10 Somerville Magazine
Putting the brakes
on COVID-19 An Interview with Professor Sir Marc Feldmann
COVID-19 is, by all accounts, a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. Fortunately, our senior medical Fellows like Marc Feldmann have been coordinating a oncein-a-lifetime response to the crisis, including new clinical trials, advice and research partnerships.
A
brief read of our Somervillians Stepping Up feature (p.29) is enough to confirm that there is hardly an institution or place of work where Somervillians have not been making a positive impact since the pandemic began. In this feature, however, we have taken the opportunity to focus on the profound contribution made by our senior medical Fellows to the global fight against COVID-19, including an in-depth interview with Sir Marc Feldmann, winner of the 2020 Tang Prize for Biopharmaceutical Science. In this interview, Sir Marc takes us through how anti-TNF therapy works and why it is being tested as a coronavirus treatment, the difficult process of running clinical trials in the middle of a pandemic and how soon life might go back to normal. First things first, can you possibly explain in layman’s terms how anti-TNF works? Well, if you picture inflammation as a little car race, you’ve got six cars all racing each other to deliver the inflammation. Now, our theory was that if you took just one car out of that race – in this case, the cell-signalling protein or cytokine known as TNF – then the inflammation would stop. At the time most people thought this was crazy because they assumed – quite reasonably – that the other five cars were still there, doing their thing, and inflammation would ensue. However, we had evidence that suggested removing TNF slowed the other cars down. It was very unexpected, but that’s the point about science: often you have data that changes how you think about
Image provided by courtesy of the Goldlab Foundation
