̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - World Health Organization (WHO)

Graduate, get a job … make a difference #4

ta385 — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Isobel Firth (Newnham College) BA Natural Sciences (2016)

I graduated last summer and I’m currently working with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), a non-profit organisation based in Geneva that develops treatments for neglected diseases and patients with a public health focus.

I’m working in the paediatric HIV and Hepatitis C programmes with a very experienced and interdisciplinary team. ̽��ֱ��projects are a fantastic mixture of medicine, chemistry, law and public health rolled into one and I’m learning lots about the world of drug development.

In the HIV project we are working to provide a treatment for children with HIV which is practical to dose, easy to administer, in a taste-masked formulation, and which is available to infants as soon as they are diagnosed with HIV. This is vital because early treatment makes the difference between life and death for these children. ̽��ֱ��Hepatitis C project is focussed on developing an affordable treatment for Hepatitis C as the current treatment options are too expensive for the majority of people living with the disease which can eventually lead to liver cancer.

̽��ֱ��work I do on these projects is varied, including literature reviews, presenting and analysing scientific data on potential drug candidates and editing scientific papers for peer review. These all require skills I developed during my time at Cambridge. Working here has confirmed my interest in a career in public health, and the experience of working in this organisation will help in making that a reality.

What Cambridge did for me

On the Natural Sciences course, I had to write scientific essays for supervisions which left nowhere to hide – if you have misunderstood a topic it becomes very obvious. I had never written a scientific essay before coming to Cambridge and the first few took me days to write but I slowly improved through practice. In my final year I did a laboratory research project where, along with other practical lab skills, I learnt the ropes of academic science writing which I use all the time in my current job.

On top of my studies, I was part of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Swimming and Water Polo Club (CUSWPC) throughout my three years and was president of the club in my final year. This involved organising events such as alumni meals and our historic varsity match against Oxford, and lobbying for greater provision for sports clubs within the university. Many of the skills I now have in the workplace were developed as a result of being involved with CUSWPC and it was definitely the best thing I did while at Cambridge.

When I was applying to do a Masters in public health I met with a Cambridge careers advisor who helped me to re-engineer my CV and, as a bonus, told me about the Cambridge Global Health Scheme. I applied with little hope but was accepted onto the scheme which led me to an internship at the World Health Organisation in Geneva. It was a fantastic experience for someone with aspirations in public health and I was lucky to have the experience so early in my career. Through that, I began an internship with DNDi in Geneva – this wouldn’t have been possible without the ̽��ֱ��’s Global Health Scheme.

My motivation

I was always impressed, if not intimidated, by the calibre of research going on at Cambridge. I understood that it was, in some abstract way, impactful down the line, however my real interest was how incredible scientific innovation translates into positive change. For that reason, I wanted to use my scientific background to work in public health, where science meets the harsh reality of economics and politics.

Bridging the gap between innovation and health intervention for the most needy is what motivates me now, which is why the work of DNDi appealed to me so much. Their motto is ‘the best science for the most neglected’ which means that the organisation is the vital link between a eureka moment at the laboratory bench and helping people with diseases for which they would not otherwise get treatment.

Applying to Cambridge

I went to a local comprehensive school in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. I had great teachers who inspired me to learn science and helped me with the things I found difficult (thanks Mrs Nicholl for all the help). My school would generally have a couple of Oxbridge applicants every year but I had almost no preparation for my Cambridge interview. Following one good interview and one terrible interview at the College I applied to, I was offered a place in the Winter Pool by a different College, Newnham, where I happily completed my three year Natural Sciences degree.

Starting at Cambridge was intense, the first year Natural Sciences course is extremely full on and I don’t think any of us, whatever schools we had been to, were prepared for it. We helped each other through it and when I received my good results at the end of first year, I realised that I wasn’t as out of my depth at Cambridge as I sometimes felt.

Cambridge graduates enter a wide range of careers but making a difference tops their career wish lists. In this series, inspiring graduates from the last three years describe Cambridge, their current work and their determination to give back.

