Meet the 2024 Microbiology Society Peter Wildy Prize Winner, Dr Lucy Thorne

05 April 2024

Each year the Microbiology Society awards the Peter Wildy Prize for outstanding contributions to microbiology education or the communication of microbiology to the public. The Peter Wildy Prize is named after distinguished virologist and much-loved teacher Peter Wildy, who was President of the Society from 1978 to 1981.

Ahead of the Peter Wildy Prize 2023 lecture, Nathan Palk interviewed Dr Lucy Thorne to learn more about her career and how it feels to win a Microbiology Society prize.

Congratulations on your win! How did you feel when you were told you were this year’s winner of the Peter Wildy Prize?

I was delighted and quite taken aback! I was really grateful to be nominated as I’ve been going to the Microbiology Society Annual Conference for years, and I have seen the excellent outreach and public engagement work of Peter Wildy Prize winners. I also feel the award should recognise the teams involved in all our public engagement activities. This includes our work in Sierra Leone, which was set up in collaboration with Professor Ian Goodfellow at the University of Cambridge, colleagues at the University of Makeni, and the local team who have been delivering the activities there. I’m also grateful to the teams of volunteers and colleagues in the UK who have helped with my Outbreak events here. They make running the activities easy and ensure students get the most out of them.

How would you summarise your research to a member of the public?

We are trying to understand what makes a pandemic virus so good at spreading between people. There are lots of factors in this, but my research focuses on how viruses overcome our frontline defence, which is called the innate immune system. This is like a surveillance and defence system built into every cell in our body. It can detect an incoming virus and activate defences to fight and contain infection.  All viruses have to overcome this system to establish an infection and spread, but this is a particularly important barrier against new viruses that jump into humans from a different species. We’re trying to learn as much as we can from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19, and other coronaviruses, about how pandemic viruses do this so well, so that we can spot similar features in other emerging viruses and identify those with the most pandemic potential. This could help us assess which types of viruses we should prepare for. This is really important now as climate and environmental change is driving an increase in the number of viruses that emerge in humans from other species all over the world, by impacting the way animals and humans interact.   

What research have you done on SARS-CoV-2?

Before the pandemic, I was working on how HIV overcomes the innate immune system. When the pandemic began, we started to ask similar questions about SARS-CoV-2, as the innate immune system acts as a universal barrier to infection. We discovered that from the start of the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 was already very good at overcoming this system to allow the virus to spread in its target airway cells.  SARS-CoV-2 has many tools and tricks that it uses to escape detection and disable the response to infection, and we think this may have contributed to its pandemic potential. As the more transmissible variants of concern arose, we wanted to understand how they were evolving and adapting to spread better in humans. We discovered that they had each evolved to get better at suppressing the innate immune system, which we think helps them stay undetected for longer in the early stages of infection giving them a greater chance to transmit. We’ve uncovered some of the molecular details of how they’ve done this. We found that the variants started making more of the key proteins that can switch off the innate immune system, and we’re now trying to understand the mechanisms of how these proteins work, and if we can see similar proteins and mechanisms in other viruses.

Where do you see your research going in the next few years?

During the pandemic, we were in a race to understand SARS-CoV-2. However, we now have an opportunity to pause and think about what we can learn from SARS-CoV-2. Most of our work is looking to understand the molecular details of how SARS-CoV-2 proteins disable the innate immune system. In particular, we are trying to understand how SARS-CoV-2 proteins rewire host transcription and gene expression in response to infection, as this is not well understood for coronaviruses and acute hit-and-run RNA viruses. Viruses are brilliant cell biologists, and so understanding how they manipulate and reprogram cell biology can also give us fundamental new insights, particularly around how the innate immune system is regulated in health and disease.

In the long run, our goal is to broaden beyond SARS-CoV-2 to make our findings relevant to other emerging viruses, as I have learned through my career working on different viruses, and from my brilliant mentors, that you can learn a lot by comparing how viruses operate.

In a much bigger picture, we are also thinking about how climate change is going to change the future of infectious diseases, impacting the frequency and type of viruses we encounter. We need to start collaborating across different disciplines to understand what viruses are likely to arise from these new interactions and where we need to target our surveillance and future research efforts.

What are your proudest achievements in your career?

One of my proudest achievements was going to Sierra Leone as part of the Ebola outbreak response. I was really humbled to see the whole response, from locals and internationally, and the incredible bravery people displayed on a daily basis. I was only there a short time, but it had a big impact. At the end of it, we had a moment to climb a hill next to the treatment centre and sit to take it all in and I remember feeling proud that we were there to contribute to something happening in real time. The exposure to doing research in an outbreak setting, and all the skills this needs beyond the lab to work in a team in high pressure, also prepared me for responding to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic here.

I’m really proud of the work we did during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The speed of discovery during the pandemic was so fast, so the work was high pressure as we wanted to produce results and new knowledge in a relevant timeframe, keeping up with the pandemic, but without compromising the quality of the research, data integrity was extremely important. The way we did this was by properly working as a team with a completely shared goal. I am so proud to have been part of this, how well we worked together and our combined achievements.

