Journal Article

Sarah Gilbert: carving a path towards a COVID-19 vaccine

Lane, Richard

2020

Overview

Once the genome sequence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) became available in mid-January, Gilbert's team set to work to design a vaccine, using recombinant DNA techniques to create a SARS-CoV-2 antigen and embedding it within a primate adenovirus vector. Gilbert's team was awarded a £2·2 million grant from the UK's National Institute for Health Research and the UK Research and Innovation in March, 2020, to scale up her team's efforts to move into coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine preclinical and clinical trials. Gilbert's early vaccine work at the University of Oxford started in 1994 with Adrian Hill, who today is Director of the Jenner Institute, with a focus on malaria vaccine research, and, given her particular interest in cellular immunology, the importance of T-cell responses to parasite infection.

• Publisher: Elsevier Ltd,Elsevier Limited
• Subject: Antigens / Betacoronavirus - genetics / Clinical trials / Clinical Trials as Topic / Coronaviridae / Coronavirus Infections - epidemiology / Coronavirus Infections - prevention & control / Coronaviruses / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Vaccines / Deoxyribonucleic acid / Disease transmission / DNA / DNA vaccines / DNA, Recombinant / Drug Development / Embedding / Genomes / Gilbert Sarah / History, 20th Century / History, 21st Century / Humans / Immunology / Lymphocytes T / Malaria / Nucleotide sequence / Pandemics - prevention & control / Parasites / Pneumonia, Viral - epidemiology / Pneumonia, Viral - prevention & control / Recombinant DNA / Research Design / Research Support as Topic / SARS-CoV-2 / Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 / United Kingdom / Vaccines / Vaccines, Synthetic / Vector-borne diseases / Viral diseases / Viral Vaccines