Latest news with #MartinLandray
Daily Mail
24-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Chance meeting between two epidemiologists on the number 18 bus in London helped save an estimated one million lives during Covid and paved the way for the end of the pandemic
What Britain has to offer to the world was never clearer than in the leading role we took in the Covid crisis – and all because of a chance meeting on a number 18 bus from Marylebone to Euston in London. Martin Landray found himself next to another epidemiologist Sir Jeremy Farrar and they began to talk about a new respiratory disease, SARS-CoV-2, which had originated in China and now reached the UK. At that stage life was still normal, as demonstrated by the packed bus they were on. But the new coronavirus was crippling the health system in the north of Italy. The two scientists agreed it would spread through the UK in a fortnight and they had to start searching for treatments – fast. Clinical trials were necessary. Ordinarily, such trials would take around a year to get off the ground. But the two medics knew that in a global emergency things had to be different. Within nine days, they had recruited their first patient, after which the study was rolled out to 175 hospitals and an extraordinary 10 per cent of all patients hospitalised with Covid. By this point the pandemic was tearing through populations across the world, so pressure to deliver was huge. The worst affected patients were being put on ventilators, with a survival chance of 50 per cent. There were no treatments and no vaccines – no one even knew if a working vaccine was feasible. The trial investigators kept cool heads and picked their drugs carefully. Positive results were emerging from an unexpected source, an anti-inflammatory drug called dexamethasone. It had two big advantages: it was cheap and was already stocked in the cupboards of all pharmacies. Amazingly, it worked – the first time any drug had been shown to save lives in the crisis. Better still, it worked best on the sickest. The discovery of dexamethasone was a chink of light at a moment when the pandemic had taken nearly 40,000 lives in the UK. But despite the urgency, the two professors held back from saying anything publicly. For another week they probed and double-checked the data. Then the drug was announced to the public; it was in use the same day and saving lives by the weekend. It is estimated to have saved a million lives across the globe. The next stage was to develop a vaccine, spearheaded by Oxford-based Professor Sarah Gilbert. Soon large-scale vaccine trials were underway and a deal was made with Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. As the miserable pandemic year drew to a close, the vaccine was approved for use. UK regulators, usually criticised as being too slow and bureaucratic, showed themselves to be the nimblest in the world as Britain became the first country to approve a vaccine tested in clinical trials. Vaccines and treatments discovered in the UK likely saved more lives globally than those from any other country. The Press focused remorselessly on failings in other aspects of the country's response, but British scientific capabilities were central to the global effort. No other country made a bigger contribution to the Covid fight. Yet just a few years on, progress in preparing for the next pandemic has stalled. There are still many infectious disease classes for which we don't have vaccines, including the Marburg virus, Rift Valley fever and Lassa fever. Finding vaccines can be phenomenally difficult – after 40 years of trying, we have still failed to discover one for HIV. The threat of a new pandemic has not gone away. Particularly worrying are respiratory pathogens with high adaptability and transmissibility that spread without visible symptoms. Increasing urbanisation and globalisation mean when one emerges, it will spread fast. At the same time other threats are starting to loom larger. Bacterial infections are becoming very effective at resisting antibiotics we throw at them. We are starting to lose the race to develop the new second and third-line antibiotics needed for when this happens, with more than a million people dying every year because they cannot access an antibiotic that works. A recent study in the Lancet found that this could double to two million a year by 2050. In that same year, another eight million deaths could occur from associated causes while infected with a drug-resistant bacteria. By the middle of the century anti-microbial resistance could become as big a killer as cancer. Is there a role for cash-strapped Britain in preventing the devastating impact of another pandemic, blessed as we are with a superb science base? The answer is yes. Britain often boasts of having nurtured more Nobel Prize winners than anywhere except the US. Less well known is that nearly a third of prizes have been awarded to scientists born outside Britain but affiliated with a UK institution or resident in the UK, demonstrating just how successful we have been in attracting the brightest minds. That happens largely because the UK has many top-ranked universities playing a major role in many of the scientific discoveries shaping a medical revolution in the sequencing of cancer genomes. Many have had rare diseases diagnosed as a result and personalised therapies for cancer patients have become possible. Britain has played a major role for centuries when it comes to life-saving discoveries, from Edward Jenner and the smallpox vaccine to Alexander Fleming's penicillin discovery. Such a tradition of innovation has been good business. Off the back of it, the UK has become Europe's largest hub for life sciences with more than 300,000 of the world's most sought-after scientists working here. What needs to happen now to avoid another global health catastrophe is to make urgent progress on vaccines, treatments and diagnostics and a new class of antibiotics. The UK's science base has made it a global leader in genomics, vaccine development and bio-technology. The more the world invests, the more Britain benefits. Doing the right thing for the world can be profitable too.