Early dreams of becoming a vet
Growing up in Birmingham, Jeremy first developed an interest in science when he was at junior school after getting gripped by a television family drama series called Daktari. Highly popular during the late 1960s, the programme was based on the work of Dr. Marsh Tracy, a veterinarian surgeon who directed an animal hospital and nature reserve in East Africa with his daughter. It was centred on their fight to protect all African wildlife, while caring for and studying injured animals and endangered species.
So inspired was Jeremy by Daktari that whenever he accompanied his family's cats and dogs to the local vet he always asked how to get into veterinary science. He carried his dream of becoming a vet to secondary school. But he got little encouragement from his school which was largely focused on classical subjects. Also the school's careers officer tried to dissuade him from applying to university to study veterinary science because he believed Jeremy would never get a place. What Jeremy also found disheartening was that while being very good at maths he was forced to abandon it at an early stage because it clashed with the school's timetable for biology, chemistry and physics which he needed to get for veterinary science. He was especially disappointed at having to drop maths in favour of physics because he found the latter more difficult.
For his final A level exams, Jeremy scored 'A' in both chemistry and physics and 'B' in biology. To this day Jeremy regrets that he did less well in biology because it was his favourite subject. But in the overall scheme of things it did not really matter because he had enough marks to study veterinary science at the University of Bristol.
Broadening his horizons
Lasting five years, Jeremy really enjoyed his course. He particularly enjoyed the third year when he opted to take an intercalated degree. This gave him the opportunity to take a break from his veterinary science course to study pharmacology in depth for which he gained a BSc. As a result of this he gained a strong interest in understanding the mechanism behind how drugs work. Based on this he decided that once he had finished his veterinary studies he wanted to branch out into the wider scientific world.
Not quite sure exactly what he wanted to do when he finished university, Jeremy decided to travel for some years. During this time he landed up working temporarily as a vet in Australia and then going out to join some friends working in Africa. He found this experience highly rewarding. Importantly, he says it gave him the chance to meet lots of different people and learn about different cultures. It also made him question whether he really wanted to spend his whole career working for veterinary practice in the UK.
The epiphany moment came to Jeremy one day when he was travelling on the back of a vehicle in Africa. At that point he says he knew that he really wanted to find a way to use his skills to benefit low income countries. His thoughts were in part influenced by the emergence of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), a disease that began to claim the lives of many thousands of people across the world in the 1980s. Little was known initially about the disease, but it was subsequently understood to be caused by the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) which damages the cells in the immune system and weakens the ability to fight off everyday infections and disease.
Jeremy thought the best way forward was for him to do a doctorate. The easiest option for him was to take a doctorate in neuropharmacology because he had covered this subject in depth during his pharmacology degree. But it soon became clear to him, after he had succeeded in getting a Wellcome Trust scholarship to do a doctorate in neuropharmacology at University College London, that this was not the route that he really wanted to go down. He realised that he had merely gone down this path because of his strong familiarity with the subject due to his pharmacology degree and because of the ease with which he could get funding to do it.
Specialising in infectious diseases
Having witnessed the devastation caused by the AIDS epidemic in Africa he knew that infectious disease was where his interests really lay. As a result he decided to take a master's degree in immunology at the University of Birmingham. Not able to get any funding for the course, Jeremy managed to get through it by working part-time as a locum vet and with the financial support of his wife.
Moving back to Birmingham, the city where he grew up, Jeremy says was a bit strange, especially as he landed up studying just across the road from where he had gone to school. But he really loved the immunology master's course because a lot of it was to do with tropical diseases. At the end of his degree he was offered the chance to do a PhD but turned down the opportunity because he says 'I never saw myself as a fundamental scientist, I always had a desire to see results in the field'.
Following his course at Birmingham, Jeremy decided that he really wanted to work in tropical countries and looked to get some funding from the Overseas Development Administration to do this. At first this looked like it would happen, but at the last moment it did not work out. Needing to revise his plans very quickly, Jeremy landed up joining the Pirbright Institute. Located in Surrey between Woking and Guildford, the Pirbright Institute is a research institute dedicated to the study of infectious diseases, primarily viruses, in farm animals.
