Professor Sharon Peacock: the unsung hero behind COG, Britain’s genome sequencing marvel
Post-Covid, blockbuster films will be made about who cornered and tamed the Covid-19 critter and saved us all from wrangling for eternity over whether a Scotch egg counts as a meal. Harbour no hopeful illusions, the virus will never be beaten, only cornered. On a surviving IMAX screen, probably now somewhere distant from you, the post-WWII The Dam Busters equivalent will be COG (Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium). Go for it, Sam Mendes. After 1917 you’re my favourite to come up with a snappy title, and nail-biting presentation. Masked cinema goers will queue around the block.
Instead of lantern-jawed Guy Gibson silhouetted in searchlights, hauling back on the yoke of a thrumming Lancaster over the Möhne Dam, we shall be gobsmacked by the formidable, surgical-blues-clad Professor Sharon Peacock in her lab at Cambridge, wrestling with pipettes.
She and her team will dazzle onscreen as they decode the RNA of the virus extracted from positive Covid test samples acquired across the UK in record quantities, hunting down variants that might transmit more easily, wreak increasing physical devastation and, most significantly, risk outrunning the posse of vaccines released by Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna, aimed at heading them off at the pass.
Be under no illusion – there is a “Kent” variant, not because the mutation originated in Kent, but because COG was the first to identify it in a sample gathered there. Likely by that time it was already halfway round the globe and could have originally mutated anywhere. Elsewhere it simply lurked unseen, un-genome decrypted.
On reflection, maybe not the biopic for you, Sam. Not your scene. Better a documentary by the ever-optimistic and lucid Professor Brian Cox, to express the innocent awe and wonder the nation should feel at COG’s achievements.
After all, the scale of this enterprise is cosmic. COG now maps 30,000 Covid-19 genomes a week. To put that in context, pre-COG, Public Health England sequenced 50,000 pathogen genomes of all sorts in a year. From a standing start in April 2020, Professor Peacock has created a consortium that can sequence 1,560,000 genomes a year.
Yes, pause to goggle. That is a 3,020 per cent increase in national capacity. Investors in Tesla, Bitcoin and Game Stop’s roller coaster stock rides have been beaten into a cocked hat.
Another stunning factoid. The UK’s genome sequencing capability equals 50 per cent of that available on the entire planet. Records are kept by GISAID (Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data – catchy, or what?), the organisation that provides an open access data base of Covid flu variants, now adapted to Covid-19.
Go on, have a look here. It will either scare the socks off you, or reassure that behind screen-grabbing, prattling politicians, the headlining Covid deniers and alternative doom-Tweeters there is a global army of co-operative scientists who work seamlessly together – and know what they’re talking about.
More context. In world league terms the UK is number one in genome sequencing, the USA is 47th. Get over that unseemly post-Brexit nationalistic flag waving immediately! One chorus only of “Rule, COG-UK”. The more seemly, reflective questions to ask are; why did we pull off the miracle; and are there policy conclusions to be drawn that will ensure we can continue to do our bit in global crises to come?
From my lowly vantage point as a conscientious observer of healthcare developments, and the holder of ministerial responsibility for pandemics once upon a time, in a Department of Health, long, long ago and far, far away, indulge me as I make some blunt, now layman’s observations.
Covid-19 will not be beaten. Don’t kid yourself. Viruses were on earth before our teeming cells were dreamt of in some smoking hydrothermal vent in the Pacific basin. They have staying power. We play dangerous games with them, extracting unknown, long-dormant varieties from the carcasses of Woolly Mammoths that emerge from the melting tundra; tweaking them in labs across the globe to see what it takes to make them more virulent. The ones with more rigid DNA (rather than the flexible RNA of Covid-19) like Polio and Smallpox we can encircle and eliminate. The Covid common cold has thwarted us. Covid flu challenges us every year with yet another strain.
Covid-19, the latest model off the three-billion-year-old virus production line, can be reduced from being a surging global pandemic but will remain endemic. Like Tony Blackburn, it will always be with us. Sorry, but my wife insists on listening to Hits of the Sixties at 6:00am on Radio 2 every Saturday and I’m entitled to my own cheap “hit”.
Understanding how the virus mutates is critical if the vaccines increasingly suppressing it are to be kept up to date over years, not just the present crisis, matching the crafty protein changes the virus evolves as it moves from host to host, enhancing its cell-piercing armoury.
