Oliver Sampson

Research interest:

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a leading cause of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The risk remains even after successful treatment because inflammation during prolonged infection drives lasting fibrosis and cirrhosis. The WHO estimates up to 300,000 people globally die annually from HCV-related HCC and liver damage.

Despite the availability of direct acting antiviral (DAA) therapies for HCV, a vaccine is still vital to achieve the WHO target of eliminating viral hepatitis as a public health threat by 2030. Efficacy trials in naturally infected cohorts, primarily people who inject drugs, are inefficient and prohibitively resource intensive. A controlled human infection model (CHIM) wherein small groups of consenting healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with HCV after receiving an experimental HCV vaccine offers the opportunity to drastically reduce the time and financial barriers currently stalling progression of pre-clinical HCV vaccines.

I am the project manager for the development of a CHIM for HCV in Oxford – a global first for a blood borne virus. The project is divided into two stages. HCV cannot readily be cultured in-vitro and there are no suitable animal models. Building on the precedent set by the Jenner institute’s blood-derived CHIM for P.vivax malaria, the first stage of the project is to bank plasma from human HCV+ donors and test for co-infections and treatment resistance mutations (ISRCTN 12181449). In the second stage, plasma determined to be suitable for CHIM infection, the ‘inoculum’, will be given to consenting healthy volunteers to establish HCV infection before treatment with DAAs to confirm the inoculum can be cured in the absence of an experimental intervention. Once a safe HCV CHIM is established, it will be available for use in clinical trials to test HCV vaccines.

Background:

I hold a DPhil from the University of Oxford, Wellcome Trust Infection, Immunology, and Translational Medicine programme, and BSc in Medical Microbiology from the University of Leicester. My research background is in wet-lab BSL3 infectious disease and the very early innate antiviral response. I transitioned to clinical study management during a post-doc at oncology biotech Etcembly before returning to the University as a project manager.