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A vaccine to protect children against meningitis B – the strain that now causes the vast majority of bacterial meningitis cases in this country – could soon be introduced in the UK.

On Friday the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommended Novartis' Bexsero (MenB) vaccine for approval for babies 2 months and up. The step paves the way for a Europe-wide licence for the vaccine, and for national governments to decide whether to include it in childhood immunisation programmes.

'As paediatricians we have seen the devastating effect that MenB disease can have on young children and adolescents, so welcome the recommendation for approval for this vaccine as an important step towards the prevention of childhood meningitis,' says Dr Matthew Snape of the Oxford Vaccine Group, who is hopeful that the vaccine can be introduced into the routine immunisation schedule in the near future.

Oxford researchers, including Matthew Snape, Professor Andrew Pollard, Professor Moxon and others, played a significant role in the almost 20 years of work behind the development of the Novartis vaccine, from the early stages to clinical trials, as our earlier news story reported.

Matthew takes up the story: 'Developing a vaccine against MenB infections has been very difficult primarily because, unlike the MenC organism [a strain for which a successful vaccine was introduced in 1999], the outer coating of MenB is not recognised by the immune system.

'Over several decades many different proteins had been studied as vaccine targets without success. To overcome this, Professor Richard Moxon and others developed a novel approach whereby the MenB bacterium's DNA blueprint was used as a tool to find new protein targets,' says Matthew. 'This vaccine is a direct result of this work. It represents an entirely new approach to vaccine development, and one that has important implications for developing vaccines against other diseases.'

Professor Moxon of the Department of Paediatrics at Oxford University explains: 'The story of the underpinning science goes back to 1995. This is when the first complete genome sequence of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae was completed and published.'

This advance opened up the possibility of using the sequenced genomes of other disease-causing bacteria as a new approach to making vaccines, as Richard later outlined in the Lancet. After all, a complete genome sequence would provide an inventory of all the genes encoding every factor responsible for the virulence of the disease, or that would prompt an immune response in the body. Vaccines that target one or more of these genes could then be developed.

'There already was a H. influenzae (type b) vaccine, so an obvious candidate for using a genomic approach was Neisseria meningitidis (meningococcus),' says Richard, 'and specifically the B strain, since for technical reasons a vaccine for this strain needed a completely new approach from that used for the ultimately successful MenC vaccine.'

Oxford had been one of the main collaborators on the project to sequence the entire DNA of H. influenzae, Richard explains, and he was then in position to persuade Craig Venter – the US scientist pioneering novel DNA sequencing methods at his private research institution, The Institute for Genomic Research – to consider sequencing meningococcus B.

Richard's laboratory in the Department of Paediatrics sent DNA from a B strain of meningococcus to Venter's group at TIGR in 1995. The strain was one isolated from an outbreak of meningitis in Stroud in 1981. Richard explains that some preliminary sequencing work began to demonstrate how powerful the genomic approach could be. At this stage, Rino Rappuoli, lead scientist at Chiron Vaccines in Italy, came in with serious project funding and, crucially, all the resources of a commercial vaccine development company. The result was a collaboration, initiated in 1996, between Chiron (later acquired by Novartis), Oxford University and TIGR in Maryland USA.

'Between 1996 and 2000, the sequencing and analysis of the B strain was carried out and culminated in two back-to-back papers in Science,' says Richard. 'The second of these papers identified a number of candidate vaccine antigens which, after much further research led by Mariagrazia Pizza at Novartis, culminated in formulations that went into clinical trials.

'The Oxford Vaccine Group was a huge player in the clinical trials that resulted in the decision by EMA,' says Richard.

The Oxford Vaccine Group, also in the Department of Paediatrics, has been involved in 7 different clinical trials of the MenB vaccine, enrolling a total of over 1000 participants (over 800 children and more than 250 students). These included the first studies in children which were performed in 2006.

Professor Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford Vaccine Group and Matthew have been closely involved in the design, planning and analysis of results for these studies.

