In 2007, I participated in an Oxford vaccine trial. This was the 1st time chimpanzee adenoviruses were tested on humans. I was the second to be injected w/ this stuff.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine is directly based on that tech, with tremendous hope beyond COVID
👇
2007 was a touchy time to participate in a vaccine trial. The year before a trial for Theralizumab had resulted in 6 volunteers out of 8 suffering a cytokine storm. One of the 6 lost toes and fingers. The last two? They had only received placebos!
As a consequence, the Oxford Jenner Institute had trouble recruiting volunteers for their trials. One of my fellow @MertonCollege Fellows explained to me the science and the goals for their 2017 campaign and convinced me to participate.
The idea was to take a protein insert known to induce an immune response useful vis-à-vis malaria, and to stick it on a non-recombinant chimpanzee adenovirus. The human immune system would be virgin to such an intrusion and react more specifically to the protein insert.
I thought that was so cool! As explained to me the goal was clearly to build a new approach to creating a vaccine. How often do you get to contribute to that?
This below is the official Participant Information Sheet.
I was in Subgroup 1A.
Pages 1-4
Pages 5-8.
I was compensated (not paid!) 20GBP per trip, 5.50GBP per hour, 6 GBP by blood sample.
Pages 9-12. Page 11 omitted due to personal numbers (for emergencies). Page 12 is the consent form.
This is the official registration for the vaccine trial. The chimpanzee adenovirus they were using is called ChAd63 when considered as a "vaccine vector". clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00…
This is the publication that resulted from the study. Not overly flashy, but, essentially: "it's safe and generates more potent response than previous malaria vaccine attempts". pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22275401/
Now that they had outlined a valid approach, the Oxford researchers set out to refine it. They had two components to play with: the platform and the protein insert. The insert is disease specific, while the platform is generic.
For the platform, it's best when it has as low human seroprevalence as possible. They found a new type, which they called ChAdY25 then renamed ChAdOx1, which seemed to be more globally rare.
They knew ChAdY25 and ChAd63 were different because the sera collected from my study didn't react to ChAdY25. This validates the idea that one could have concurrent vaccination programmes based on two different vectors.
They also got to varying the disease-specific protein inserts. This fascinating 2017 review article lists all these attempts beyond malaria: HIV, Ebola, rabies, influenza, tuberculosis, hepatitis, etc.
The rest is history: once COVID arrived, they had all the understanding they needed in order to design a vaccine (and for once the resources for this). The Oxford COVID vaccine is based on ChAdOx1.
(Remember, we are returning to "normal" fast. I can't believe we haven't really started talking about this globally:)
Looking back at all the whole intellectual progress there, two aspects really are fascinating.
1/ With all this validation, attention, money, etc, there is real promise to make progress on all these established diseases using similar techniques. BUT... each time we will make an attempt, we will have to "burn" an obscure chimpanzee adenovirus in order to do so.
2/ for as long as mRNA vaccines remain expensive and hard to deliver, our best protection against future species-hopping pandemics will probably be in *preemptively* "vectorizing" benign diseases from our *closest* species. How crazy of a trick to our immune system is this?
2/ Think #SwissCovid efficacy is comparable to manual contact tracing? One paper cited is from May 2020, the other July but concerns data collected up until March 2020. Ages ago. We have learned a lot since about the virus, e.g. the heterogeneity of infectiousness
When Cummings sent his job ad, I wrote a thread on how revealing it was of his world view, and particularly that he would name check a journalist like @carolecadwalla
Indeed, Cummings understands the systemic level very well. But as I said then, he fails to understand how others build meaning and why that is important.
The UK virus strategy is to #FlattenTheCurve, like everywhere else, but with a twist. The epidemiologists operate under the assumption that the behavioral scientists ("nudge unit") are correct, and it is impossible to ask for strong efforts for more than a week.
@carolecadwalla The fact that Cummings felt compelled to refer to you in this job ad is actually hugely relevant. He understands the systemic level very well, but fails at understanding how others make sense of the systemic, and why that is important.
@carolecadwalla He also fails to understand there is circularity in the particular context of elections (i.e. process of how the average p makes sense of what's best, given tons of influence). That circularity gives more legitimacy to your stories than his calculations as a way to build meaning
@carolecadwalla His job ad is largely obsessed with "causation" and "counterfactuals", which is a very narrow view of what "meaning" is. Meaning here are explanations that others can relate to, in the sense that they can come up with their own plan of how to relate to it.
There is ABSOLUTELY a story here, documenting Facebook's resistance to the "Download your History" feature (yet their use of this White Whale for PR purposes right now, even yesterday at Davos by Sandberg) 1/n
This is not a frivolous request. The reason to ask is that this feature would make a lot of v interesting research much easier and potent (+granular, personal feedback). E.g. this research on Twitter would transfer over completely
I have known this for a while. In fact, as I was working in 2016 w/ @HNSGR on his @CamAnalytica uncovering, I became convinced neither journalism or research alone would cut it. User-centric data, in the spirit of @mydataorg could bridge the two motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/…
The FB press release on the data breach discloses enough to conclude it was way more devastating than reported. It makes two partial disclosures: one on quality of the hack (how well did hackers control a hacked account), one on quantity (how many accounts hacked at that level).
The quality of the hack is extremely high: if you fully own an account, you could (through "View As") fully control the account of any of their friends as well (by pretending to be them). One could use this to hop towards high value targets, from friend to friend.
Quality of hack is so high one could also use this full control to log into any place where Facebook Login would have been used (Tinder, Spotify, etc), and access to all the user data there as well. If you read carefully the press release it is implied, but could be clearer.