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Covid, five years on: UK ‘still not ready to protect the population'
On 9 March 2020, Martin Landray was studying the likely impact of Covid-19 as it started to sweep Britain. What was needed, he realised, was a method for pinpointing cheap, effective drugs that might limit the impact of the Sars-CoV-2 virus that was filling UK hospitals with dangerously ill patients. Within 10 days, Landray – working with Oxford University colleague Peter Horby – had set up Recovery, a drug-testing programme that involved thousands of doctors and nurses working with tens of thousands of Covid-19 patients in UK hospitals. Trials were carried out in wards crammed with sick individuals, and these quickly showed that several overhyped medicines such as the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine were ineffective. At the same time, dexamethasone, a cheap treatment for inflammation and arthritis, was found to reduce deaths by a third among patients on ventilators, a discovery that saved more than a million lives across the planet. Recovery was one of the UK's greatest scientific triumphs in the battle against Covid, though Landray remains cautious. 'It was a great achievement but I have to say we were lucky that we got approval to set up the programme so quickly,' he told the Observer. 'I worry that this would not happen again when the next pandemic arrives. We could end up with a lengthy, committee-driven process that would be too slow and we would not get another Recovery. We have not learned our lessons.' It is a view shared by many other scientists. Britain may have triumphed with its Recovery programme and its speedy introduction of vaccines but the nation today shows alarming signs of forgetting the scientific lessons it learned during the pandemic. It is a point stressed by Prof Adam Finn of Bristol University. 'In terms of public health decisions, the main lesson we learned in 2020 is straightforward: when you get a pandemic, don't assume it's going to be like the last one. Five years ago, everyone expected the next pandemic would be flu, and so models assumed we had to shut down schools and keep children at home because they would be the ones spreading disease. 'That would have been true for flu but it wasn't for Covid. Young people were not disease spreaders and, wrongly, were kept apart. They paid an unnecessary price because we had made false assumptions.' It was a key lesson but Finn said he now worried the nation was already forgetting what it had learned during Covid. 'It's already beginning to happen, not just in the minds of the public, but also in the minds of the scientific community. The memories and lessons – such as the mistake of the prolonged closure of schools – are being lost. We actually need to record what happened with care so that our past experiences can guide us when this happens again. Merely holding inquiries in order to castigate people for getting things wrong is not enough.' Criticism of the processes by which scientists advise government was also voiced by Prof Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University. 'I don't think the scientific advisory system worked well throughout the pandemic,' he told the Observer. 'There were too many mistakes made, and I think we need to change how we do that. We need a better way of sampling scientific evidence and scientific opinion, and a better way of turning it into advice. We need to ask more scientists and distil their views into advice.' Woolhouse also criticised the decision to delay the large-scale deployment of lateral flow tests. 'The scientific advisory system did not embrace this as a technology and so it was not rolled out as it could have been in late 2020 when it could have played a key role in avoiding the next lockdown. Instead, we had to wait another year for it to be used in a widespread manner when it played a key role, along with vaccines, in the battle against the arrival of Omicron variant,' added Woolhouse. Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, warned that institutional knowledge in the UK about what to do in the event of a new pandemic was now on a precipice. 'We are still not ready today to protect the population within 100 days of onset for most pandemic scenarios and we are not spending enough on health security to get there any time soon. 'The risk to society from pandemics should be taken more seriously as the last, relatively trivial, low mortality pandemic still caused a global shock. The next could change the world as we know it.'
