The Laboratory is headed by Professors Andrew J. Pollard, Teresa Lambe and Daniela Ferreira who direct the activities undertaken.

The facilities available allow us to support the work of many Principle Investigators whose projects are supported by a Lab Manager, CL3 Lab Manager/Biological safety Officer, Sample Manager and a team of sample management technicians, a range of Post Doctoral Researchers with a diverse skill set, a team of Research Assistants at various stages of training who can support the basic sample processing through to complex research and help support at numerous DPhil Students, multiple MSc students and FHS students, who are completing research projects associated with the pre-clinical and clinical trials as well as the exploratory research activity. Plus supporting the newly created Laboratory Apprentice Clinical Trials Technician training and numerous external school student interns and work experience placements. Many of the Post Doctoral Researchers are co-supervising the DPhil students who then have access to the expertise available within the team as whole.

The Containment Level 2 (CL2) Laboratory capabilities for trial delivery include processing of serum, saliva, nasal fluid, nasal washes, nasal scrapes, mucosal swabs of the naso and oropharynx, stool, cellular material such as PBMCs, Lymph node fine needle aspirate (FNA) sampling, genetic sampling for genome wide analysis or transcriptomics.

The laboratory space is spread across two buildings with complementary and specialist facilities and equipment which allows for increased capacity of trial through put. OVG also has a dedicated CL3 facility, maintained at a very high standard, that provides the capability to handle samples from Controlled Human Infection Models (CHIM) including after challenge with Salmonella Typhi, Paratyphi. The CL3 facility allows the team to prepare challenge agents that are safe for human consumption and which have been successfully inspected by MHRA and HSE, conforming to high regulatory requirements.

The activity in these spaces is supported by a Laboratory Manager and CL3 Laboratory Manager/Biological Safety Officer. Our CL2 facilities include clean cell culture and microbiological facilities for respiratory challenge prep including Pneumococcus and RSV and GCP endpoint microbiology delivery following these challenges and following Pertussis challenge undertaken at an external site. These samples are also prepared for flow cytometry, spectral flow cytometry, molecular biology, imaging, pre-clinical vaccine development and manufacturing.

Core lab function

The core lab supports pre-clinical and clinical trials through analysis of primary and secondary endpoints as well as exploratory research. The activities can be largely grouped into (i) classical and molecular microbiology, (ii) serology including systems serology, (iii) cellular immunology, as well as (iv) bioinformatics and systems immunology.

Classical and molecular microbiology of pathogens form the basis of controlled human infection models (CHIM) with Salmonella typhi and paratyphi, Streptococcus pneumoniae and RSV with detection of colonisation and/or infection as the primary endpoint. Classical and molecular microbiology also supports national and international studies of prevalence of disease and vaccine efficacy both in Oxford and through transfer to partner institutions.

OVG has substantially expanded serological assays from classical ELISA to the study of antibody function using systems serology approach. Established assays are being used alone or in combination to rapidly evaluate response to vaccines and/or infection in epidemiology studies, observational studies, clinical trials and CHIM. Increasingly, multiplex approaches allow evaluation of antibody response and function to multiple antigens using Luminex and Mesoscale Discovery Platforms as well as neutralisation assays using pseudoviruses (including lentiviruses, VSV and others).

OVG has considerable expertise in the analysis of cellular immune responses combining functional assays and transcriptome analysis. The team has access to both conventional and spectral flow cytometers. While immune responses to experimental vaccines or infection are rapidly evaluated using T- and B cell ELISPOT, in depth analysis of immune responses including discovery of correlates of protection can also be augmented by studies using complex flow cytometry panels to investigate antigen-specific T and B cell responses. Multidimensional flow cytometry and transcriptome analysis at the single cell level can be supported by expert technical postdocs and computational biologists supporting the analysis of these high dimensional datasets. OVG has built on multidimensional analysis of immune responses to investigate immune responses in human tissue such as the respiratory mucosa and lymph nodes often using serial samples donated by study participants.