Bridging the gap between innovation and health intervention for the most needy is what motivates me

Isobel Firth (alumna)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Call of duty: fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone

cjb250 — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 16:16:43 +0000

On the windowsill of Professor Ian Goodfellow’s office sit photographs of him with his children, and just down the corridor, his wife is carrying out research in the same department. Even at work, he is surrounded by constant reminders of the special things in his life, providing a sense of security.

His work, too – apart from the treadmill of seeking funding – is a secure, safe environment. Goodfellow is a basic scientist, carrying out lab-based studies into viruses such as norovirus, the winter vomiting virus. He doesn’t even come into contact with norovirus patients, so is at no particular risk of contracting this unpleasant, but relatively harmless, infection.

Yet in December 2014, Goodfellow chose to leave all of this security behind – for several months at a time – to join a taskforce fighting one of the most hazardous and frightening emerging infections of recent times, the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. Since the epidemic began in West Africa in 2013 until it was declared over in March 2016, the virus infected more than 28,000 and killed over 11,000 people.

Goodfellow was one of over 30 people from Cambridge, coordinated by Dr Tim Brooks at Public Health England, who lent their support. Goodfellow helped set up one of the first diagnostic laboratories in an Ebola Treatment Centre near Makeni, in northern Sierra Leone, with support from the UK government. This was physically demanding and at times potentially dangerous work. “We had to move several tons of equipment and reagents by hand, in 35°C heat with over 90% humidity on a rather dangerous and very active building site,” he recalls. During their stay they encountered fires, electric shocks, and one of his own postdocs was bitten by both a spider and a snake.

Since the start of the epidemic, Goodfellow and colleagues have sequenced over 600 Ebola genomes, helping provide information about how the virus is evolving in, and how its evolution has been affected by, unprecedented levels of human– human transmission.

Towards the tail end of the epidemic, sequencing allowed researchers to trace the origin of new cases. “To end the epidemic, you need to make sure that any new cases are in transmission chains that are being monitored and are geographically contained, so you can pinpoint where this virus is coming from.”

̽��ֱ��Tonkolili District, for example, had been Ebola-free for several months when a new case occurred. “We needed to know if this new case had come from a new introduction from an animal host, from a neighbouring country, or if it was part of a chain of transmission that had been hidden from the healthcare providers.

There’s a lot of stigma around Ebola, so it was possible there was a whole cluster in a village and that no-one was reporting the cases. That would be a disaster: all of a sudden, you don’t go from one to two cases, you go from one to tens or even hundreds.”

By sequencing the virus, in a very short time they were able to trace the source back to a survivor in whom the virus had persisted, and to take appropriate measures to prevent further spread. In fact, their work showed that Ebola can persist in survivors for over 15 months after infection and be transmitted through unprotected sex, and possibly even from a mother to her child through breastmilk.

Now that the emergency has passed, the treatment centre has closed down, but its equipment is being used at the ̽��ֱ�� of Makeni Infectious Disease Research Laboratory in a building donated by the country’s president, Ernest Bai Koroma. ̽��ֱ��laboratory was kitted out with support from the Wellcome Trust and the Cambridge- Africa Programme, and now functions as a base for local and visiting scientists to carry out research. Goodfellow and his postdoc Dr Luke Meredith have helped train local technicians and researchers in some of the latest techniques in surveillance and sequencing of pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis B.

“We need to avoid ‘parachute science’, where scientists fly in, take samples and leave,” he insists. “It should be about developing sustainable partnerships, about developing local capacity. With training and support, local researchers have the ability to respond to these outbreaks; they just need the equipment and the infrastructure.”

This has already shown its value. A new case arose in January 2016 while neither Goodfellow nor any of his colleagues were in the country, but local scientists were able to use the techniques to trace the source of the infection.

Going to Sierra Leone was not an easy decision for Goodfellow, but he feels that he had a duty to respond. “ ̽��ֱ��academic virology community had a responsibility to offer support. We couldn’t just sit back and watch this massive epidemic explode in front of our eyes with the knowledge that we have skills that could be useful.”

