Adrian Hill: the scientist on a mission to speed up the Oxford trials and deliver a vaccine by early 2021

When Professor Adrian Hill, the scientist leading the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine programme, suggested that vaccine trials should deliberately expose young, healthy volunteers to coronavirus, he faced opposition from some of his colleagues. Newspapers were told that senior research partners were “not particularly happy” with Hill. Professor Sarah Gilbert, a senior vaccinology expert at Oxford, later delivered a humiliating public slap-down: “It’s not something that’s going to happen in the short-term,” she told BBC Radio 4.

Hill’s plan would have accelerated the process of approving the vaccine, eschewing the need to wait for members of the public to catch the virus in their communities before opting to volunteer in the trial. He had voiced concerns over the summer that the virus is being suppressed at such a fast rate by national lockdowns that there’d be a chance “we get no result at all”. The Oxford team, Hill told reporters, was “in the bizarre position of wanting Covid to stay, at least for a little while.”

In the end, the Oxford programme did not adopt Hill’s suggestion. Volunteers in its human trails are not being deliberately infected with coronavirus and, consequently, the programme did not move fast enough for a vaccine to be approved in September or October, as had been anticipated by some. However, normal trials have rapidly expanded to countries with higher infection rates, such as Brazil, South Africa, India and the United States. Tens of thousands of volunteers have been enrolled, with substantial results expected before the new year.

Professor Hill has been at the forefront of Oxford’s coronavirus vaccine push, as founder and director of the University’s Jenner Institute, a non-profit research centre for vaccine development that has traditionally focused on infectious diseases in developing countries, such as HIV/AIDS and malaria. A highlight of the 61-year-old, Dublin-born academic’s career was his work on an Ebola vaccine in 2014 – he led the first clinical trial for such a vaccine in West Africa.

Yet Hill’s most important work is still underway: he is now spearheading efforts at the Jenner Institute to establish a state of the art genetic coding technology with the potential to revolutionise vaccinology.

Rather than following the tradition of using an exhausted strain of the virus to immunise people, the technology at the Jenner Institute seeks to alter the genetic code of a similar virus, removing its harmful traits, before making it behave like the virus being targeted. Professor Sarah Gilbert, one of Hill’s most senior colleagues at the Jenner Institute, used this technique, modifying a chimpanzee virus, to immunise people against MERS (another deadly coronavirus).

Following clinical trials in the UK proving its effectiveness, Gilbert’s vaccine is being tested in Saudi Arabia, where MERS continues to ravage communities.

It is thanks to this ground-breaking research and technology that the Jenner Institute was able to leapfrog dozens of other vaccine groups when Chinese scientists published the genetic code of Covid-19 in January. With trials now in the third stage and on track to provide substantial results in the coming weeks, the Jenner Institute is “on track to save the world,” according to Bloomberg.

Not only has Oxford’s vaccine programme been swift and it will also seek to provide a double protection against the virus by building up T-cells as well as antibodies. Having partnered with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, contracts for tens of millions of Oxford vaccine doses have been signed by governments across the continents, ranging from Australia to India.

Among the most optimistic for a quick and effective vaccine rollout is Professor Hill himself, who recently suggested that an emergency-use authorisation be granted to allow the vaccine to be used on high-risk individuals and health workers in the UK as soon as Christmas.

Hill told an online conference last week that while UK authorities “will want to see more data on safety and maybe efficacy before they give license to vaccinate everybody”, he was confident regulators will “move very fast” to grant an emergency authorisation based on preliminary results as soon as they are submitted. Such authorisation would make Oxford’s the first vaccine to be approved by a western government.

Once again, however, it appears that Hill’s colleagues at Oxford are not quite as enthusiastic about accelerating the vaccine timeline, with few to no words about the potential for an emergency use authorisation from other professors at the Jenner Institute. There have been suggestions from some that this is yet another case of him being over-optimistic.

Few people can be knocked for being natural optimists, but critics would say that when the hopes of a nation hang on your ability to deliver promises in short order, any public display of optimism should be supported by a solid bedrock of scientific work. These critics see him as a gung-ho director jumping the gun on a project that cannot be rushed.

It is noteworthy that Hill’s ex-wife, Professor Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, has faced similar accusations of blind optimism over her studies on the potential for a much lower herd immunity threshold than was originally envisaged. As was evident in her interview with Reaction in July, Gupta is one of the few people in her field to oppose stringent lockdowns. Infectious diseases are not an external threat, she said, but things we have to accommodate into our social contract.

The story of the Jenner Institute’s efforts to “save the world” has barely been written. If Oxford-AstraZeneca wins the race for vaccine approval and distribution, the team behind it will rightfully receive an abundance of attention and recognition.

The Jenner Institute – funded assortment of donors including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the European Commission, the US National Institute of Health and the UK Department of Health – will be in a position to lead a revolution in vaccinology using its genetic coding technologies. It was founded just 15 years ago.

Yet, in the midst of it all, Professor Hill’s optimistic nature – part maverick, part motivator, part scientific genius – has been a familiarly, and peculiarly British character.