Dr Joseph Newman

Researchers at Pirbright have developed a pig respiratory coronavirus (PRCV) model which will help to understand how coronaviruses cause disease and how the immune system responds to them. Human coronaviruses such as Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS…

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can potentially infect a wider number of animal species including rodents and ferrets, reveal Pirbright scientists. The study found that SARS-CoV-2 variants Alpha, Beta and Delta can infect more species compared to the ancestral virus strain, this is due…

Studies carried out by The Pirbright Institute and the University of Oxford have shown that Oxford’s new potential vaccine against COVID-19, named RBD-SpyVLP, produces a strong antibody response in mice and pigs, providing vital information for the further development of the vaccine. Although this…

The Pirbright Institute, working in collaboration with the University of Oxford, have successfully shown that two doses of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AZD1222) vaccine produce a greater antibody response than a single dose in pigs. The emergence and subsequent spread of SARS-CoV-2 has caused a global…

A novel foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) diagnostic reagent has been developed by scientists at The Pirbright Institute. This has the potential to be used in FMD diagnostic tests, and will be significantly quicker to produce when compared to existing test reagents due to a simplified production…

Researchers at The Pirbright Institute have helped in the development of a new molecule to treat a range of viruses including the common cold. In addition to the days of work lost due to illness, the common cold can cause complications in respiratory illnesses such as asthma and cystic fibrosis. The…

Researchers at The Pirbright Institute have shown that when drugs are used to inhibit the cellular protein, hsp90, foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) production is reduced. Hsp90 is a protein used by cells to fold other proteins correctly and it was shown to be required by FMDV to form the outer…