Oxford vaccine team behind Covid Astra Zeneca jab to appear on BBC The One Show

Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert and Dr Catherine Green will be on the iconic green sofa on Tuesday night's show. 

The award-winning team are to be joined by comedian Ricky Gervais as his new special Supernature is released on Netflix.

Professor Gilbert and her team had been working for years preparing for "Disease X" - an unknown illness that would require the vaccine.

Thanks to our guests tonight @AngelaHartnett, @EmiliaFox and @MrDavidCaves 👏

Tomorrow we'll be joined by @rickygervais and the pioneers behind the AstraZeneca vaccine - Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert and Dr @CathGreenLab 🙌

Stream #TheOneShow on @BBCiPlayer 👉 https://t.co/8Jl8mQyyWi pic.twitter.com/jSN5dxj808

— BBC The One Show (@BBCTheOneShow) May 23, 2022

Speaking to The Daily Mirror after their Pride of Britain Special Recognition award win, the Professor said:" The idea of having to live through a pandemic while we developed a vaccine to get us out of a pandemic?

“We hadn’t planned for that.”

Dr Gilbert is a Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford and she co-founded Vaccitech.

Prof Sarah Gilbert - DBE

Prof Gilbert works on vaccines for many different emerging pathogens, including influenza, Nipah and MERS.

She's Oxford's Project Leader for the vaccine against the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 which is now in use across the world.#OxfordVaccine pic.twitter.com/GX9lx46TDl

— University of Oxford (@UniofOxford) June 12, 2021

After becoming a professor at the university's prestigious Jenner Institute, she established her own research group to create a universal flu vaccine that could be effective against different strains.

In 2014, she went on to lead the first trial of the Ebola vaccine.

The second trial of that vaccine was just beginning when, in early 2020, Covid-19 emerged.

READ MORE: Professor Sir Andrew Pollard on the Oxford Covid jab

Gilbert quickly realised that she could adapt her approach to tackle the virus.

Meanwhile, Professor Green heads the Nuffield Department of Medicine's Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility (CBF).

Dr Green is the Monsanto Senior Research Fellow at Exeter College as well as an Oxford and an Associate Professor at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford.

Prof Catherine Green-OBE

Prof Green specialises in creating vaccines for clinical trials & heads the Nuffield Department of Medicine's Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility.

She was one of the leads in the team who started work on developing a COVID19 vaccine as early as Jan 2020. pic.twitter.com/vZvXPAR0ap

— University of Oxford (@UniofOxford) June 12, 2021

She specialises in creating vaccines for clinical trials and over the last 15 years, the CBF team has been developing vaccines for malaria, TB, influenza, MERS, Zika, rabies, plague, Ebola and more.

By the end of July 2021, seven months after it was licenced, a billion doses of the Oxford vaccine had been delivered to more than 170 countries around the world.

The One Show airs at 7 pm on weeknights on BBC One or you can catch up on BBC iPlayer.