Professor Diana Gibb
This profile is from the MRC Annual Review 08/09: A day of discovery. The review takes readers on a journey through a day in the life of the MRC, dropping in on people involved in MRC research as they go about their daily business to find out what they’re doing.
Professor of epidemiology and consultant paediatrician at the MRC Clinical Trials Unit, London.
Professor Diana Gibb is an MRC scientist who coordinates clinical trials in people with HIV — a job that sees her spend significant time abroad.
Di Gibb is in her office preparing for a week’s trip to the MRC unit in Entebbe, Uganda. It’s a grey, overcast London day and traffic can be heard thundering along the Euston Road outside. It all seems a far cry from Africa.
Di is an epidemiologist and paediatrician. She helps plan and coordinate clinical trials in people with HIV, and spends about a quarter of her time abroad. With her glasses perched on her head secured by a string of colourful African beads, she looks the part of a globe-trotting doctor. After studying medicine, Di worked all over the world, including a stint working with Tibetan refugees in the Himalayas. Later she set up the first UK service for children with HIV. She joined the MRC Clinical Trials Unit nine years ago and helped design the DART trial – a six-year study involving 3,300 HIV-infected people in Africa.
“Back then, so many people were dying from AIDS in Africa. And it was all the able-bodied who were dying, the ones who had to earn money for their families, and they were leaving behind the children and old people. It really was an emergency,” she says. But Di’s seen dramatic changes since the introduction of antiretroviral drugs. “Overnight, people stopped dying. Hospital wards for adults and children with HIV emptied out in the UK and in Africa we saw up to seventeen-fold reductions in death rates, which was pretty phenomenal,” she says.
“One of the questions we’re asking now is: how do we get the drugs out to everybody, particularly to people in rural areas, where most Africans live? Recently we’ve been trying to find out how HIV treatment for adults and children can be managed without sophisticated laboratory tests, in the DART and ARROW trials.”
When she’s working in the UK, a typical day for Di begins before 6am, because she commutes to London from her home in Bristol three days a week. “It works quite well to come up to London for two of the days in a row, staying overnight and work really full-on. I ride my bike to the train, put it on the train, and ride it at the other end. I can do it at fairly breakneck speed,” she says.
“Epidemiologists spend a lot of their day networking online. The communications revolution has made all that possible. When I first worked in Africa, people didn’t really have mobile phones, but now they’ve really taken off out there, even in remote areas.
“Networking is what I like best about this job. I also like making sure that we link up adult treatment advances with those for kids. For example, adult HIV treatments are a lot simpler these days, but children are still stuck with taking three separate liquids with syringes that have to be carried from the clinic back to their villages. So we’ve worked with generic drug companies to get them to make tiny three-drugs-in-one baby pills. Now the pills have been licensed by the World Health Organisation.
“It’s also great to see some of the young African researchers taking more leading roles – some are becoming leaders in their field, getting funding and moving forward. To have helped with that is very satisfying.”
Published August 2009