What if medicine could protect us against many respiratory viruses at once? In this episode of Ben Yeoh Chats, Ben speaks with Brian Wang, Programme Director at ARIA, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Brian leads ARIA’s Sustained Viral Resilience programme, which is exploring whether we can harness the innate immune system to create a new kind of preventive medicine.
Brian explains why most people think about immunity through antibodies, vaccines and the adaptive immune system, while the innate immune system is broader, faster and potentially better suited to broad-spectrum protection. The challenge is that innate immunity has historically been harder to understand and harder to engineer safely.
Ben and Brian discuss whether sustained innate immuno-prophylactics, or SIPs, could one day provide months of protection against flu, RSV, coronaviruses and future pandemic threats from a single dose. They also explore AI for biology, synthetic biology, pandemic preparedness after COVID, medical regulation, the UK science base, and ARIA’s model for funding high-risk research.
A conversation about innate immunity, preventive medicine, pandemic resilience, AI in biology, and how breakthroughs actually happen.
00:40 What we misunderstand about the immune system 02:04 Could one medicine protect against many viruses? 03:55 Innate versus adaptive immunity 06:18 Why innate immunity was overlooked 16:36 Breakthroughs in innate immunology 21:09 Why start with respiratory viruses? 25:47 How ARIA funds frontier science 29:27 Promising approaches to SIPs 34:13 AI for biology and its limits 38:15 Brian’s path to ARIA 39:16 Pandemic preparedness after COVID 44:03 Overrated / underrated 47:27 The UK science ecosystem 50:15 Medical regulation 53:31 GLP-1s and wider biomedical discovery 56:47 Upcoming ARIA calls 01:02:10 Advice for scientists and builders
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