Many of the scientists who went out have struggled to return to their normal work, he says – some even quit their jobs on returning to take up more front-line jobs or to undertake more translational research. For Goodfellow, it has certainly made him appreciate the contribution that basic science makes.

“Basic science can often feel removed from real world applications,” he says, “but the skills you gain from running a laboratory are actually very useful in these kinds of environments. ̽��ֱ��ability to think on your feet and to figure out solutions is invaluable.”

It has also given him some perspective about what he does. “ ̽��ֱ��satisfaction you get from being involved in a response like this and in capacity building is orders of magnitude better than publishing academic papers.”

Cambridge graduate Charlotte Dixon (Churchill), BA (2014) Modern and Medieval Languages, was also part of the Ebola crisis response in Sierra Leone in 2015 while working with the Department for International Development on their Graduate Scheme.

Working in a lab as a basic scientist can often seem far removed from the real world. A year since the World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak over, one researcher tells how the skills he learned working in a lab in Cambridge turned out to be surprisingly useful in fighting one of the most terrifying disease outbreaks of recent times.

̽��ֱ��satisfaction you get from being involved in a response like this ... is orders of magnitude better than publishing academic papers

Ian Goodfellow

Belt buckles

Dr Caroline Trotter works on an infectious disease that has killed even more than Ebola. It occurs periodically right across the ‘midriff’ of Africa from Senegal to Ethiopia, in the so-called ‘Meningitis Belt’.

In the last major meningitis outbreak, in 1996, some 250,000 were infected and 25,000 people died. It was at this point that the global health community came together to fight back.

̽��ֱ��Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP) was launched, a partnership between international health organisation PATH and the World Health Organization (WHO). Working with the Serum Institute of India, MVP developed and rolled out the meningococcal A conjugate vaccine in just 10 years to combat the particular strain that affected the African belt. Since its introduction in 2010, 265 million people have been vaccinated. In Burkina Faso, where the vaccine was first used, a mass vaccination campaign saw 10 million people vaccinated in 10 days.

But even campaigns as huge as this aren’t enough to eliminate the infection, as Dr Caroline Trotter from the Department of Veterinary Medicine, explains: “You get a honeymoon period, but then you see a resurgence of cases.”

Trotter and her team used mathematical modelling to predict the best strategies for ensuring that this did not happen. ̽��ֱ��WHO, who funded her work, used it to shape their guidelines and ensure that the vaccine was introduced into routine vaccination programmes across sub- Saharan Africa.

She and Goodfellow were part of a Cambridge-Africa delegation to ̽��ֱ��Gambia in 2014 – a trip that inspired Goodfellow to lend support to combatting Ebola – and as a result Trotter is now working with collaborators at the Medical Research Council Unit in the country to look at the effect of the vaccine on pregnant women and their babies.

Meanwhile, she continues working with the African Meningococcal Carriage Consortium, a global research effort to study how meningococcal meningitis is spread in Africa, with the hope of gradually tightening the belt on this devastating disease.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Cambridge researchers support the WHO

lw355 — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:27:31 +0000

̽��ֱ��WHO Collaborating Centre for Modelling, Evolution and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases recognises the work of Cambridge researchers who work in this area.

̽��ֱ��Centre, directed by Professor Derek Smith in the Department of Zoology, has pan-university and highly interdisciplinary activities with members of the Department of Zoology, Department of Pathology and Department of Veterinary Medicine in the School of Biological Sciences, members of the School of Clinical Medicine, and also from the Department of Architecture and Computer Laboratory.

̽��ֱ��Centre is linked with researchers throughout the world and is concerned with global infectious disease issues that affect not only the developed world, but also the developing world. For example the Centre has close cooperation with the Cambridge in Africa program, in particular on researching the dengue virus.

One of the long-standing activities of the Collaborating Centre is to provide support for WHO activities in the global surveillance of influenza and other pathogens – including dengue and enterovirus 71 – as well as recommendations on suitable vaccine strains for use in these and other emerging and re-emerging diseases.

