Professor Robin Shattock: Advancing The Frontiers of Medicine
Professor Robin Shattock is the Head of Mucosal Infection and Immunity within the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London. Shattock’s research focuses on the mechanisms of mucosal infection and the development of novel preventative strategies appropriate to a developing world setting.
This has led to the establishment of international collaborations aimed at preclinical identification, development and selection of HIV microbicide and vaccine candidates prior to formal clinical efficacy trials.
His team at Imperial College were working on Ebola and Lassa fever vaccines using new technology but had not got as far as human trials when a novel coronavirus started to kill thousands of people in Wuhan, China.
Professor Shattock oversees a portfolio of research that is supported by 26 members of staff including researchers, PhD students, clinical trial managers and project managers. Professor Shattock has published over 160 peer-reviewed articles in this area and secured funding from the European Commission, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, MRC and the NIH.
Prof Shattock’s group is responsible for the DNAVAC project which aims to apply recent state of the art technological advances in DNA vaccination and immune monitoring, both at the single cell and molecular level, to enable detailed probing of developing vaccine-induced antibody responses.
Shattock told the Guardian, “I’m cautiously optimistic that it will work as well as anything else that is being developed because it induces good immune responses in animal models, and we predict it will be the same in humans and it will be very safe because we are using such low doses.”
The Imperial vaccine is based on bits of genetic code, rather than bits of the virus itself. The code is inserted in fat droplets into the muscle of the arm, which then makes the spike protein for which the Sars-CoV-2 virus is famous. This induces the immune system to go into action, producing antibodies to fight it and hopefully creating a memory of the virus as an enemy invader to be repelled in case of genuine infection.
Shattock is aiming for a vaccine that will treat the billions of people on the planet, however, small their country’s GDP. That’s the real beauty of this approach, he believes: it’s very safe, uses very little material and can be scaled up very quickly.
“The next time there is a pandemic, we hope this technology will be ready to be produced in many parts of the world much, much more rapidly. We are at a transition point. In five years’ time probably everybody will be using this sort of technology for outbreak pathogens.”
Shattock has been named one of the Neusroom 100 honourees making a change and helping the world fight the Covid-19 virus. Check out the full list of honourees here.
