Prepping for the next pandemic

"We say Covid was the biggest public health incident for a century, but I don't think any of us think it'll be a century before the next." The words of Prof Dame Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK’s Health Security Agency who have this week launched a new laboratory to halt the next pandemic in its tracks. It’s called the Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre, and will be focusing on tackling current threats - like bird flu and superbugs - as well as disease ‘X’, the next potential threat to public health. Dr Bassam Hallis is the lab’s Deputy Director at the site in Porton Down…

Bassam - With climate change, with urbanisation, we do expect to see more public health emergencies, and some of those inevitably will lead to pandemics. And what we hope from having those facilities is ensuring we do as much work as possible, currently in what we call 'at peace time'. So we are ready to respond faster and at a higher capacity in order to actually provide a quick response, which hopefully will reduce the ability of the next virus from causing the pandemic or the public health emergency that we've had during covid.

Chris - So if COVID started now that the centre is being established, what would you do differently? That would mean we were more agile, we were faster off the mark against COVID. And how would it affect outcomes?

Bassam - Because of the learnings we've had from COVID, because of the new facilities, we are able to respond and mount a response that is significantly faster and higher capacity. So to give you an idea, one of the key assays, the tests we were doing to demonstrate the efficacy of the vaccines against COVID. When COVID started, we were testing about 100 samples a week. With the new facilities we have and the increase in our scientists, we are now able to test 3000 samples a week. We are now able to have significantly bigger responses, much faster to provide the data to the policy makers on which vaccine to deploy, and also the vaccine developers to allow them to develop the vaccines and get them licensed.

Chris - Prevention's always better than cure though. And if we're at a stage where we're now having to test things, it means the threat's already here. So is an element of the work going to be better international collaboration and communication to try to keep the threats out and at bay in the first place so that we don't end up with a pandemic spreading from one geography all over the world and then becoming a major threat everywhere?

Bassam - Absolutely. And collaboration, both within the UK and globally, is absolutely key to the response. You know, we feel we have fantastic capabilities and excellent scientists to respond to any public health emergency, but nobody could do it on their own. And that's why we work very closely with academic partners and with industry and NGOs, whether that's in the UK or globally. We are constantly performing surveillance studies in this country to see what might be coming up, what might be happening. At the same time we work with partners internationally, so to try and identify any potential emerging new virus or bacteria and try to get hold of them and do the work we need to do to try and stop them from causing the public health emergency pandemic that SARS COV-2 virus managed to do.

Chris - One of the theories about where COVID came from was that it may have been an escape from a laboratory, accidental or otherwise. If you are talking about bringing deadly things to your laboratories, how do we know that we're not going to have an outbreak from port and down?

Bassam - So our facilities, Chris, are unique in being able to handle those pathogens, those bacteria and viruses that are categorised according to the level of how dangerous they are. And we are uniquely placed in being able to receive those pathogens to grow them and work with them safely. We meet all the requirements that are required to work with these pathogens, whether from safety or from security.

Chris - So you will be bringing potentially things like Ebola to your laboratories in order to work on things of that sort of threat level in order to work out how to mitigate them?

Bassam - Absolutely. And Ebola is an example that we've done that for. When there is a potentially emerging virus or bacteria, the only way we could respond is to get hold of these, bring them here into our laboratories, and work with them safely and securely to try and understand how they cause disease, how they transmit between people or indeed whether they're likely to transmit from an animal to a person like what we're doing now with influenza. And then to put all the tools necessary. So we are ready from day one to evaluate any new vaccines or therapeutics should we need to deploy this.

Chris - Flu is going to be one of those ever present threats, which you must have your eye on COVID obviously, because it's still very much in evidence at the moment. But what other things are you worried about at the moment? What are going to be the targets now for the years ahead that you're going to be either working on or doing active surveillance on?

Bassam - We have a very active surveillance program that happened, you know, ongoing in this country. One of the things we're doing is to make sure our capability and our preparedness is pathogen agnostic. And what I mean by that, while we maintain surveillance programs to be clear about what may be circulating in our country or potentially coming into our country, is developing the capabilities that allow us to respond, what we call 'disease X'. And what I mean by that is whatever could come up, so the capabilities we are developing and enhancing, the increase in the scientific knowledge that we have here is really being targeted to respond to whatever comes up next.