Each year, influenza infects 5–15% of the world’s population and kills up to half a million people – a figure that can rise to many millions in the event of a pandemic. Spearheading the annual race to identify the best vaccine to combat seasonal flu, the WHO collates information about the flu viruses in circulation worldwide in the preceding months.

As part of this process, Dr Colin Russell in the Department of Zoology curates a global database of information on the rapidly changing variations (called antigenic differences) in the influenza coat protein – the part that makes it difficult for our immune system to recognise flu from one year to the next.

“Our WHO Collaborating Centre is in the privileged position of informing public health initiatives through highly translational scientific research, using technology that allows real-time detection of circulating viruses that escape protection conferred by current vaccines,” said Smith.

̽��ֱ��Centre uses a technique called antigenic cartography developed by Smith with Dr Alan Lapedes (Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico) and Professor Ron Fouchier (Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam). ̽��ֱ��technique analyses antigenic differences between pathogens, allowing real-time detection of circulating viruses that escape protection conferred by current vaccine strains. “Antigenic maps allow us to make sense of vast amounts of difficult binding assay data. One can see at a glance the global picture of decades of viral evolution,” added Smith.

In addition, the Centre carries out research on the evolution of pandemic influenza. “We can start asking questions such as how close is nature to evolving an aerosol-transmissible form of bird flu that can be transmitted from human to human, as opposed to the varieties we have seen so far that have been passed to individuals in close contact with infected birds,” said Smith.

̽��ֱ��work of the Centre is underpinned by the activities of Cambridge Infectious Diseases, a multidisciplinary community of researchers that promotes, develops and supports initiatives which focus on infectious diseases.

WHO Collaborating Centres are designated by the WHO Director-General to carry out activities in support of the Organization’s programmes on areas such as nursing, occupational health, communicable diseases, nutrition, mental health, chronic diseases and health technologies.

For more information, please visit www.whocc.infectiousdisease.cam.ac.uk/ or download the WHO Collaborating Centre for Modelling, Evolution and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases brochure.

A newly designated Collaborating Centre at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will support the World Health Organization (WHO) in detecting and responding to major epidemic- and pandemic-prone diseases.

Our WHO Collaborating Centre is in the privileged position of informing public health initiatives through highly translational scientific research.

Professor Derek Smith

Stillvision

Researchers at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Modelling, Evolution and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases

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Yes

Drying without dying

bjb42 — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Resurrection might seem an unpromising topic for scientific research, but there are well-characterised organisms, including some animals and plants, that are able to enter, and recover from, an apparently lifeless state. They can remain in suspended animation for long periods, perhaps for decades, but then resume their normal lives, apparently unaffected.

Life without water

Dr Alan Tunnacliffe, Reader in Biotechnology at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, and his research team are working on one means by which nature is able to cheat death. This is called anhydrobiosis, derived from the Greek for ‘life without water’, and occurs in organisms that are able to withstand almost complete desiccation.

̽��ֱ��ability to survive extreme dehydration is remarkable for a living organism since it is widely accepted that life is water, and usually there is a limit beyond which further loss of water is fatal. Humans are typical in this respect, as water comprises approximately two-thirds of our body weight, and loss of just 15% of this is life threatening if not treated rapidly. Anhydrobiotic organisms, by contrast, are able to survive loss of most of their body water, which is reduced to 10% or less of body weight in the dried state. When dry, no signs of life can be detected: metabolism is completely shut down and only resumes when water is present once more.

When dry, anhydrobiotic creatures can tolerate an astonishing range of environmental stresses, including extremes of temperature and pressure: from –270°C, which is close to absolute zero, to +150°C, well above the boiling point of water; and from the vacuum of space to a thousand atmospheres in a pressure chamber. After this mistreatment, they can still be revived by rehydration without ill effect. It is perhaps not surprising that one proposal for how life originated on Earth is that anhydrobiotic organisms were carried through space from another planet.