Covid-19 may seem horrific now but will come to be seen as a timely warning to a complacent global society. There will be other, potentially more virulent viruses heading down the road, either courtesy of careless lab containment policies or pesky Pangolins. Which was it? There is no conclusive evidence either way. The toothless and gormless WHO investigators plowtering around in Wuhan obfuscation will get nowhere. The debate over where Covid-19 originated is a topic for another day.
For now, the positive lessons learned from agencies such as COG which are having a good Covid war, have to be encoded into the DNA of global health structures to ensure tomorrow’s viral crises can be addressed more effectively than today’s.
How did Professor Peacock do it? When the Covid diaries are published, her email to five colleagues in early March 2020 saying, “Can you call me, please?” will be writ large. That simple. It was the catalyst for a plan that went from drawing board to a proposal to Chief Medical Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, securing £20m of funding, within weeks.
The formal submission to ministers and the exchange of memos with Matt Hancock’s private office will make fascinating reading when open for public scrutiny, either through the passage of time or as evidence to the Health and Social Care Select Committee, inevitably set to review the conduct of policy once the current crisis is contained.
My experience of being faced with a potential Ebola outbreak in the mid 1990s makes me suspect that the inspired decision to back COG will turn out to owe much to the fluid relationship between the Secretary of State and the Chief Medical Officer. In my time as Minister of State at the DOH I was blessed by having the canny Sir Kenneth Calman as CMO, in an office directly below mine in Richmond House. Door ever open. His network reached deeply into the bewildering network of clinical and scientific skills with which the UK is blessed. CMOs must be networkers supreme.
Never did I ask to speak to an expert, like Professor Peacock, without Sir Ken producing them in my office, with a magician’s flourish the next day. My money is on our slightly chaotic British way of “doing” policy, rather than some meticulously documented tick box bureaucratic procedure, being COG’s midwife. Just think vaccines and the pen-pushing EU. Disaster.
Next lesson. Networks matter. COG funders and partners total 78 institutions across the UK ranging across health care trusts, universities, charitable foundations, and research collaboratives. With a flutter of pride, I noted my alma mater, the University of Glasgow, is in on the action, via its Centre for Virus Research (CVR), part of the spanking new research complex sited on the old Glasgow Western Infirmary complex. Alone, they bring twenty-four highly qualified professors and doctors to the party.
It says much for both Professor Peacock and all her co-contributors that this complex orchestra of all the talents was playing in tune within weeks. Sharon Peacock’s role is serendipitous. She left school at 16 in 1975, worked in a corner shop, decided to become a nurse, then entered medical school at the age of 23, becoming involved in microbiology in Thailand. In a sense, her talent, hidden behind the scenes, lay dormant until Covid-19 called her to the colours and public notice.
Recently she was interviewed by Andrew Neil on Spectator TV. Clock in at 9.04 minutes to watch. Warning. Don’t watch the next interview with Douglas Unknown, leader of the Scottish Tories, hoping to thwart Lucretia Sturgeon. Car crash.
Professor Peacock comes across as unassuming, compellingly competent and with a cross-disciplinary attitude that eludes many academics who seem to live in silos. Her grasp of the global implications of her work shines through. She self-effacingly shares the credit. In the race to instil public confidence she storms the finishing line first, leaving politicians trailing on the back straight.
COG shares centre stage in the current crisis spotlight, along with the UK’s vaccine innovators. They use the massive Diamond light source synchrotron at Didcot, Oxford, which reads the crystalline structures of proteins within minutes rather than weeks, speeding the creation of bespoke vaccines. Both are a tribute to the depth of the UK’s scientific skill and the prudence of policy makers of both political stripes in getting out of the way and supporting projects without pre-guaranteed results.
Meantime, in the wings, ARIA awaits an entrance. An £800m venture to foster cutting edge science projects, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, brainchild of Kwasi Kwarteng, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, it will promote high risk, high pay-off projects like its American counterpart, DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency). Good to see that blue sky research is still alive and kicking.
Covid-19 is miserable, has taken a dreadful global personal toll, set back economies, and rocketed government debt into orbit, but we should take a moment, as the cautious emergence from lockdown unfolds, to reflect on our fortuitous national strengths. They serve us well in this conflict and will be there, skills honed, to serve us even better in the next. Today’s toast is, “COG!” And, from corner shop to Covid gene sequencing queen, I give you, Professor Sharon Peacock.