Medical Sciences was generously supported by UCL alumnus Dr Sanjeev Kanoria, Chairman and Founder of Advinia Health Care Ltd.
It was launched in 1997 with previous recipients including Sir Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind and Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry 2024, Lord Patrick Vallance, former UK Chief Scientific Adviser, and Professor Jennifer Douda, pioneer of CRISPR gene editing, and Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry 2020.
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