Animal magic

One type of animal that can perform the anhydrobiosis trick is the bdelloid rotifer, a harmless, normally aquatic, creature that is less than a millimetre in size. Bdelloids are ubiquitous in freshwater environments throughout the world, particularly in temporary pools where the ability to survive desiccation offers a selective advantage.

Dr Tunnacliffe’s group is studying two different species of rotifer, one collected from a bird bath in his back garden, and the second from a billabong in Australia. They can be grown easily in the laboratory, feeding happily on bacteria or other small organic particles. They also reproduce asexually – no males have ever been found – so that large cultures can be derived from single individuals. This results in a population of genetically identical animals (a clone), and clones of many thousands of rotifers can be produced in the laboratory.

Other small animals are also able to undergo drying without dying, including some species of nematode worms, normally found in soil or on leaf litter, and thus frequently subjected to drought; these animals have also been adapted to life in the laboratory.

How do they do that?

̽��ֱ��ready availability of large numbers of bdelloid rotifers and nematodes allows biochemical and genetic studies to be carried out that should eventually unravel the mystery of anhydrobiosis. Initial work has focused on simple sugars that are able to protect biological molecules against desiccation damage. Many of the plants that undergo anhydrobiosis, the aptly named resurrection plants, contain large quantities of sucrose – the same sugar used to sweeten tea or coffee. Researchers have discovered that another related sugar, trehalose, seems to be involved in protecting some animals and microorganisms from dehydration stress. Both sugars are thought to protect drying organisms by forming organic glasses inside cells and around sensitive molecules, trapping them in space and time.

Water-loving proteins

Other similar molecular magic tricks are sure to be discovered since bdelloid rotifers are now known from the group’s research to be unable to produce trehalose. One class of molecules that offers an alternative to the ‘sugar solution’ to the anhydrobiosis problem is that of water-loving (hydrophilic) proteins. Recent research in the Tunnacliffe lab has discovered such proteins in bdelloid rotifers and indeed many other desiccation-tolerant organisms, including plants and microorganisms.

A major problem for proteins in a drying cell is loss of three-dimensional (3D) structure, resulting in the proteins clumping together to form aggregates, which can be toxic to the cell. Hydrophilic proteins are unusual in that they lack a defined 3D structure and seem able to protect other proteins around them, either in the test tube or a living cell, from aggregation. Further work has shown that hydrophilic proteins might also offer protection to cell membranes during desiccation, and help to prevent cells becoming leaky under stress.

Biostable medicines

An understanding of the drying-without-dying trick is not only of scientific interest but could also have important medical applications. For example, many drugs and vaccines are fragile molecules that lose their potency if not kept cool. This limits their effectiveness in many developing countries, where refrigeration is not always available. ̽��ֱ��difficulty in maintaining a ‘cold chain’ from point of manufacture of a medicine to its point of use has been highlighted by the World Health Organization as a major hurdle in bringing some treatments, regarded as routine in the developed world, to less- developed regions. A technology that allows medicines to be dried, conferring on them the remarkable biostability of anhydrobiosis, could be of enormous benefit, and this approach is already being used by some vaccine manufacturers.

Dr Tunnacliffe has recently received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) to take this idea a step further. Understanding how a rotifer or nematode survives drying should allow the application of what has been learned in these organisms to a mammalian cell. Such driable-but-viable cells could have applications in tissue engineering where new cell-based therapeutics are envisaged. At the moment, for example, producing an artificial pancreas capable of secreting insulin in response to high blood sugar levels as a treatment for diabetics requires the handling of fragile live cells. If these cells could be dried in a viable form, the accompanying biostability should make such artificial organs more like off-the-shelf medicines, easy to store and with a long shelf life; rehydration could be performed just prior to use. Although this scenario currently sounds like science fiction, the humble, harmless rotifer is teaching us that it might not be too far away.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Alan Tunnacliffe (at10004@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

Some remarkable organisms are able to withstand almost complete desiccation. How they survive is providing Cambridge researchers with new ideas for biostable therapeutics.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ��

Drying

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Yes