Matthew says: 'The initial paediatric studies conducted in 2006 enrolled 2 month old and 6 month old children to receive one of two formulations of this vaccine. One of these formulations induced a broad immune response against multiple strains of the MenB bacterium, and was therefore taken forward for further assessment in a larger study conducted across five European countries.'

The results from this larger study, in which the Oxford Vaccine Group was again involved, enrolling 400 of the 1800 infant participants, provided data critical to determining how the MenB vaccine might be incorporated into existing child immunisation schedules.

So what can we expect from the new MenB vaccine now it's on its way to being licensed? After all the meningitis C vaccine has been enormously successful. There have been only 2 deaths in children and young people under 20 in the last 5 years, compared to 78 deaths in the single year before the vaccine was introduced.

Matthew says: 'Each year between 460 and 860 children and adolescents suffer either meningitis or septicaemia (blood poisoning) due to MenB in England and Wales, with the highest rates being in children below 2 years of age.

'Calculating what proportion of these cases are likely to be prevented by immunisation with the MenB vaccine has been a considerable challenge, as the proteins targeted by the MenB vaccine vary between different MenB bacteria. But early estimates are in the region of 75%, which would be an enormous step forward in the goal of preventing childhood meningitis.'

He adds: 'As with all new vaccines, ongoing surveillance is going to be the key to understanding how the vaccine can be employed most effectively. One key question is whether using the vaccine in a large proportion of the population will reduce circulation of the organism in the community, thus providing "herd immunity" to people who have not received the vaccine.'

Many animals travel long distances in groups but little is known about how this may influence the navigational skills of individuals.

To test if travelling with others who know the way affects a bird's path-finding abilities a team from Oxford University, UCL, and Microsoft Research Cambridge, studied homing pigeons. They paired up experienced and less experienced - 'passenger' - pigeons on repeated flights and then recorded how well the birds navigated on their own.

I asked Benjamin Pettit of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, one of the authors of a report of the research in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, all about passengers, pigeons, and learning in a flock…

OxSciBlog: How might some animals be 'passengers' & others 'drivers'?
Benjamin Pettit: Animals that live in groups will often use each others' behaviour as a source of information - about food or predators, for example. This also applies to navigation.

In a travelling group, such as a migrating flock of birds, there will often be differences in experience, especially if animals of different ages have travelled the route a different number of times. Simulations of flocks suggest that only a minority need to know the way to guide the flock to its destination, so it is possible that only some of a flock is navigating, and the rest follow.

This raises the question of whether the 'passengers' in the group learn to navigate for themselves. Simply travelling with others who know the way already, like passengers in a car, could inhibit an individual’s route learning, making it harder to travel alone in the future. This has been called a 'passenger/driver' effect.

OSB: How did you examine the passenger/driver effect in pigeons?
BP: We track homing pigeons with mini GPS loggers. Over the past decade scientists have discovered a great deal about how a pigeon learns a route as it becomes more familiar with an area of the landscape.

In this experiment we compared route learning in two conditions - some pigeons flew alone, whereas others flew together with a trained 'demonstrator' pigeon, which had already learned a route home from that release site.

After a sequence of 12 flights, we tested the birds on their own. If being a 'passenger' interferes with learning, we would expect the birds trained in pairs to have more erratic routes when they then fly without the 'demonstrator'.

OSB: What does your study tells us about how pigeons share/gain information about a route?
BP: In fact, the birds trained in pairs learned homing routes just as well as if they had flown alone. This shows that a pigeon continues to pay attention to the landscape even if it has another pigeon to follow. The 'demonstrator' pigeons improved their homing routes as well, which was surprising.

In previous experiments, pigeons with this amount of experience settled into a particular homing route and rarely changed it. So rather than a homing route being strictly transferred from one bird to another, the pairs' routes ended up including new shortcuts that may have been discovered by the less experienced bird.

OSB: How might less experienced birds navigating benefit a flock?
BP: Birds can use a number of different cues to navigate over unfamiliar terrain, including geomagnetism, smells carried by the wind, and the position of the sun (or stars). So a bird over unfamiliar terrain is still likely to have some information to add to the flock's route choice. Theoretically, a flock can improve its navigational accuracy by combining information from as many birds as possible.

