Chance and necessity

008 LA ND ES BIO SCI EN CE. DO NO T D IST RIB UT E. pathogens to produce the antigen of interest and induce an immune response. Unfortunately these approaches had severe limitations, and GSK researchers determined that a better, as yet undetermined, approach was still needed. In the late 1980’s researchers at GSK were pursuing development of new vaccines to combat major diseases, including HIV and malaria and they were finding that live vector and DNA candidate vaccines simply may not deliver the necessary protection. In 1987 GSK Biologicals decided to turn its attention to other options that might exist. It is at this point in the story that my road and GSK’s crossed and then converged. As far as I can remember, I always have been fascinated by the natural sciences mainly because, as the French biochemist Jacques Monod once so elegantly wrote, chance and necessity govern them.3 I was trained as a biological pharmacist, and then received a Ph.D. in immunology in France in 1985. I was most captivated by how different molecules and their preparation could impact the immune response, particularly in the context of vaccines. I spent a year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Royal Free Hospital in London. From there I moved on to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, first as a postdoctoral research fellow, and later as a research assistant professor, working on a way to improve the delivery and efficacy of vaccines. In March 1990, serendipity intervened. I was giving a presentation at a conference in Florida, on a topic that I had specialized in for the previous three years—the use of liposomes to increase vaccine efficacy. As chance would have it, a GSK scientist was present in the audience that day and showed great interest in my work. Three days later I received a call from Jean-Paul Prieels, then Head of Research, asking me to travel to Europe for a job interview. I must admit that a return to Europe was far from the future I saw for myself—I had just married an American and we were considering settling in the United States. But I was intrigued. The congruence of my own research and GSK’s vaccine research program became immediately apparent and instantly exciting. It offered me the possibility to make a transition from research to applied science and contribute to global health solutions, working among a team of talented people with expertise that complemented my own. Almost to my own surprise, within just a few short weeks I accepted the role of Head of Formulation in the GSK research and development group, and my husband and I moved to Belgium. My mandate was to explore ways to increase the immune response to vaccines containing recombinant proteins with a particular focus on HIV, herpes and malaria. The last 20 years have taught me much, but one lesson is particularly striking—that although we can choose the roads we travel on, the places they take us to can be surprising. Serendipity is an often neglected aspect of science—hardly surprising as it is an element of chance that seems out of place in fields where discipline, application and endeavour are essential to discovery. Be that as it may, serendipity has played an important part in the recent revolution in vaccines development and in my own career. One of the most important innovations in vaccine science was the discovery and use of adjuvants. Demonstrated first by Gaston Ramon in 1925 and expanded one year later by A.T. Glenny, for over 80 years adjuvants have been studied for their ability to safely increase the immune response against a given antigen.1,2 Ramon was the first to recognize that the addition of a variety of substances could increase the antibody response to a given antigen. Reportedly, he even once mixed tapioca with inactivated diphtheria and tetanus toxin and found that, to his surprise, it served as a more effective vaccine than the toxin itself.1 The science of vaccine adjuvants has come a long way since then. The most common classical adjuvant in use today are aluminium salts, which has enabled protection against numerous diseases that today are fears of the past. However, there are still many deadly diseases to tackle and for which new strategies are needed to develop and produce efficacious vaccines. A new generation of adjuvants has brought renewed hope to researchers developing vaccines for challenging diseases once thought to be beyond the reach of vaccination, such as malaria. In some cases, novel adjuvants may even allow for a reduction in the amount of antigen needed, enabling an increase in vaccine manufacturing capacity, which may be necessary in a public health emergency (e.g. in the event of an influenza pandemic) in order to be able to vaccinate more people faster. I remember in the late 1980s, early 1990s when vaccine development itself was still perceived as a quiet backwater in pharmaceutical research. At that time the promise of a recombinant live vector approach to developing new vaccines held a lot of interest for researchers. Yet another approach had also gained popularity, DNA vaccines—using pieces of DNA from viruses or other