Life after Whitehall: The career moves of British special advisers

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordThe article examines the post-government career moves of 521 former British special advisers who served from 1997 to 2017. Analysis of an original dataset mapping the first job each special adviser ‘landed-in’ after leaving government shows the vast majority land in corporate lobbying and policy advocacy roles. A minority become politicians, although many continue to work in political organisations. The least popular choice is public service. The findings challenge the ‘lure of power’ hypothesis and lend weight to increasing concerns about former political staff revolving to shadow lobbying. The findings point to potential lobbying regulation loopholes first raised by the UK Committee of Standards in Public Life. A multi-nominal logistic regression shows how party affiliation and occupational path dependency constrain career moves. Labour special advisers are less likely to become corporate lobbyists than Conservative and Liberal Democrat ones. Special advisers also tend to revolve back to similar professional roles held before an appointment.Flanders Research Foundation (FWO)KU Leuven, Belgiu

From COVID-19 research to vaccine application: why might it take 17 months not 17 years and what are the wider lessons?

It is often said that it takes 17 years to move medical research from bench to bedside. In a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) world, such time-lags feel intolerable. In these extraordinary circumstances could years be made into months? If so, could those lessons be used to accelerate medical research when the crisis eases? To measure time-lags in health and biomedical research as well as to identify ways of reducing them, we developed and published (in 2015) a matrix consisting of overlapping tracks (or stages/phases) in the translation from discovery research to developed products, policies and practice. The matrix aids analysis by highlighting the time and actions required to develop research (and its translation) both (1) along each track and (2) from one track to another, e.g. from the discovery track to the research-in-humans track. We noted four main approaches to reducing time-lags, namely increasing resources, working in parallel, starting or working at risk, and improving processes. Examining these approaches alongside the matrix helps interpret the enormous global effort to develop a vaccine for the 2019 novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19. Rapid progress in the discovery/basic and human research tracks is being made through a combination of large-scale funding, work being conducted in parallel (between different teams globally and through working in overlapping tracks), working at greater (but proportionate) risk to safety than usual, and adopting various new processes. The overlapping work of some of the teams involves continuing animal research whilst entering vaccine candidates into Phase I trials alongside planning their Phase II trials. The additional funding available helps to reduce some of the usual financial risks in moving so quickly. Going forward through the increasingly large human trials for safety, dosage and efficacy, it will be vital to overlap work in parallel in the often challenging public policy and clinical tracks. Thus, regulatory and reimbursement bodies are beginning and preparing rapid action to pull vaccines proving to be safe and effective through to extraordinarily rapid application to the general population. Monitoring the development of a COVID-19 vaccine using the matrix (modified as necessary) could help identify which of the approaches speeding development and deployment could be usefully applied more widely in the future.United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council grant MR/K014773/1 ‘Time Lags in the Translation of Medical Research: Developing a Case Study Approach to Achieve a Better Understanding’ from the MRC’s Economic Impact call from the Methodology Research Programme

Climate, human behaviour or environment: individual-based modelling of Campylobacter seasonality and strategies to reduce disease burden

Acknowledgements: We thank colleagues within the Modelling, Evidence and Policy Research Group for useful feedback on this manuscript. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Availability of data and materials: The R code used in this research is available at https://gitlab.com/rasanderson/campylobacter-microsimulation; it is platform independent, R version 3.3.0 and above. Funding: This research was funded by Medical Research Council Grant, Natural Environment Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Food Standards Agency through the Environmental and Social Ecology of Human Infectious Diseases Initiative (Sources, seasonality, transmission and control: Campylobacter and human behaviour in a changing environment (ENIGMA); Grant Reference G1100799-1). PRH, SJO’B, and IRL are funded in part by the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Gastrointestinal Infection, at the University of Liverpool. PRH and IRL are also funded in part by the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Emergency Preparedness and Response, at King’s College London. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, the Department of Health or Public Health England.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Out of the ivory tower: an explanation of the policy advisory roles of political scientists in Europe

The relevance and impact of political scientists’ professional activities outside of universities has become the focus of public attention, partly due to growing expectations that research should help address society’s grand challenges. One type of such activity is policy advising. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding the extent and type of policy advising activities political scientists engage in. This paper addresses this gap by adopting a classification that distinguishes four ideal types of policy advisors representing differing degrees of engagement. We test this classification by calculating a multi-level latent class model to estimate key factors explaining the prevalence of each type based on an original dataset obtained from a survey of political scientists across 39 European countries. Our results challenge the wisdom that political scientists are sitting in an “ivory tower”: the vast majority (80%) of political scientists in Europe are active policy advisers, with most of them providing not only expert guidance but also normative assessments

Antibiotic research and development: business as usual?

The global burden of antibiotic resistance is tremendous and, without new anti-infective strategies, will continue to increase in the coming decades. Despite the growing need for new antibiotics, few pharmaceutical companies today retain active antibacterial drug discovery programmes. One reason is that it is scientifically challenging to discover new antibiotics that are active against the antibiotic-resistant bacteria of current clinical concern. However, the main hurdle is diminishing economic incentives. Increased global calls to minimize the overuse of antibiotics, the cost of meeting regulatory requirements and the low prices of currently marketed antibiotics are strong deterrents to antibacterial drug development programmes. New economic models that create incentives for the discovery of new antibiotics and yet reconcile these incentives with responsible antibiotic use are long overdue. DRIVE-AB is a €9.4 million public–private consortium, funded by the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative, that aims to define a standard for the responsible use of antibiotics and to develop, test and recommend new economic models to incentivize investment in producing new anti-infective agents