Portrait of the female scientist behind the success of the Astrazeneca vaccine against Covid-19

Overcoming difficulties and challenges on the way of scientific research, Sarah Gilbert and her colleagues have successfully invented the Oxford/Astrazeneca Covid-19 vaccine. This is a success and a great hope to contribute to ending the pandemic.

As the second wave of Covid-19 swept through, many experts said that a safe and effective vaccine was a ray of hope to reverse the pandemic. The community turned its attention to the scientists who were behind the success of each vaccination. On November 23, 2020, the University of Oxford and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced that the vaccine that these two units jointly produced was 70% effective, low dose 90% effective. This is considered an encouraging sign in the chain of good news about vaccination.

At that time, pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna announced the effectiveness of their two vaccines at 95% and 94.5%, respectively. Unlike the mRNA-based vaccine that must be frozen, AstraZeneca's product can be stored in a conventional refrigerator at 2-8 degrees Celsius . Thus, the selling price of this vaccine is of course much cheaper. The UK government has pre-ordered 100 million doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine. The company also said it will produce 3 billion doses for the world by 2021.

Behind the success of the AstraZeneca vaccine is the effort of two female professors Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, who lead the Jenner Institute research team, University of Oxford. In which, Professor Sarah Gilbert (58 years old) is one of the female scientists honored by the BBC in the list of 100 Outstanding Women in 2020 for their tireless contributions to the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. 19.

Scientist Sarah Gilbert. (Photo: Oxford University).

The arduous path of scientific research

Two days before the end of 2020, a news from the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) seemed to make the whole UK happy. That is the news that the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical Group (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) has been officially approved for use in the UK and the UK Government will accelerate the largest vaccination program in history. with this vaccine as of January 4, 2021.

On January 3, 2021, India, the world's second largest Covid-19 epidemic area, became the second country after the UK to officially approve the use of this vaccine. The results of the effectiveness and approval of this vaccine are of great interest to the general public because of its advantages in the possibility of mass deployment, especially in poor countries, so it has become a hope for an early end to the pandemic. By now, many people have heard about the project leader, a British female scientist at the University of Oxford – Professor Sarah Gilbert.

Sarah Gilbert (born 1962) , is a professor of vaccines at the Jenner Institute of Oxford University - one of the world's leading medical research centers. However, her path to the successes like today was not paved with roses as everyone imagined.

Sarah Gilbert was born into a family of an office worker father and an English teacher mother in Kettering (a town in Northamptonshire, central England). Sarah graduated with a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of East Anglia, then went on to receive a doctorate in biochemistry in genetics from the University of Hull (both schools are not part of the elite group of universities in the UK). ).

Sarah Gilbert is a music lover, used to play in the school's symphony orchestra, and in college often played the saxophone. Schoolgirl Sarah at that time often went to the forest to play music to avoid disturbing people living around. After graduating with a PhD, Sarah began working in the industrial environment before returning to the academic environment to join the research group of Adrian Hill – professor of medicine at the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford to start. research on anti-malaria vaccines in 1994. In 1998, she gave birth to a baby (one triplets) and after maternity leave, the young female scientist's family began to have difficulty returning to work. research.

'Balance between work life is not easy, and sometimes impossible if you don't have good support. I have three children, sending them to kindergarten is more than the salary of a postdoc like me then. My partner (her husband, scientist Rob Blundell) had to sacrifice his career, stay at home with three kids so I could go back to research , ' Sarah confided in an interview. with the school.

But with Sarah, the scientific environment also has its own advantages with flexible and non-fixed working hours. Her efforts and her husband's silent sacrifice paid off when Sarah Gilbert was appointed a lecturer at Oxford University in 1999 and then an associate professor (Reader) in 2004.

In 2007, Sarah Gilbert persuaded the Wellcome Trust to fund her a major project to develop seasonal influenza vaccines, and officially became the Wellcome Trust Foundation's Strategic Program Manager for Human and Veterinary Vaccine Development. It was not until now that Sarah Gilbert established a strong enough research group of her own to pursue the ambitions she still cherished.

