Move over Louis Pasteur, there’s a new vaccinologist in town! Her name is Sarah Gilbert. She was born in April 1962 in Kettering, U.K. to a middle-class family. She graduated with a B.Sc in biological sciences from the University of East Anglia in 1983. After earning her doctoral degree from the University of Hull in 1986, she worked as a researcher at the Brewing Industry Research Foundation.
She became a Reader in Vaccinology at the University of Oxford in 2004 and became a professor at the Jenner Institute in 2010. She worked on the design and creation of influenza vaccinations and was part of the team that researched a ground-breaking field in vaccinology that sidestepped traditional scientific methods to produce vaccines at an accelerated pace.
This approach is called ‘plug and play’ which uses ‘platform technology’ that takes genetic material from the target virus and ‘plugs’ this material into a platform to produce a vaccine. Prof Gilbert was already working on this technology when Covid-19 struck in December 2019.
The platform in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic is the common cold virus which has been injected with genetic material from the Covid-19 virus to create a vaccine.
Usually a vaccine takes several years to develop but thanks to new scientific research, the vaccine for coronavirus was created in 4 months! Prof Gilbert’s vaccine- Oxford-AstraZeneca – is used in more than 170 countries today.
Prof Gilbert was made Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to science and public health and honoured by Barbie doll maker Mattel which created a doll in her likeness as a role model for children around the world.
Picture Credit : Google
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