Live recording from the webinar on Wednesday 13th May 2020. The first in a series of online talks organised by the Oxford University Personalised Medicine (OUPM) Society. We are pleased to host Dr. Amesh Adalja, who will be presenting his talk, “The Characteristics of Pandemic Pathogens.” Dr. Adalja is a senior infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health where he is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. Dr. Adalja has served on multiple US government committees tasked with establishing innovative guidelines for treatment and healthcare reform during infectious disease emergencies. He is also a board-certified physician in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and critical care medicine. In addition, he is a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American College of Physicians, and the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Dr. Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, poet, medical doctor and author. Disease does not spread alone – it spreads in tandem with health hoaxes, medical myths and pseudoscience. Information is contagious. The same mathematical models used to track the spread of a virus can be used to track the spread of information that goes viral. Dr. Seema Yasmin, a former Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer for the CDC and current director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative, talks about misinfodemics in the age of COVID-19, including potential measures to stop misinformation contagion.

Professor Kari Nadeau is the Naddisy Foundation Endowed Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and Director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. In addition, she is the Section Chief in Asthma and Allergy in the Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Division at Stanford and the Senior Director of Clinical Research for the Division of Stanford Medicine Hospitals. Throughout her career, she has been a pioneer in the field of Translational Allergy and Immunology, both defining the mechanisms of new therapies and then translating them clinically to make transformative changes in patient care. Furthermore, she has led research in oncology, transplant and autoimmune trials and is a member of the National Steering Committee for the intramural clinical research programs at the NIH. She has also started four biotech companies in the Bay Area under Stanford patents and has worked in industry to lead two drugs through the FDA to approval. During the current COVID-19 pandemic, she led one of the key successful NIH NIAID-funded Remdesivir clinical trials as a potential therapeutic for SARS-CoV-2. On April 29th, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of NIH and a current member of the US Coronavirus Task Force, announced that Remdesivir will become the “new standard of care” for COVID-19.

Dr Saad B. Omer is the Director of the Yale Institute of Global Health, a Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at the Yale School of Medicine, and the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. He currently serves on the WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety and has previously served on the U.S. National Vaccine Advisory Committee. Dr Omer’s research portfolio includes epidemiology of respiratory viruses such as influenza, RSV, and COVID-19. He regularly contributes op-eds for publications including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and his work has been cited in global and country-specific policy recommendations.

Dr. Chandan K. Sen is a J. Stanley Battersby Chair and Professor of Surgery, and Director of the Indiana Center for Regenerative Medicine and Engineering (ICRME). He serves as Associate Vice President of Research at IU and as Associate Dean of Research at the IU School of Medicine. Additionally, he is the Executive Director of the Comprehensive Wound Center at Indiana University Health and is recognized as a Lilly INCITE scholar. His lab has shown the potential of an electroceutical fabric to be utilized as PPE in the fight against coronaviruses. This fabric manipulates the electrokinetic properties of coronaviruses to reduce potential for infection.

Dr Kraemer is a Branco Weiss Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford and an Associate of the Oxford Martin Programme on Pandemic Genomics. His work addresses questions related to the spatial spread of infectious diseases. In January, Dr Kraemer began building a global line list database of confirmed COVID-19 cases, which has evolved into the Open COVID-19 Data Working Group, an initiative co-led by the University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School, Northeastern University, and the University of Washington. Using this data and other global datasets, Dr Kraemer is focused on modelling the impact of human mobility on the spread of COVID-19 and identifying how human mobility data and genomic data can inform when lockdowns can be lifted.

This talk explains the response to COVID19 in clinical and research settings and provides a snapshot of the Oxford, national and global response to the pandemic as of October 2020. In addition to his work as a clinician, Professor Angus is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Clinical Tropical Medicine and Global Health. His research focus is now on clinical trials and vaccine development in malaria, influenza, HIV, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and in more recent times, COVID19.

Dr Petousi is a Consultant Respiratory Physician and Senior Clinical Research Fellow in the Nuffield Department of Medicine. Shei has recently been involved in the publication of a paper titled “Successful awake proning is associated with improved clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19: single-centre high-dependency unit experience.”

Recorded live on 4th December 2020, Dr. Justine Loh presents her talk: “Behind Closed Doors: An ED Doctor’s experience of COVID19.” Dr Justine Loh is an Emergency Medicine and Paediatric Emergency Medicine Consultant at Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust. She will be explaining her experience working as a front line doctor during the COVID19 pandemic.