'My advice to women who both want to maintain a family and a career in science is to accept that it will be especially difficult work. It is important to know how to plan and to ensure full support from your partner. Either way, planning and being realistic about what you need can help in the long run. I'm lucky, my children seem to have developed normally, but none of them want to be scientists, " said Sarah Gilbert.

The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is highly effective in preventing Covid-19.

Historical research

In the early days of 2020, when receiving the first data on the genetic structure of the virus causing pneumonia in Wuhan, Sarah Gilbert's team immediately thought of creating a vaccine. She, along with another female Oxford professor, Teresa Lambe and her team, worked continuously over the weekend to design a vaccine.

Before coming up with the Covid-19 vaccine, their team worked on a similar virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-Cov) and this vaccine is also in the process of clinical trials. The vaccine against Covid-19 (named ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) is designed from a weakened chimpanzee flu virus, containing the corona virus spike code to 'impersonate' the Sars-CoV-virus- 2 (which we still call Covid-19 for short) helps the body create antibodies to destroy this virus.

At the time, they did not have enough information about how quickly the new virus could spread, but Sarah Gilbert saw the possibility of developing a vaccine at a rapid pace and planning clinical trials. But where does the money come from for clinical trials, which are extremely expensive and time-consuming? This is a thorny issue.

Sarah Gilbert actively persuaded other subjects to help with funding, calling for government funding and the whole team was delighted at the good news that the British Government would support funding (£22 million) for the experiment. and manufacture this vaccine. The team's aim to create a vaccine for humanity means they won't develop a vaccine for profit like the precedents that scientists in the UK have pursued.

'From the very beginning, we saw that this vaccine would be in a race against the virus, not against other vaccines. We work at the university and have no intention of making money from it,'' S. Gilbert told the BBC.

Sarah Gilbert has collaborated with another female scientist, Catherine Green, an Associate Professor of Biology at Oxford, to develop a vaccine. And Catherine's team will play the role of culturing the virus to create a vaccine. They quickly created the first batch of the vaccine in the Oxford laboratory for the first trial in humans and anxiously waited for side effects from the first volunteers, the scientists at Oxford themselves.

The good results were that no one experienced any side effects after the first 48 hours of vaccination. At that time, the group breathed a sigh of relief to begin the experiment with a larger number of volunteers. Sarah Gilbert and her colleagues quietly work and shoulder the responsibility of bringing the world back to normal from the pandemic. With such high expectations, they don't even have time to rest or be distracted. Even, they are always in a state of high stress and lack of sleep for the past year.

'I've been trained to be able to do that. If you've ever had to spend nights with only four hours of sleep taking care of triplets, you've done a great job. This is something I used to go through," Sarah Gilbert told the Independent.

Sarah's children are now in college and all three are biochemistry students and have actively supported their mother by participating in the vaccine trial, although she did not have much time to talk during this time. with them every day.

Oxford's team has reached a major deal with pharmaceutical manufacturer AstraZeneca, which will manufacture and distribute the vaccine on a non-profit basis. Under the humanitarian agreement pursued by Oxford, AstraZeneca will sell the vaccine developed by Oxford at a non-profit original price during the pandemic and keep this preferential price unchanged for middle and low-income countries. This makes it possible for their vaccine to be distributed very cheaply (about more than 3 USD per dose).

"Imagine how difficult it would be for a poor country to intend to inject millions of people with new generation vaccines that require storage at super low temperatures and cost 10 times as much? Besides having The price is very cheap, the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine does not require a super-low temperature environment for storage (only needs from 2-8oC in a common refrigerator) so it will be extremely easy in the stages of transportation and storage. even in poor countries.

If successful, Oxford's vaccine will be a savior for poor countries. From the very beginning, we saw this vaccine as a race against the virus, not against other vaccines. We work at the university and have no intention of making money from it," Sarah Gilbert emphasized again what she once told the press.