While at the Pirbright Institute Jeremy completed a PhD at the University of Hertfordshire. His doctoral research focused on the immunology of foot and mouth disease (FMD). This is a severe and highly contagious and sometimes fatal viral disease that affects cloven-hoof animals such as cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. Having significant economic consequences for animal farming, FMD was high up on the news agenda in the early 1990s because mass vaccination to control the disease was beginning to be phased out in the European Union due to the fact that it had largely been eliminated from Europe. The Pirbright Institute had largely built up its reputation in FMD and had been at the centre of the UK's FMD vaccine production since 1963.
Having only worked before on human immunology during his master's degree, Jeremy enjoyed learning about animal immunology for his doctorate. After Jeremy finished his doctorate, in 1993, he led the International FMD Vaccine Bank at the Pirbright Institute for nearly four years. Set up in 1990, with funding from eight countries, this bank maintained an emergency reserve of the antigen for FMD that could be made very quickly into vaccines to respond to any potential outbreaks. Jeremy really enjoyed the work because it brought him into close contact with vaccine research and commercial companies. He also learnt a lot about the regulatory process.
Moving into the commercial world to do more applied science
By the time Jeremy had spent seven years at the Pirbright Institute he was ready for a change. Making the decision to move on was complicated by the fact that by now he had two children, one aged four and the other 18 months. With his four year old approaching school age, he knew this was the right moment to move because any later would disrupt his schooling. Another factor that influenced his decision was that although he had a permanent contract at Pirbright Institute, its government funding was uncertain and he had already seen a couple of redundancy rounds.
In the end Jeremy landed up moving to Sandwich in Kent to become director of research and development at Pfizer Animal Health, an American company. When Jeremy joined, in 1997, the company was rapidly expanding and beginning to develop vaccines as part of its portfolio of products to treat disease in livestock and companion animals. Getting involved with the vaccine part of the company, Jeremy found the transition relatively easy due to his prior work at Pirbright. At that time companies did very little work on a vaccine before it had reached sufficient maturity within the academic environment for it to be licensed for development into a commercial product by a company. In many ways, Jeremy describes what he did at Pfizer as sitting on the other side of the table from what he had previously done at Pirbright. For him the work gave him a new perspective on how the publicly funded vaccine research he helped oversee at Pirbright got translated further down the line to benefit animal health.
A great deal of Jermy's time at Pfizer involved interfacing with academics and key opinion leaders to find viable vaccines that companies would be prepared to help develop, particularly for the livestock sector for which there were few products. As a result of this process, Jeremy leant a lot about the nature of collaboration with external partners and drawing up contracts. After seven years he moved over more to the side of development and became the head of the group working on biological research.
Protecting livestock to save human life
Initially a lot of Jeremy's focus at Pfizer was on the development of products for high income countries. But over time his group began also looking at Africa and the Middle East. This geographical shift gave Jeremy scope to return to his interest in tropical diseases and eventually he set up a group to address emerging infectious diseases. One of his reasons for going in this direction was because many infectious diseases that cause epidemics tend to spill over from animals and start in low to middle-income countries where controls can be less strict.
After spending seventeen years with Pfizer, Jeremy joined a not-for-profit organisation called the Global Alliance for Livestock Veterinary Medicines (GALVmed). Set up in 2004, GALVmed invests in research not funded by the private pharmaceutical sector that seeks to advance vaccines, diagnostics and other products to help control tropical livestock diseases. Such investment is intended to help the many millions of resource-poor farmers who rely heavily on livestock to survive and increase food security, both of which are key to protecting human health.
Jeremy says GALVmed grew out of the observation by various people that while there was good science being funded around the world, both in lower and higher income countries, 'for various reasons it was not finding its application in the field'. He had seen just how powerful science could be in the quest to eradicate rinderpest, also known as cattle plague. Caused by a virus that can spread rapidly among cloven-hoofed animals (mainly cattle and buffalo), rinderpest had a long history of loss in animal populations, with a 100 percent death rate in susceptible herds. Transmitted through the air, the virus typically causes fever, loss of appetite, nasal and eye discharges, erosive lesions in the mouth and upper respiratory tract, severe diarrhoea and dehydration and eventually death.
Because of its far-reaching social and economic consequences, in the 1980s the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) launched the Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme. Using a combination of diagnostics, surveillance and vaccination this programme succeeded in eliminating the disease from the world. In 2011, rinderpest became the second infectious disease to be officially declared eliminated, the first one having been smallpox in 1980.
