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One of my weird ideas, one drunken night or something” is how Gregory Stoloff describes his epiphany that could lead to a Zika vaccine. The 53-year-old is the founder of Seek, a London biotechnology firm that he hopes is on the cusp of a breakthrough to stop the spread of the virus. More than 1.5 million people in Latin America have been infected with Zika and the World Health Organisation declared it “a global emergency” earlier this month.

“I was always wondering why we have mosquitoes in the world,” Stoloff tells me. “How did Mother Nature mean us to live with them? None of the things people have tended to rely on — netting, spraying — were really working. It suddenly hit me that there’s one massive difference [between humans and mosquitoes]: we have to coagulate blood. If our blood doesn’t clump together, we bleed to death. Mosquitoes must do the opposite, because if a mosquito didn’t un-coagulate your blood, it would clog in their throats and they’d die.”

Mosquito saliva contains an anti-coagulant to keep blood liquid so it can flow through the insect’s body. Stoloff’s idea was to create a vaccine against the saliva, rather than the diseases they carry: “I rationalised that — if the immune system is on heightened alert to the saliva — then the reaction at the site of the bite would be enough to kill anything there at that time.”

Scouring research, Stoloff found that when people have been injected with large quantities of the saliva, they do not contract the diseases mosquitoes carry. “But to suck out saliva from a mosquito is uncommercial, so we had to solve how to create the saliva synthetically.”

He estimates that saliva has 100,000 proteins, meaning it would take “forever” to construct. However, Seek’s researchers have spent five years finding the four proteins out of those thousands that the immune system reacted to in large volume. These they can manufacture in a lab. “Making short proteins is just like Lego,” he explains. “Proteins are made of amino acids and you just stick one onto the next one.”

It was never Seek’s plan to make a Zika vaccine. When its scientists first tested this three years ago, they did so on malaria, dengue and West Nile virus.

They found that animals that were given the vaccine didn’t get the diseases. But there’s a secondary benefit too: “The beauty of what we have is that it not only protects the subject, it also kills the mosquito. We’ve trained the body to have these immune cells running around in the blood that are on the lookout for saliva. Now, when the mosquito bites us and sucks up our blood, those immune cells are going up into the mosquito.”

The cells attack the mosquito’s saliva, clumping it together. “The mosquito then dies because it can’t feed. It can’t re-bite or function properly.”

In testing, Seek had mosquitoes bite animals they had vaccinated, and those they hadn’t. The “control” mosquitoes had a life cycle of 21 days. But the mosquitoes that had bitten vaccinated animals died on day eight — before they could lay eggs. “You have the best of both worlds,” Stoloff says, with the smile of a proud father. “Which is a protection and a transmission block all together.”

He believes another proposed solution to halt Zika — genetically-modified mosquitoes — will fail. “If you saw a defective male, you wouldn’t want to marry and reproduce with him. If you’re releasing genetically-modified males that can’t mate properly, the females will pick that up in no time. It’s ridiculous to think we can beat Mother Nature and evolution at their own game.”

I’ve met Stoloff in Seek’s lab near Mornington Crescent with three of his 300 staff, including head of biology John Brew, who Stoloff describes as like a “private detective for medicines”, lab manager Ana Fernandez and project manager Olga Pleguezuelos.

They are all excited to be working on Zika. “What we’re doing now could save people tomorrow,” says Pleguezuelos. “It’s an amazing feeling for a scientist: that you are changing the world.”

Stoloff reminds me of Brains from Thunderbirds: wiry, funny and bubbling over with brilliant ideas. He criticises the Western approach that puts our health needs above those of the developing world: “Third world diseases are not well-supported by big pharma or governments. They talk as if they are but the amount of money is tiny. With Ebola and Zika, they have had to scurry like mad when there’s a risk of it hitting the West, or a risk that the West will look bad.”

For years, he adds, no one would fund Seek’s mosquito saliva vaccine. “Third world? Not interested. Now, all of a sudden, with Zika, there’s a ‘we must do something’ attitude.”

A longer-term solution would be for governments to stockpile such drugs to guarantee a market. “You have to find a way where the government says: ‘We will buy these now because we know it’s a future issue and we’ll help finance you in the interim.’ But the world doesn’t work like that. It’s the same with global warming. Until we see the water rising, we won’t believe it’s a problem. The human race will always be — unfortunately — reactive.”

Stoloff considers himself an outsider in pharma. Although he started a medical degree, he switched to banking. He worked as an investment banker for two decades but kept an interest in scientific research. “When you’re outside the mainstream, you can look at things differently because you’re not channelled down a particular path.”

When he left banking, he hired scientists, researchers and regulatory experts to critique a host of ideas he had. “They threw out the majority of them, but kept some and modified a lot.”

He describes his work at Seek as bringing “banking and science together”, an unusual mix. “What tends to happen is scientists have an idea and it becomes their life, even though it’s going nowhere commercially. You can’t do that if you want a successful business, and you want to get returns quickly, so I put in place cut-throat measures to test very clearly whether things work.”

Stoloff also brought the idea from banking of spreading risks, so instead of designing new drugs the company takes old medicines and upgrades them. He compares this to the way phone-makers work. “People pay a lot of money for an Apple 6 but it still only makes calls and gets emails, like Apple 1, which nobody buys now. But in medicine, we’ve always wanted to come up with a new phone that makes calls differently and gets on the internet totally differently.”

So Seek has developed a painkiller — Flarin (“Nurofen six”) — where the drug delivers relief to the spot of need much more efficiently. Such drugs can also be brought to market quickly.

Cash raised from these sales funds Seek’s more experimental projects. Its raison d’etre is to do things differently. “In the scientific community, everyone follows everyone. If GSK is going down this path and Roche is going down this path” — he points in different directions — “one of them is going to win and the other is going to look stupid. So they don’t do it.”

Seek’s specialism is highly mutating viruses, such as HIV and influenza. With HIV, Seek has been developing a T-cell vaccine for 12 years, but only now is there interest from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US. Another of Seek’s projects is to re-purpose drugs that are not routinely used against cancer to supplement mainstream treatments: the drugs aren’t a cure but they can stop tumours growing or spreading.

Stoloff hires people who “think differently” and are open-minded: “Most people aren’t. They don’t like to be told that everything they’ve learned for the past 20 years is wrong.” He also brings together scientists with different specialisms. “Then, you get this magical creation. It’s like with the Manhattan Project — only when all these people spoke to each other could you get massive advancement.”

The deck is stacked against Seek, though: “When you go for government and grant monies, they get sent to a committee. The committees are all the leading professors in the world who are all funded by big pharma. They can’t say ‘yes, let’s do that’ because they’ll lose the money for their research. So everything gets corralled down one way.”

What eventually changes is either the consensus shifts or a drastic event — such as Zika — occurs: “Then people will jump on board.”

The timeline for the vaccine is now in others’ hands. It would ordinarily take around seven years to come to market but due to the crisis it is likely to be fast-tracked. The NIH is looking to run a phase one trial in the next two months.

If the outcome is positive, Stoloff thinks they could start vaccinating within “six months to a year”.

What could it mean for Seek? “It’s enormous. We’re potentially talking about hundreds of millions of people being vaccinated. We could become a very big company quickly if it happened.” He pauses. “That’s a big risk, though: if.”

Follow Rosamund Urwin on Twitter: @RosamundUrwin