_edited.jpg)
Institut Pasteur - University of Oxford Partnership Launch
On 28 October 2025, Pasteur Foundation UK hosted an evening that captured both the spirit and the substance of modern scientific collaboration. Organised in collaboration with the French Embassy in London, the event marked the formal launch of the partnership between the Institut Pasteur and the University of Oxford, two institutions united by a simple conviction: that science, as Louis Pasteur said, “knows no country.”
The evening opened with Professor David Fidock, newly appointed Scientific Adviser to the President of Institut Pasteur, recalling his own cross-border career. Collaboration, he argued, is not an accessory to science but its engine. It was a sentiment echoed by Professor Sir Stewart Cole, Chair of Pasteur Foundation UK and former Pasteur President.
“The UK and France are two countries of similar sizes and demographics facing similar challenges,” he said. “I am convinced that by working together we can overcome challenges faster.”
That line framed the night’s discussions: complementary excellence, shared vision, and the belief that partnership accelerates progress.
In Conversation "science knows no country": Professor Sir Stewart Cole and Professor Dame Angela McLean.
​The evening’s headline conversation brought together Professor Dame Angela McLean, the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, and Professor Sir Stewart Cole, sharing their thoughts on cross-border collaboration from their personal experiences as early-career researchers right the way through to holding significant roles on the world stage. Professor McLean was both candid and compelling “The thoughts that keep me awake are how much money the UK government is going to put into research and development,” she said, a remark that drew knowing laughter. Across the developed world, public investment in science is failing to match the scale of the challenges ahead.
​
Of these, McLean said, the one that worries her most is climate resilience. “Of all the things I worry about, I am most worried about climate resilience and adaptation,” she said. “I don’t think our plan for climate resilience fits into ‘the plan’.”
Her message was not one of despair but of urgency: science, properly funded and international in outlook, remains one of the few tools capable of confronting intertwined crises, from pandemics to climate-driven disease.
​
Professor Cole turned the discussion to the next generation of researchers and the Foundation’s Young Researcher Mobility Programme, which supports early-career scientists to train across borders. McLean, who once worked at Institut Pasteur herself, endorsed the initiative warmly. “It’s very good for us to have all our preconceptions challenged, always and early,” she reflected. “When you make great collaborations with people, they can go on for so long.”
"Of all the things I worry about, I am most worried about climate resilience and adaptation."
- Dame Angela McLean, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser
​Her words set the tone for the second part of the evening, ‘Meet the Future of Global Health’, a panel of three early-career researchers who had experienced first-hand a Pasteur-UK mobility programme, moderated by Trustee Philippe Chalon.
Lucia Mrvova, a parasitologist who last year completed the Pasteur-UK masters programme, described her time in the Pasteur laboratories as transformative. “It was great to see that scientists are actually sometimes very community-based creatures,” she said, a reminder that science advances fastest when it builds communities as well as data.
​
Leonardo Gonzalez-Smith, an American PhD candidate on the Pasteur-Oxford programme, contrasted this culture with the competitiveness he had experienced elsewhere. “The programme gives me enormous opportunities to build on my research and become a better researcher, but also to work on the scientific collaboration and communication which are as important as the research itself.”
​
Dr William Boland, a former Pasteur-Oxford PhD student and now Research Associate at the University of Leicester, pointed to the practical dividends of mobility: “As a researcher I was able to develop my technical skills at both institutions. By combining these different areas, we’ve established an ongoing collaboration for investigating molecular inhibitors of coronaviruses.”
​
Their testimonies captured the evening’s central message: that scientific excellence depends on the movement of ideas, and of people.​​
Pasteur Foundation UK Trustee, Philippe Chalon, chairs a panel on young researcher mobility with Leonardo Gonzalez-Smith, Will Bolland and Lucia Mrvova.
If any single project exemplifies the Oxford–Pasteur partnership, it is the institutions’ joint Microbial Genomics Platform, which applies genome sequencing to track bacterial evolution and antimicrobial resistance.
​
Moderated by Professor Samuel Sheppard of Oxford, the evening’s final discussion brought together Professor Sylvain Brisse of Institut Pasteur and Professor Martin Maiden of Oxford, collaborators for more than 25 years. They described how their shared database, BIGSdb, has become a global tool for identifying and tracking pathogenic strains.
“Bacterial strains are very diverse,” Brisse explained. “They differ by medically important properties like antimicrobial resistance and pathogenic power. We needed a way to recognise them. The technical innovation was to use the genetic code, compress it into a fingerprint or barcode. That allows people to recognise the same strain anywhere in the world.”
“The technical innovation was to use the genetic code, compress it into a fingerprint or barcode. ”
- Professor Sylvain Brisse, Institut Pasteur
The implications are profound: faster outbreak detection, better vaccine design, and smarter use of antibiotics. Maiden called the partnership an exercise in “complementarity” Oxford’s educational reach fused with Pasteur’s biomedical depth. It was, he suggested, a template for how modern science should work: collaborative, data-driven, and borderless.
Sir Stewart Cole closed the evening by framing the partnership in global terms: “Together, with ongoing support, the Oxford–Pasteur Partnership can produce new knowledge, make new discoveries, strengthen global health systems, and help save lives.”
The evening was less a celebration of institutions than a demonstration of how cooperation itself becomes a form of innovation. It showed that collaboration is not a sentimental ideal but a pragmatic necessity in a world where viruses, bacteria, and climate shocks respect no borders.
Collaboration in action: Professors Martin Maiden (Oxford), Samuel Sheppard (Oxford) and Sylvain Brisse (Pasteur) discuss the Pasteur-Oxford microbial genomics platform.
From the measured realism of McLean’s comments, to the optimism of the young scientists, the event radiated a shared conviction that knowledge gains its power through connection.
As guests drifted into the autumn night, the conversations lingered; new ideas taking root between Oxford and Paris, mentors and students, researchers and philanthropists. The message was clear: international collaboration is not a luxury of science, but its lifeblood.
Science, as Louis Pasteur said, knows no country. And on this evening in London, that principle felt less like a motto than a working plan for the future.
