Brian Wang on Innate Immunity, ARIA and Pandemic Preparedness
Episode description
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.
Contents
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