(tranquil music)
- In some ways, what we're doing
is state-of-the-art but also very simple.
- So the point of a vaccine,
the way I think about it,
it's like a programme for the immune system.
The more finesse that you have in terms
of your design of that programme, the better the vaccine.
When the sequence of the virus was first published,
people were able to look at that sequence
and then target the part of it
that encodes the spike protein
that allows the virus to get into the cells
and then use that to design their vaccine.
What's different about the vaccine that's being developed
at Imperial is that it is completely synthetic.
- Our approach is different
because we're using genetic material.
So we've taken the code for just the surface protein
of the virus and used that as the genetic vaccine.
It's what we call RNA.
And we take that small instruction set
and put it inside a fat droplet or lots of fat droplets
and inject it into the muscle
and when it's taken up into those muscle cells,
it essentially instructs those cells
just to make that surface protein.
- This is quite different from what's normally done.
So if you think about the flu vaccine,
normally you would have the protein actually being injected
and then the body recognises that.
Whereas in this case, actually the cells are helping
to make it themselves.
- And because it's not you, it's foreign,
you make antibodies against that protein,
which we predict will be protective for natural exposure.
- This is the first time
that this has been done in this way.
- There's nothing of the virus in there.
It's just genetic code.
It can't produce the whole virus.
So it's tricking your immune system
to think it's seeing the whole virus
but it's just seeing that surface protein.
- If we show it works, it's a game-changer.
- If any of these vaccines are shown to work,
then everybody's gonna want it
and so we have to think in advance
how we can manufacture for the whole of the UK,
for the whole of the world.
- [Katrina] The point is that you need
to vaccinate enough people that you get herd immunity
so we're not seeing breakthrough cases.
- One of the real advantages
is that we only use a very tiny dose
and that means, in a one-liter volume,
we can make the equivalent
of two million doses of the vaccine.
So you can imagine a one-liter bottle of lemonade,
that will contain two million doses.
Now, to make that same amount of vaccine
with a conventional approach,
you might need 10,000 litres.
- It's not enough to show that it works in a lab.
It's not enough to show that it treats a mouse.
You need to show that it treats a human
and the only way you can do that
is an experiment in people.
And that's what we mean by clinical research.
- It might be in here.
Let me just see 'cause this one here at the bottom says...
- [Robin] So we're really excited
that it's going into our first participant
because we've been working for this since January.
- Your average vaccine study maybe takes several months,
possibly half a year to prepare for,
whereas these studies,
because they are so, so urgent,
we go from zero to 100 in weeks to maybe a month or so.
So it's very, very different in terms of preparation.
- Okay, so as you know,
this trial is to test
whether the new COVID vaccine is effective.
- We first will immunise a single individual,
check for a few days that it's safe,
there's no side effects.
Then we'll go into three individuals
and we'll slowly increase the number of people
that have the vaccine
as we gain more and more confidence in its safety.
- We're asking is it safe?
But we're also asking about reactogenicity, okay?
And that's the technical term for side effects
from a vaccine.
To some extent, you want some side effects from a vaccine
because the vaccine works in...
It mimics infection.
And so if you're getting some signs
of feeling like you've got an infection and you don't
but feeling like you do,
then that tells you your immune system is working,
it's recognising the vaccine
and it's being programmed,
it's understanding the vaccine.
- Yeah, so he said...
- And then the next phase
will be to do a large efficacy trial
and that's where we test whether the vaccine works.
So half of the participants will have a placebo vaccine
and half will have the active vaccine
and we'll be looking to see
if there are fewer numbers of infection,
hopefully no infection in the group
that gets the active vaccine.
And that'll be about 6,000 participants.
- [Katrina] You'll get an emergency card from us as well.
So if you need to call us out of hours.
I'm optimistic.
I think science and medicine
have tackled many problems.
- I think it's absolutely vital
and before the COVID-19 vaccines were talked about,
of course, we've had all this with previous vaccines.
So I'm not a vaccinologist, I'm a pharmacologist
but I'm happy to admit
that the vaccinologists have done more
for human health than pharmacology will ever do.
- So we have to plan for success
even though we don't know right now
whether this vaccine will actually work.
So one of the things that we're doing
to plan for success,
which I think is quite unique,
is we've set up a social enterprise
and a social enterprise is there
to make the vaccine available
and available at an affordable price across the world.
It will generate a very modest revenue
in order to make sure that we can keep providing the vaccine
for years to come.
But it's not going to be marketed as a high-value product.