Georgina Ferry interviews Derrick Crook, Professor of Microbiology, 9 November 2021.
Topics discussed include (00:00:30) an overview of Professor Crook's early medical training and route into clinical microbiology; (00:03:41) DC's first awareness of COVID-19 and its emergence in early 2020, references to the disease in the media and its initial perceived connection to SARS and other infectious diseases; (00:06:46) changes to work as a result of COVID-19 and work in other countries, including South Africa on cholera outbreaks; (00:08:20) development of COVID-19 mutations [lineages] and transmissibility; (00:13:50) Modernising Medical Microbiology research group and its work; (00:18:05) DC's interest in other infectious diseases prior to emergence of COVID-19 and research into the carrying of germs by healthy people into hospitals, antibiotic resistance; (00:23:09) computational analysis of the genetic code of Tuberculosis and mining of the code to find signatures of resistance and mutations, determining whether an organism is going to be resistant to anti-tuberculosis drugs; (00:26:54) work with Sarah [Walker], Tim [Peto] and John Bell on the response to COVID-19 and the setting up of the wide-scale testing platform required across the country; (00:28:34) Porton Down swab screening, manufacturing and supply problems, safety and standard of tests; (00:29:31) the development of an ELISA test to measure antibodies through the blood samples of infected people, work with the Government and Office for National Statistics (epidemiological survey); (00:32:02) work with Yvonne Jones on the test; (00:36:15) genomic research funded by Oracle; (00:37:00) Scalable Pathogen Pipeline Platform; (00:44:00) partnership with Oracle providing cloud infrastructure and software to configure tools and up-scale sequencing; (00:45:45) LamPORE study in collaboration with Oxford Nanopore; (00:51:30) setting up of SARS-CoV-2 sequencing in routine lab with sequence going through the Oracle cloud platform, with results going to Government.
