Video transcript: Nicola Stonehouse

Video transcript for ‘Researcher Spotlight: Professor Nicola Stonehouse’ embedded on the Faculty of Biological Sciences news pages.

(The screen shows Nicola sitting in a chair against a plain background, and the video starts with her closing a film clapperboard and handing it to someone off screen.Nicola talks to camera throughout.)

My name is Nic Stonehouse. I'm Professor of Molecular Virology in the School of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Leeds.

What we try and do is to take an understanding of how viruses work, and take that a step further into trying to combat them.

And what we are developing primarily are new vaccines.

One of the vaccines that we're developing is a new vaccine for polio, and the vaccines are currently made from virus, which has obviously biohazard implications.

It means that not everybody across the world can make these because they have to put special containment into place, which makes it expensive.

So if we look at this and we think that this is a virus,then the outside shell is completely inert. It's completely safe.

It's the material inside – the genetic material – this, when it gets inside our cells, is what causes disease.

So if we make these [the shell], and we don't make this [the genetic material] we've got something which is a perfect copy of the virus but is totally safe. Safe to make, safe to use.

And that's what we're doing with polio.

We've been doing it for 15 years, so it's not quite as simple as this. We've had to make a few changes along the way, but this vaccine is now going into clinical trials.

Polio is a very serious disease, and there are in fact, a family of viruses which cause polio-like symptoms. It can cause paralysis and in some cases can be fatal.

It's not a disease we see in the UK very much because we have had an effective vaccination program for a very long time, but that's not the case worldwide. And indeed we still have polio emerging in some countries.

It's highly infectious and really, really easy to spread through contaminated food and water. And wherever we get cases of polio, they spread really, really rapidly.

I didn't necessarily plan to go to university when I was growing up. It was only really when I did A-levels that I thought that might be a good idea and an interesting idea.

And after university, I applied for a PhD, really because I was so enthused by my final year project. Being in the lab was just amazing for me, and so much better than undergraduate practicals.

But I didn't choose wisely. I was in the wrong place with the wrong project at the wrong time, and I only stayed a year.

At that point, I really just wanted to get a job, and I started to work as a technician and that went well.

I started going to conferences. I enjoyed the lab work really well, and I thought, yeah, maybe it's time to embark on some study again.

So I did my PhD part time. It's not an easy route to follow, but it was financially better than being a student for sure. And it opened lots of doors for me and was very good in training for balancing time management, I would say.

Then I worked as a postdoc between the UK and Sweden, and a little while later I applied for fellowships and it's really the the MRC Career Development Fellowship that opened the door to my independent career. 

What I hope to see is that we manage to get our virus-like-particles into childhood vaccines, that we do that safely, that we are able to launch the clinical trials that are needed.

Clinical trials are really expensive. The Gates Foundation is funding some of those, but they've got to be done slowly, carefully.

But I hope that's what I see. And then we can apply this technology to other viruses beyond polio, so that this becomes a kind of platform, if you like, a springboard for the future.

And along the way, training scientists of the future, people from the lab going on to their own independent careers. Nurturing that scientific family is really important.