With coronavirus cases soaring and several countries bringing in tougher lockdown measures, many people are struggling to find much cause for optimism at the moment. But Britain¡¯s latest Nobel laureate?in medicine is not one of them.

¡°We just have to hang on ¨C a vaccine is just around the corner,¡± insisted Michael Houghton, who?shared?this year¡¯s prize?in physiology or medicine with US scientists Charles Rice and Harvey Alter for their ¡°seminal discoveries¡± that led to the discovery of the virus hepatitis C.

Speaking to?Times Higher Education?from his home in California,?Professor Houghton?said he understood the growing frustration with coronavirus restrictions, ¡°especially for those with small businesses¡±, but called on people to ¡°be a bit more patient and wait for the vaccine¡±.

¡°There is a good chance that at least one of the vaccine candidates will be effective,¡± said Professor Houghton, who is Canada excellence research chair in virology and Li Ka Shing professor of virology at the University of Alberta.

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¡°We¡¯ve come this way for eight to nine months, so if we can stick in for another few months¡­Then we can get people who are at risk vaccinated and we can start to open up,¡± said Professor Houghton.

The 69-year-old¡¯s belief in an imminent vaccine is not based simply on faith in his scientific peers; Professor Houghton has been involved in the world of vaccines for almost a decade, first with work related to a potential vaccine for hepatitis C, one of which has entered human trials, and more recently with a Covid vaccine being developed by colleagues at Alberta.

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Does his positive outlook square, however, with recent reports that a Covid vaccine will only become available by the middle of 2021 at the earliest?

¡°We have so many candidates in phase 3 ¨C they are all different and there is a very good chance ¨C not a 100 per cent chance ¨C that¡­one of these candidates will show efficacy and safety in November,¡± predicted Professor Houghton, who added that ¡°in the new year, they will start rolling out tens of millions of vaccines in the UK, US and Canada¡±.

¡°I am optimistic ¨C perhaps by nature ¨C but probably by February or March you will see the high-risk groups ¨C our fantastic health workers and first responders ¨C being vaccinated and then it will be the people with co-factors and the elderly,¡± he said.

While some scientists fear the public¡¯s trust in science is starting to crumble ¨C with lockdowns failing to produce the suppression of Covid that many imagined ¨C Professor Houghton argued that scientists should not be gloomy. ¡°I understand that people are frustrated but this is a global pandemic, and if countries had not taken unprecedented measures, we may have seen 10 million people die of Covid, rather than 1 million,¡± he said.

Professor Houghton added that the vaccine candidates in development were ¡°a great example of academia working with government and big pharma¡±.

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¡°One of the good things about the US is how they encourage public health agencies to give grants to universities and drug companies, and they all work together,¡± he said, noting that, while working?on hepatitis at the San Francisco-based Chiron Corporation, one of his key collaborators was Dan Bradley, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Professor Houghton¡¯s network of colleagues in Canada and the US ¨C in academia, government and big pharma ¨C reflects a career that is noticeably different?from those of recent British medicine Nobelists, who have largely been based in the UK and often Oxbridge.

In contrast, Professor Houghton¡¯s PhD at King¡¯s College London was sponsored by a pharmaceutical firm and he left the UK 40 years ago to work at a biotech start-up in California, where he undertook his Nobel-winning hepatitis research.

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His scientific career has had a few other unusual turns, too, he admitted. While Professor Houghton, the son of a London truck driver, excelled at school and took his A levels in maths and physics a year early, he was unable to study biosciences at a ¡°more established university¡± because he did not have a biology A level. Instead, he went to the University of East Anglia, which had been opened just six years earlier in 1963.

¡°It was actually one of my top picks and I did some great things there but I probably had too good a time,¡± he reflected. ¡°I ended up with a 2:2 ¨C instead of the 2:1 I was predicted ¨C which meant the PhD fellowships that I¡¯d been offered disappeared,¡± he said.

His move to the US in the late 1970s was because ¡°the state of UK science and, in particular, industrial science was very poor¡±, he said.

¡°Britain was really in the doldrums ¨C it was bankrupt and borrowing money ¨C so when an opportunity arose to work at a company founded by two University of California professors, I took it,¡± he said. ¡°I¡¯ve never considered coming back to Britain.¡±

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However, Professor Houghton said that he might have stayed longer in the UK if he?were young nowadays, given the thriving state of the country¡¯s biomedical industries. ¡°In science, Britain is doing much better and is back on a very high level, as we¡¯ve seen in the way Oxford has responded to Covid,¡± he said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com