One of the most important tools that helped bring about the achievement with rinderpest was a highly effective rinderpest vaccine developed by Walter Plowright, who headed up the Department of Microbiology at Pirbright Institute between 1978 to 1983. Jeremy points out that public funding was key to getting the vaccine off the ground. Ultimately, he says, 'it was manufactured in relatively low levels without major pharmaceutical company inputs until very late on'. But unfortunately there are very few other examples where this has happened.
All too often Jeremy has seen what he calls the 'valley of death'. This is when academics get enough funding to undertake proof of concept for a vaccine, but not enough money available to take it any further so that they have a viable product that a company is willing to take a risk on and develop. What attracted Jeremy to working for GALVmed was it gave him a chance to help direct investment towards bridging this gap. Appointed chief scientific officer at GALVmed, Jeremy led the research and development group and also worked with the commercialisation and policy groups.
Heading up a company to combat zoonotic disease
Following seven years at GALVmed, Jeremy decided the time was right for him to take the plunge and take up an invitation to head up a company called The Vaccine Group spun out of the University of Plymouth in 2017. Taking up the position in 2021, what attracted Jeremy to TVG was that it had reasonable financial backing from a mixture of public grants and private equity. In addition it had a promising vaccine platform pioneered by Dr Michael Jarvis. His technique uses a modified version of the herpesvirus, known as a vector, to deliver genetic instructions to the body's cells to respond to new disease threats. These instructions are designed to teach the immune system how to recognise and block specific antigens, a type of protein found on the surface of pathogens. This is key to providing protection against an infectious disease. One of the advantages of the platform is that it can be adapted very rapidly and cheaply to deliver a different vaccine. All that is needed is to change the viral antigen coding region in the vector.
Originally set up with a focus on human health, TVG was looking for someone who could help reorient it more towards interventions in animals to help combat zoonotic diseases. These happen when pathogens jump between animals and humans. With approximately 60 percent of human infections thought to originate from animals, zoonotic diseases are a major global health challenge, encouraged by our close contact with animals in agriculture, as companion pets and in the natural environment. Such diseases have increased in recent years due to human activities like urbanisation, deforestation, wildlife exploitation, tourism and global climate changes. In order to target zoonotic diseases, TVG believed the best way was to create vaccines for animals. Part of the reason for this was because creating such vaccines is much easier to test and quicker to gain approval than human vaccines. Intervening in animals is also an effective way to reduce the chance of an infectious disease spreading into humans.
Having strong knowledge of the veterinary world and knowing the process of taking products all the way from the benchside to the market, Jeremy was ideal for taking up the reins at TVG. It also gave Jeremy the opportunity to once again work closely with a scientific team which he greatly enjoys. Helping them to build out a portfolio of products, a lot of Jeremy's role is working out how to get commercial and government funding for taking them forward. They also work closely with other companies and the University of Plymouth, who support the discovery of potential antigens because TVG does not have that capacity inhouse.
As chief executive officer of TVG, Jeremy has many different roles. A lot of his time is spent making sure people are happy with what they are doing and have reasonable employment conditions. Another important area for him is identifying opportunities where the company's platform can be best exploited. Heading up a small company, also means Jeremy has to find ways to raise funding and make sure the books are balanced. This can sometimes be difficult, but as he says, 'you don't come into a small start-up if you're not prepared to accept the stresses of day-to-day funding.' Because he is not involved in the actual laboratory science of the company, Jeremy is able to do most of his work from Sandwich where he still lives.
Not being afraid to change direction and travel
One of the key pieces of advice Jeremy gives to people considering a career in the biomedical sector is 'to find something that you really like and enjoy learning more about and working in it'. Finding out what is right can take some time and trying out different paths. In his case he found out what he really liked by a process of trial and error. One of the critical moments for him was having the courage to turn down the offer of funding to do a doctorate in neuropharmacology because he knew that it was not what really excited him. Making that decision was not easy, but looking back he knows it was the right one. Another turning point for him was realising that he was far more interested in the practical application of science than being a laboratory scientist.
Jeremy also points to the importance of resilience and not always going down the expected conventional path. For example, he would never have succeeded in getting into veterinary science if had listened to the career officer at his school. Nor would he have been able to realise his ambition to help improve human health in places like Africa had he joined a UK veterinary practice like many of his peers. Jeremy is also a strong believer in taking the opportunity to travel and work abroad early on before the needs of a family set in which makes moving around much more difficult. In his case he points out that going to Africa was a major eye opener for teaching him what his real passion was.
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This article was written by Dr Lara Marks based on a interview conducted with Dr Jeremy Salt on 28 July 2023.