OSB: What further work is needed to examine route learning behaviour?
BP: Similar learning processes could be at work in flocks of migratory birds that travel in mixed-experience groups. This can be investigated through long-term tracking studies of wild birds, both species that migrate alone and those that form flocks. As for the pigeons, we already have plans to test how learning plays out in larger flocks. In particular, we will test whether a follower learns as quickly as leader, within a large flock.

This video [see below] was put together as part of a set of webpages that provide a great showcase of Oxford's research on the world's most pressing health problems in the parts of the globe where it matters most. It's life-changing research that perhaps we don’t celebrate enough.

After all, Oxford's global health programme got special mention as the university retained its crown as best in the world for medicine in the Times Higher Education's World University Rankings recently.

And the university's Tropical Medicine research pages note that currently recommended treatments for malaria, dengue shock syndrome, typhoid, melioidosis, TB meningitis, diphtheria, leptospirosis are all based on work conducted by Oxford scientists.

The video and the mini-website on Oxford’s partnerships in global health give a taster of some of the projects going on in over 30 different countries around the world (check the pins in the map).

It's clear even from a quick browse through these pages that the success of this research – from tackling infectious diseases like malaria, HIV/AIDS and flu to the burden of cancer, diabetes and depression is built on long-standing partnerships with local hospitals and universities.

This is not a new model. The Wellcome Trust has funded overseas units in Kenya, Thailand  and Vietnam for decades, in which Oxford faculty members based overseas work with local doctors and researchers on an equal footing. Developing training and infrastructure has also been important, helping to inspire the next generation of health leaders in the developing world.

Nor is this research happening in a bubble or an ivory tower. It is research committed to providing practical solutions that will save lives.

One example comes from last week, with an assessment of a programme in Africa to increase access to the most effective malaria drugs.

The recommended first-line treatment for malaria are artemesinin-based combination therapies, or ACTs (the effectiveness of which Oxford researchers based overseas demonstrated). But access to these drugs in many areas is incomplete, and the use of less effective, poor quality or fake drugs can make the development of drug resistance more likely – and indeed resistance has been detected in parts of South-East Asia (thanks to partnerships involving Oxford researchers based there).

Recently, the Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria (AMFm) has sought to increase the availability and affordability of ACTs massively in a number of countries in Africa – particularly among private-sector outlets where many buy treatments when they have a fever that might be malaria.

This hasn't been without controversy (see pieces online at BBC News and The Guardian), but an independent review in The Lancet  last week suggests the data so far show the programme has transformed access to ACTs. And a smaller piece in Science, again last week, uses maps of malaria prevalence across Africa (put together by partnerships led by Oxford researchers) to argue the case for the facility to continue.

A decision will be made this month on whether to continue the AMFm in a modified form or not. As that decision comes up, a comment piece on the Lancet research, written by a group that started discussions that led later to AMFm being set up (including Oxford’s Nick White and Richard Peto), notes that where the programme was implemented to a substantial degree, AMFm met or exceeded benchmarks for availability, price, and market share of ACTs. They conclude: ‘We must acknowledge that an efficient approach to subsidising antimalarial drugs has worked, making them available in the private sector where people go to buy them.'

You get the picture. Yes, the political, economic and social aspects of delivering effective healthcare in resource-poor countries is complex. But Oxford’s overseas partnerships are delivering the evidence and change that can help save lives. 

Is it time to consign those annoying cables and chargers to the bonfire of technological vanities and embrace a cable-free existence?

As Oxford University Innovation report that's the promise of new technology being developed by Chris Stevens at Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science that enables devices such as mobile phones and cables to charge and transmit data without cables and could one day eliminate power and data cables altogether.

'You could have a truly active, cable-free, battery-less desktop that can power and link your laptop or PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse, phone and camera. For example, by incorporating the technology behind the screen of a computer monitor, digital files, photos and music could be transferred effortlessly to and from a USB stick simply by tapping the flash drive against an on-screen icon,' Chris explains.

'This work comes from research into metamaterials, that is, materials that act as magneto-inductive wave guides and magneto-inductive power surfaces. You can find simple inductive technology in the charging unit of an electric toothbrush but in this case we can transfer data as well, and over a distance.