There are also personal achievements which I am proud of. One moment that stands out was when I gave a talk at the Microbiology Society Annual Conference in the main session for the first time. This was the culmination of all my PhD work and took place in front of a huge audience. I was awarded the Early Career Microbiologist of the Year prize for this talk and it was the first moment. I felt that I had managed to control my nerves around public speaking and my shakey voice!

What are the biggest challenges you have faced in your career and how did you overcome them?

I had a couple of years as a postdoctoral researcher which felt quite tough as multiple projects weren’t working and I couldn’t get them off the ground. It’s hard as you start to lose confidence in yourself when you don't have anything to show for all your work. When your confidence starts to go, it affects the decisions you make, whether you put yourself out for opportunities and you start to doubt whether this is the right path for you.

There were two main things that got me through those years. The first was having brilliant and supportive mentors, including my PI at the time, past supervisors and PIs in my department, as well as other postdocs. I could talk to them about the direction of my projects, which helped making hard decision to stop projects you have invested in to refocus, but also the more personal aspects of getting through these challenges.

The second was the variety of research life. One thing I love about research is that it allows you to do a range of activities, including public engagement, conferences and getting involved in policy work. It’s always a challenge to balance this with lab work, but I’ve found other things can provide energy and motivation, develop other skills and boost your confidence to keep you going through the tough phases.

Tell us about your public engagement activity in Sierra Leone. Why did you feel it was important to establish this programme?

We’d witnessed the response to Ebola first hand during the outbreak, and at the start of the outbreak the public response was really hindered by a lack of understanding about what the virus was, and real mistrust in the messaging around it. It took effective communication from community outreach teams to help overcome this, so we felt there was a real need and a moment to build on engagement for infectious disease and science more generally.  We ran a pilot outreach event in a local school right at the end of the outbreak, where we did a simple practical extracting of DNA from bananas using everything we could source locally. This was a way to start talking about nucleic acid extraction and PCR tests that had been used to diagnose infections during the Ebola outbreak. This went down really well, so with funding from the Wellcome Trust we designed a week-long programme of hands-on, discovery science activities aimed at explaining what microbes are and how they spread, how we can stop them and how our immune systems and vaccines work. The activities were about being creative with low-cost resources. Our goal was to spark curiosity and conversations about infectious diseases, and empower people with the simple message that if you understand what a pathogen is and how it spreads, then you can take action to protect yourself, your family, and your community. We trained a local team to deliver the activities in schools every week, and since 2015 they’ve engaged over 7000 students for over 20 hours each. I’m incredibly proud of what they’ve achieved.

What has been your favourite part of running outreach activities?

One of my favourite parts is the people I get to work with and meet. This includes the team in Sierra Leone but also for the Outbreak activity I run in the UK. We recruit a big team of volunteers from undergrads to PIs and you get the chance to help train them and see their communication skills and confidence develop.

My other favourite part is seeing the excitement of students. One of the activities I developed is an outbreak scenario where there's a mystery outbreak of disease in the school and the students must discover what the cause is and decide how they are going to control the outbreak. One of the best parts is seeing the genuine excitement when someone makes a discovery in the activity. I think it’s brilliant to be able to spark that kind of curiosity and confidence to communicate it.

During your public engagement work, what are some common misconceptions you have identified about virology and how do you think we can change these?

By doing public engagement and outreach in different places, I think that there aren't necessarily common misconceptions. Misconceptions are very much relevant to your community, your belief system and where you are. In public engagement activities, it’s important to create time for people to ask questions about where you can tackle these misconceptions. It’s also important to listen to where the question is coming from and work out the best way to tackle that, being respectful of where that misconception comes from.

However, there are broader things in virology which we are coming up against. One is trust in vaccines, for example the recent measles outbreaks in the UK reflect the lack of vaccine uptake and the mistrust around it. I believe that the only way we change the opinion is to start talking about these things earlier and explain science positively so that it spreads faster than the myths, which currently is the other way around.

What advice would you give to early career researchers who want to get involved in public engagement and outreach work?

Go for it! It can be very fun and it’s going to broaden your horizons in how you think about science, and make you to think about what’s important for you and whether that matches up with what is important for the public. It’s going to challenge you to think about whether you’re addressing the most important questions in the best way.

In terms of practical advice, a good way to start is to go to science festivals. Everyone there is already engaged in science and that gives you the opportunity to develop your communication skills in an audience that is open and willing to be engaged. You also have no idea who will walk up next, all ages and different background, so you learn to calibrate how you explain your science and convey excitement about it.

What you ultimately want to think about is the audience you want to reach. Whilst science festival audiences are brilliant, they are already engaged with science. Outreach is all about reaching people who do not necessarily have the same access to science as others. Think carefully about what audience you feel is most important to target, the messages you want to convey, and what the best way to do that is for that particular audience.