British universities lead the way in global coronavirus fightback

It was notable that when the world faced an immediate health crisis, Britain’s Imperial College London provided the modelling on which numerous countries based their policies. Now, as the world shifts its focus towards long-term solutions, British universities are providing answers on the three key components to defeating coronavirus – vaccinations, testing and drug trials.

The Brazilian government is currently in contract talks with AstraZeneca to produce the Oxford University coronavirus vaccine en masse. Last week, Brazil became the first country outside the United Kingdom to conduct human trials using the university’s vaccine, and South Africa quickly followed suit with plans to trial the vaccine this week.

These developments will come as a massive boost to the team at Oxford, who had become increasingly worried that low transmission rates in the UK would make it near-impossible to prove the effectiveness of their product. In Brazil, where daily deaths are still over 1,000 and new cases are hovering at around 30,000, there’s much more scope for trials to be conducted.

For the British government it is a soft power victory. As Brazil approaches the peak of its epidemic and South Africa enters a dangerous winter season, they have looked to British universities for answers, recognising the exceptional standards of research being applied to vaccine development. If such trials succeed and more AstraZeneca contracts are signed, the perception by foreign commentators that Britain has had a bad war will quickly change.

There is also very encouraging vaccine news from the team at Imperial College, London, which is developing its own version. Yesterday, Professor Robin Shattock, who heads the Imperial project, told MPs at the Science and Technology committee that he anticipates “both vaccine candidates being developed in the UK will work individually”. This would mean a mighty return on investment for the £84 million the British government spent on both projects in May. Imperial researchers delivered their first vaccine dose to a human volunteer yesterday.

The third leg of the golden triangle, Cambridge University, has recently provided its share of exciting news. Researchers have produced a rapid coronavirus testing devicethat is both portable and able to produce results in less than 90 minutes. This could be a game-changer in NHS coronavirus holding wards, where patients currently have to wait for up to two days to receive test results. Hospital capacity would be freed up, allowing vital elective surgeries to return at a faster pace. SAMBA II, as the device is named, is currently being used in Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.

At Manchester University, researchers are moving fast to hasten the evaluation of such machines. They have developed a new framework – the Covid-19 National Diagnostic Research and Evaluation Platform – to provide a single, fast-paced path from invention to implementation. Experts from across the field will feed into one evaluation system, which in turn should allow the NHS hospitals to be amongst the first in the world to adopt machines that reduce the average testing turnaround from two to three days to mere minutes.

Finally, Oxford University’s Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) team is constantly testing pre-existing drugs on coronavirus patients in the anticipation that some will clinically reduce the mortality rate. Having already proven that Dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, can reduce deaths among patients on ventilators by around 30 percent, the team is currently trialling Azithromycin, a commonly used antibiotic, and Lopinavir-Ritonavir, a HIV drug, among others.