'The real beauty is that since the technology is in a patterned conductive layer, we can start adding that layer to any surface or indeed into a fabric.'

Weaving power and data capabilities into fabric opens up all kinds of intriguing possibilities such as smart textiles: the Oxford researchers have already built cable-free technology into a carpet to power a lamp and can achieve 3.5 Gigabits per second data transfer rate and hundreds of watts of power but believe there's still plenty of scope to improve the performance of their circuits. These advances suggest that the ability to synch and charge mobile devices could, literally, be woven into the fabric of public spaces.

Another advantage is that without the ports and holes needed to plug in cables it's much easier to make devices robust and waterproof: something that will make metamaterials technology ideal for applications in industries from aerospace to medicine.

But, even more importantly, according to Chris a cable-free existence could help us to recycle our electronic devices as it's the fact that they are wired and soldered together that makes them so hard to reuse:

'If you do away with wires and connect your components by sticking them onto a sealed circuit board, taking them apart becomes easy. No desoldering, no heat treatments, no toxic chemicals, no damage to the components,' he says.

'High spec computers can be sent back to the manufacturer when the next model comes out and the processors can be reused for lower spec home computers. Eventually those same processors can end up in TVs and washing machines – dramatically increasing the lifecycle of electronics.'

Think of it like electronic reincarnation: if your laptop is good to you in this life its reusable components mean it can come back as the home cinema that lights up your living room in the next.

Because of its intriguing properties graphene could be the ideal material for building new kinds of electronic devices such as sensors, screens, or even quantum computers.

One of the keys to exploiting graphene's potential is being able to create atomic-scale defects – where carbon atoms in its flat, honeycomb-like structure are rearranged or 'knocked out' – as these influence its electrical, chemical, magnetic, and mechanical properties.

A team led by Oxford University scientists report in Nature Communications a new approach to a new approach to engineering graphene's atomic structure with unprecedented precision.

'Current approaches for producing defects in graphene are either like a 'shotgun' where the entire sample is sprayed with high energy ions or electrons to cause widespread defects, or a chemistry approach where many regions of the graphene are chemically reacted,' said Jamie Warner from Oxford University's Department of Materials, a member of the team.

'Both methods lack any form of control in terms of spatial precision and also the defect type, but to date are the only reported methods known for defect creation.'

The new method replaces the 'shotgun' with something more like a sniper rifle: a minutely-controlled beam of electrons fired from an electron microscope.

'The shotgun approach is restricted to micron scale precision, which is roughly an area of 10,000,000 square nanometres, we demonstrated a precision to within 100 square nanometres, which is about four orders of magnitude better,' explains Alex Robertson of Oxford University's Department of Materials, another member of the team.

Yet it isn’t just about the accuracy of a single 'shot'; the researchers also show that by controlling the length of time graphene is exposed to their focused beam of electrons they can control the size and type of defect created.

'Our study reveals for the first time that only a few types of defects are actually stable in graphene, with several defects being quenched by surface atoms or relaxing back to pristine by bond rotations,' Jamie tells me.

The ability to create just the right kind of stable defects in graphene's crystal structure is going to be vital if its properties are to be harnessed for applications such as mobile phones and flexible displays.

'Defect sites in graphene are much more chemically reactive, so we can use defects as a site for chemical functionalisation of the graphene. So we can attach certain molecules, such as biomolecules, to the graphene to act as a sensor,' Alex tells me.

'Defects in graphene can also give rise to localized electron spin, an attribute that has important future use in quantum nanotechnology and quantum computers.'

At the moment scaling up the team's technique into a manufacturing process to create graphene-based technologies is still a way off. Currently electron microscopes are the only systems that can achieve the necessary exquisite control of an electron beam.

But, Alex says, it is always possible that a scalable electron beam lithography type technique may be developed in the future that could allow for defect patterning in graphene.

And it's worth remembering that it wasn't so long ago that the technology needed to etch millions of transistors onto a tiny slice of silicon seemed like an impossible dream.