Prof Deborah Watson-Jones
Professor of Clinical Epidemiology
United Kingdom
Relationships with industry
My professional development for clinical trials implementation and understanding of GCP and quality assurance in practice and the regulatory nd the vaccine development pathway has been enhanced by working with several vaccine manufacturers where clinical trials are conducted with a high degree of rigor and attention to detail. I have been collaborating with Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson and Johnson and Merck & Co. during the last 8 years on Ebola and HPV vaccine trials.
Expansion of collaborator links and research sites
My professional development has been strengthened by the opportunity to work with new collaborators over the past 2 years and in new research sites and with new funders e.g. IAVI where we are going to collaborate on Lassa fever epidemiology; International Vaccine Institute (IVI), Seoul, where we are partners on a new large BMGF-funded global study on HPV epidemiology; the University of Health and Allied Science (UHAS), Ghana which is working on this project; This broadens experience in approaches and brings in new ideas for research. I am collaborating with the University of East Anglia and the University of Leeds on a new study funded through the NIHR on health resilience and extreme weather events. I have been awarded a new grant with collaborations at the University of Ibadan and a new collaboration with the Nigerian Ministry of Health as well as MITU in Tanzania.
Teaching
I co-organise the Control of STI module. This course has had between 12-27 students over the past 5 years. The co-organisers (Helen Kelly, Philippe Mayaud and myself), regularly update the lectures and course materials in order to ensure that we include important emerging key topics in this field e.g. sexual transmission of emerging infections, new vaccines, updated epidemiology and diagnostics). We also make use of the Annual Module Review and Action Plan (AMRAP) to examine student feedback and adapt the module as necessary.
In 2023, 12 students on the African DL MSc Sexual and Reproductive Health joined the course which was very successful. We have update the lectures and course materials to ensure that we include important emerging key topics and we have adapted the course to use a hybrid format for on-site and on-line students. We continue to receive positive feedback on the skill development component of the assessment, which tasks students to work in groups to produce a specific STI control programme proposal for a hypothetical donor and to also present the proposal to a ‘panel’. Former students of LSHTM who did this module have told us that this assessment exercise was extremely valuable for their later careers. Some students in the past few years have rated this as the best module that they have taken. With the exception of 2021 where we were adapting the module for remote teaching, the module has a unique self-assessment component where students are also able to provide marks for those working in the same group. This was restarted in 2022. However the hybrid nature of the module means that this is difficult to assess and we are revising the marking strategy for the assessment
Affiliations
Centres
Research
Immunology experience
As part of my professional development, I am continuing to strengthen my experience of immunology research methods through the collaboration with the National Cancer Institute’s Leidos laboratory (Ligia Pinto), with Charles Lacey and colleagues (University of York) for the DoRIS trial and with Stephen Cose and colleagues, MRC/UVRI & LSHTM Uganda Research Unit, for EBOVAC3. We have also been able to establish PBMC processing and ELISPOT assay and Luminex assays in Sierra Leone for examining the effect of malaria on vaccine immune response and SARS-CoV-2 serology.
International meetings and workshops on COVID-19
I continue to attend meetings and workshops on COVID-19 and we are continuing with an intranasal COVID-19 vaccine trial in Sierra Leone.
Co-organiser:1st International Conference Public Health in Africa (CPHIA 2021), 14-16 December 2021
• Title: Vaccination in Africa: Research Capacity, Advocacy, Manufacturing and Distribution
• Title: Digitization, Modelling and Analytics to Support an Effective Public Health Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Achievements and prizes
My main achievement in the past 3 years has been the impact that the DoRIS trial, along with an RCT in older girls in Kenya (KEN SHE), had had on global policy for HPV vaccines. As of May 2024 (and the numbers are continuing to rise), including the UK, more than 40 countries have changed to a single dose HPV vaccine strategy, including Nigeria, one of the most populous African countries, has introduced HPV vaccine using a single dose regimen. Canada has just announced its switch to a single dose programme. In the past 3 years, my team and I have given >20 talks on the evidence on single dose HPV vaccine to WHO, UK JCVI, Japan, Scotland, Australia, Thailand, SE Asia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Africa and multiple other countries through international meetings, workshops, webinars and conferences. The change of a WHO recommendation to allow single dose for 9-20-year olds, which the results of the DoRIS trial significantly contributed to, is impacting global uptake of HPV vaccines and may broaden country introductions as well as reducing costs and simplifying delivery, in turn helping to meet the WHO 2030 target of cervical cancer elimination. Our funding for DoRIS has been extended to allow us to continue to assess the durability of single dose immune responses.
The Ebola vaccine trials that I have been leading have contributed extensively to the Janssen Clinical Development Programme for their 2-dose vaccine and to the recommendation to grant a marketing authorization to the Ad26.ZEBOV/MVA-BN-Filo Ebola vaccine in the EU by the European Medicines Agency (https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/new-vaccine-prevention-ebola-virus-di…). The fast-track development of Ebola vaccines paved the way for COVID-19 vaccine development. We recently presented to the European Union on the achievements of the EBOVAC projects.
•I was one of only 2 British speakers invited to participate in the European Parliament & European Commission’s High-Level Conference on EU Research and Innovation in our Daily Lives . European Parliament, Brussels. 27 November 2018 (https://www.ebovac.org/news-publications/ebovac_eu_conference/)
• Ebola vaccine research conducted through various consortia which I lead contributed to the Queen’s Anniversary Prize award at Buckingham Palace for LSHTM for ground-breaking work on Ebola in February 2018.
Selected Publications
