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Caitlin Pley (Medicine 2014) is helping to enable a rapid vaccination response in the event of a future pandemic. Her research uses trial simulation to accelerate the estimation of vaccine efficacy.

Caitlin’s DPhil at the University of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute forms part of the PRESTO (Preparedness by Simulation and Trial Optimisation) project. Funded by CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) as part of its 100 Days Mission to respond to new disease threats with a vaccine within three months, PRESTO examines several pathogens which are potential causes of the next pandemic or large-scale epidemic.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination prevented huge numbers of deaths over multiple years,” says Caitlin.

“There is therefore a huge interest in getting as quickly as possible to the point where you have a vaccine available, which can both protect people’s lives and enable society to continue on as it was before.

“PRESTO models the dynamic of pandemics and epidemics on a computer. We then simulate different kinds of vaccine studies so that we can say: ‘Were we to test the vaccine in this way, we would be able to show that it is effective in, say, three months; but if we ran the study in this way, it would take four months.’ Often, what seems like a matter of days results in saving thousands of lives.

“The idea is that, in advance of the next pandemic, we will have more of a sense of what kind of research we should be doing to be able to licence a vaccine as quickly as possible.”

Caitlin’s current work focuses on simulating MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) pandemics in collaboration with ISI (Institute for Scientific Interchange) in Turin. Her DPhil also examines the Ebola component of the projection model.

An interest in pandemics and epidemics has been long standing for Caitlin, who took a year out from her medical studies at Gonville & 91ֱ�� College to work as an Analyst at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, based in Geneva, Switzerland. After graduating from 91ֱ�� in 2021, Caitlin began her medical career on a Covid-19 ward.

“It was a very unusual start to being a doctor,” she says. “At the time, the strain going round was the delta strain, quite a severe version of Covid, so we had a lot of patients passing away or going to intensive care.

“The majority of patients were unvaccinated, and there were often quite difficult conversations around vaccination hesitancy.”

Now armed with a new understanding of pandemic and epidemic modelling, Caitlin is open to moving beyond working in full-time medicine in her future career and is interested in potentially applying her skills to public health policy.

She says: “If I do more policy work in the future, it will be really important for me to make sure I am grounding my suggestions, recommendations and decisions in evidence. I will need to understand that evidence to be able to sift through it and synthesise it into a recommendation.

“Modelling always felt a bit like a black box to me before, and I’m hoping by the end of this DPhil to have a more critical insight into how modelling can work for public health, as well as what its limitations are.”