Amazing results

Vaccine trials began in the UK in April 2020 and hit a bump when UK cases dropped sharply over the summer, but then hopes for the trial grew again when they expanded the trial in Brazil. South Africa. In the last week of July 2021, the Oxford team officially published the first trial results in the prestigious Lancet medical journal.

Accordingly, in a phase 1 trial in the UK with the participation of 1077 healthy volunteers, the vaccine produced neutralizing antibodies against the virus (Neutralizing antibodies to destroy the virus) and also produced T cells ( T-cells) allow the immune system to remember the virus for future protection; T-cells peak within 14 days while antiviral antibodies peak 28 days after vaccination; The vaccine has a slight side effect of causing fever and mild headache, but all can be resolved simply with paracetamol, a common pain reliever.

This side effect occurred in 70% of the trial participants, but there was no danger. The news has rattled the world with hopes of a successful vaccine, although trials are still ongoing. But in September 2020, the trial ran into trouble again when a volunteer encountered serious health problems. Even in October 2020, a volunteer in Brazil unfortunately passed away.

The trials were immediately stopped to check the safety of the vaccine. Fortunately, they found the problems weren't caused by the vaccine (the volunteer who died in Brazil wasn't even part of the vaccine group but received a placebo-negative control) and the trial resumed. This pause caused the test results to be significantly delayed, but then the final results of the large-scale trial were also announced in the last days of November 2020 with an average efficiency of over 70% - an impressive number (if compared with current seasonal flu vaccines, which are just over 50% effective).

Even in a group of volunteers (2,741 people) given a first dose of 1/2 dose, followed by a full dose, the protective effect would reach over 90%, and in volunteers still infected with Covid-19, the vaccine prevents them from having severe symptoms (no one has to be treated in the hospital). And the results also show that the vaccine has minimized the transmission of the virus from these infected people through a sharp reduction in people infected without showing symptoms.

Professor Sarah Gilbert with her model Barbie doll. (Image: Shutterstock)

These results are highly appreciated, but there are also doubts about the abnormal results (in the 90% efficiency group). However, the research team made all the trial data transparent by publishing in the Lancet and submitting detailed reports for approval for use.

In fact, the MRHA performed a long-term 'rolling review' of the Oxford-AstraZeneca trial data, allowing them to believe in efficacy and safety. of this vaccine. And on December 30, MHRA officially announced the approval of this vaccine in the UK, and is considered good news before the new year 2021 about the possibility of success of the fastest and largest vaccination campaign in history. England. And on January 4, 2021, the first person to receive the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine was an 82-year-old patient at Oxford University Hospital, just a few hundred meters from where the vaccine was developed.

The success of the Oxford vaccine is giving great hope to all of humanity, and behind it is a great contribution from female scientists such as Sarah Gilbert, Catherine Green, Teresa Lambe and the team at Oxford. . Even more important is that, in addition to the tireless efforts of the research team, they also set aside economic profits in favor of bringing scientific achievements to the masses.

Well-deserved recognition

Not only was the BBC honored in the list of 100 Outstanding Women of 2020, recently, Sarah Gilbert was honored in a unique way. This female scientist was given a Barbie doll modeled after herself.

Mrs. Gilbert said she found it a bit strange herself to be the role model for a type of doll. However, she also hopes the doll will help spark a passion for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) among girls around the world.

"My passion is to help inspire girls around the world to pursue STEM careers. I hope when they see my version of dolls, they will find their passion for it. an industry that I never knew about, like becoming a vaccine researcher , " said Ms. Gilbert.

Lisa McKnight, Vice President of Mattel Toy Company, maker of Barbie doll products, said the company wants to recognize the contributions, sacrifices and dedication of all employees on the front lines against the epidemic. in times past by retelling their story through these new Barbie models. Besides Professor Glbert, the toy company Mattel also released dolls based on some of the women who made important contributions in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.