"Unfortunately, the Covid 19 experience led to a lot of disillusion on various people's parts, a lot of which was fed online, of course, with public health measures.... Now, if we get a virus like that back again, I hope we can persuade people to actually listen to public health measures, because initially that might be what we've got."
Immunologist Peter Doherty AC, who is a Laureate Professor and patron of The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, discusses the pandemic preparedness of Australia and the world with 360info Senior Commissioning Editor Suzannah Lyons.
Immunologist Peter Doherty AC, who is a Laureate Professor and patron of The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, discusses the pandemic preparedness of Australia and the world with 360info Senior Commissioning Editor Suzannah Lyons.
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00:00What is your one piece of advice for Australians ahead of the next pandemic, and are we sufficiently prepared?
00:06Quite frankly, we can never be sufficiently prepared for any catastrophe, I believe.
00:11We can't keep our focus on it, and we don't have the money and the time span to do it.
00:17So, we are improving our capacity, I think.
00:20The new CDC will, I think, get the states working better together.
00:25The states did pretty well, and we did pretty well through the pandemic.
00:29And the Morrison government, for all its flaws, did shut down international air travel quickly,
00:34and did the right thing in the main early on.
00:37And it really depends on the public going along with what's asked of them.
00:43It sounds like the chaos in the US could have an impact on us here in Australia.
00:48Do you think that's likely to be the case?
00:50I don't think it will have a lot of effect on our preparedness, or what our governments will do,
00:56or what the institutions that are responsible will do.
01:00I think all the state labs and state governments performed really well,
01:04though it would have been better if we could have better coordination between them.
01:08It's very difficult in Australia to run a national clinical trial,
01:11because health, unlike the military, was decided at the time of federation.
01:18Health would be left with the states.
01:21Since your Nobel Prize winning discovery in 1973 of how the immune system recognises virus-ridden cells,
01:28we've seen great advances in immunotherapy.
01:31What do you see as the potential of this field into the future?
01:35Immunotherapy has taken over as a major earner for pharmaceutical companies,
01:41and as a major treatment option for medicos, particularly with chronic and autoimmune diseases.
01:47Immunotherapy with monoclonal antibodies has really revolutionised treatment of multiple sclerosis,
01:53some cancers, and rheumatoid arthritis, and there's much more to do.
01:59The T-cell immunotherapy initially didn't get very far,
02:03and then we had these immune checkpoint inhibitor monoclonal antibodies,
02:07which we used to wake up T-cells that had gone to sleep in cancers, and eliminate the cancers.
02:13And we're combining that now with various approaches,
02:17where we give individuals a vaccine made from their own cancer cells,
02:22give that to them, and then use the immune checkpoint drugs.
02:26And that, I think, has a lot of potential.
02:28There's great potential in this area, as there is in great potential in all areas of molecular medicine.
02:33How much do we still have to find out about the immune system?
02:36We've got so much information, and this is true across the biomedical research spectrum,
02:42but there's still a whole lot of things we don't know.
02:46The two great complex systems we have for dealing with the external environment
02:51are the brain and the nervous system, and all its attachments and organs,
02:55like the eyes and the ears, and all those sorts of things.
02:58The immune system is the other one that reacts to foreign invaders.
03:02It's totally different from the brain, and it doesn't have a central processing unit.
03:09It's a mobile system. The cells move around the body.
03:12They move in and out. We don't know where a lot of events are actually happening.
03:16We know the lymph nodes are very important.
03:18We don't even know how big it is at any one time, because there are a lot of cells off in various tissues.
03:23And we don't know how it counts.
03:26We have reasonably stable numbers of white blood cells in blood.
03:30We don't know how that works. Why? How does that work?
03:34So there are a lot of questions, a lot of conceptual—just as there are in neuroscience.
03:38I mean, the understanding of consciousness, for instance, which I always approach with great trepidation.