The group asked me if I would tell them a little bit about one of my other hats at our regular Tuesday meeting, and this blog is about that.
In October 2019 I was seconded part-time to UKRI as the Deputy Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research council (EPSRC). What is UKRI (UK research and Innovation)? It’s a non-departmental public body that funds research and innovation. It is made up of the seven disciplinary research councils (acronyms to please Tom – AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, NERC, STFC and MRC), Research England, and the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.
As Deputy Executive Chair of EPSRC I was helping with UKRI strategy, learning how a spending review round works, visiting universities to talk about how they could work better with UKRI – pretty much everything I was expecting to be doing. But like everyone, my world changed in early 2020.
In March 2020 Sir Mark Walport (head of UKRI at that time) phoned me up and asked me to get a cross council call underway for research and innovation that could help mitigate the impacts of the pandemic. This wasn’t the start of the UKRI funded research efforts into Covid-19 and its impacts – back in February UKRI and NIHR had launched a joint call covering major health aspects and even before that from January the UKRI research councils were helping their institutes and centres redirect research and supporting changes of direction from other grant holders.
Four days after that call from Sir Mark (two of them were the weekend), UKRI launched the Covid 19 Agile Call, which ran until mid-December 2020 and received over 4000 applications across an enormous range of areas. The call was open across all of the UKRI remit including industry via Innovate. We linked it to the UKRI/NIHR call, we also had highlights in areas such as ethnicity, transmission and mental health. If you want to have a look at what was funded there are topic maps of both the innovation and research grant portfolios here
Find COVID-19 research and innovation supported by UKRI – UKRI
The aim of the call was to engage the full community, to allow us to shape the research from top-down priorities while remaining open to new challenges/needs. It was also vital that the call went from proposal to research/innovation as quickly as possible. A standard research grant typically takes over 6 months from when it is received by UKRI before the funding outcome is known. We shortened that significantly: in the initial phase we aimed to get the first response back in 2 weeks lengthening to 4-6 weeks in July. This rate of working was hard on those writing the proposals, UKRI staff and the community of reviewers. It was incredible to witness the efforts of everyone to turn research and innovation from ideas to realities in such short spaces of time. To give an idea of the efforts involved, EPSRC – not a Research Council with the largest load – received over 300 proposals in the first 5 months of which 180 were peer reviewed, leading to over 1800 review request in order to get enough reviews for each grant.
This type of open call was just one of the elements of UKRI’s Covid-19 research response. The others could be broadly described as re-directing UKRI centres/institutes towards Covid-19 and platform studies to support the national response. These interventions were all interlinked and all had to be responsive to current needs as the pandemic progressed.
The scale and speed of effort from the UKRIs research and innovation community was enormous. I should thank particularly all those who sat on panels, reviewed grants and generally helped UKRI to assess the huge number of potential ideas at incredible speed.
Overall UKRI’s Covid-19 response was cross-disciplinary, drawing all the sectors of research and innovation together with a shared sense of purpose. The projects were delivered with unprecedented speed and have had enormous impact (you can see lots of examples here Tackling the impact of COVID-19 – UKRI).
A few specific examples
- The Oxford/AZ validation – the early stage development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was funded by the UKRI/NIHR call in February 2020. This was built on decades of global research and preparation. That knowledge base provided the advanced platform from which the AZD1222 vaccine (Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19) was developed, validated and approved for human use in record time (11 months). Prior to 2020, the mumps vaccine had been the fastest developed from viral sampling to approval, in four years.
- Coronavirus fragments in wastewater can reveal when and where a spike is happening, particularly as these fragments are detectable even when people infected with the disease are not exhibiting symptoms, and so conventional testing could miss an outbreak. Developed with the help of wastewater samples from water companies, the system has now been deployed nationwide with government support. More recently, the NERC Environmental Omics Facility has found a way to identify new COVID-19 variants in wastewater samples.
- Mitigating transmission in public transport to save lives. The aim was to help address the high incidence of Covid-19 amongst London bus drivers and minimise risks for passengers and other staff. Public transport remains vital for many people – 60% of users report having no alternative for their journey – so it is important to understand how to minimise risks to both passengers and staff. The team took a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding and quantifying transmission in public transport, from simulation of air flows to modelling passenger behaviour, monitoring air quality, and identifying contamination hotspots. Bringing these together, the team has assessed and recommended interventions on London buses, from minor changes such as restoring front of bus boarding and sealing of driver assault screens (implemented across the TfL bus network in May 2020), to larger modifications to ventilation systems (completed on over 1200 buses to date). These interventions have ensured London bus drivers are working in a well-ventilated environment, minimising the risk of passenger-driver transmission risk. Work continues on the project, with the aim to develop a comprehensive risk assessment tool for TfL, which will help reduce the likelihood of transmission on public transport vehicles now and in the future.
- Since 2016, the ESRC-funded Decision Maker Panel (DMP) has been surveying thousands of businesses each month on the uncertainties they face. The DMP comprises financial officers from small and large UK companies operating in a broad range of industries; it is designed to represent the UK’s business landscape. The results help inform the Bank of England’s policies and help the government assess the prospects of the UK economy. When Covid-19 emerged, DMP quickly adapted to ask leaders how the pandemic was affecting their business. Funding through the Covid agile call has enabled the team to ask UK businesses of all sizes and sectors about the impact of the pandemic on a fortnightly and monthly basis. The panel has asked how many employees have been furloughed, how many people are working from home and what effect the pandemic has had on costs. DMP evidence is immediately used for policy decisions in real time by BoE policy committees (Monetary Policy Committee and Financial Policy Committee), HM Treasury, BEIS, 10 Downing Street and COBRA. DMP has provided evidence on economic uncertainty for meetings of the MPC in 2020-2021, which was used to justify and explain the MPC decision to maintain interest rates at historic low levels in speeches and official publications such as Inflation/Monetary Policy Reports.
- The RECOVERY trial platform (‘Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 thERapY’), launched in February 2020, was the fastest growing trial in medical history, enrolling 1,000 patients at 132 hospitals within its first 15 days. Results from RECOVERY showed that dexamethasone reduces deaths in Covid-19 patients with severe respiratory complications by a third. A recent study estimated that the potential number of lives saved between July – December 2020 from this intervention would be 12,000 in the UK and approximately 650,000 lives globally. Another RECOVERY trial arm demonstrated that the anti-inflammatory treatment Tocilizumab reduces the risk of death when given to hospitalised patients with severe Covid-19, shortens the time until patients are successfully discharged from hospital and reduces the need for a mechanical ventilator.
In case you want to see a little more you can find a recording of an earlier talk I gave about this (its a little out of date now but gives you a general idea)
How to effectively rapidly fund new research during a pandemic, Charlotte Deane – YouTube
