 My name is Guy Thwaites. I'm a director of Oxford University Clinical Research Unit. I work here in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Oakry's been in existence for 27 years. Started out doing malaria trials, but very rapidly moved into doing trials on a lot of other serious infectious diseases. And the reason we can do that is because of our collaborations with the Vietnamese government, and also with the hospital for tropical diseases down in the south, and the national hospital for tropical diseases in the north. Oakry, ever since its beginning, and it still does it now, looks at those infectious diseases and asks the question, how can we improve their diagnosis, how can we improve their treatment, how can we improve patients' outcome? And that's very simply what we do. We do that through observational studies, but more importantly we do that through clinical trials, randomised control trials, the gold standard way of changing practice, if you like. And really all of our work focuses around optimising treatment, and therefore has to focus on the challenge of those bacteria, those parasites becoming resistant to that treatment. So that's a major priority. I think the other priority that's developing quite rapidly and it's very interesting in Vietnam is vaccine preventable diseases. We've had recent outbreaks of experience, recent outbreaks of diphtheria and measles, and there is a problem with a loss of confidence in vaccination in this country. A lot of it is being driven, we think, by social media and fake news, if you like, but we've got to confront this because this is a country which should not be having those vaccine preventable diseases, and yet they're creeping back in in many ways. And tetanus is as common now in our hospital as it was in 1993, which doesn't make sense. The vaccine programme delivered by the government is actually very good, but there are some problems which we think Oakroot can help with, and that's what we'd like to do. So in 1990, 1991, what brought Oakroot to Vietnam was the ability or the acceptance that, from China, that they would release some of these new anti-malarial drugs to Vietnam for the first trials. So China had these new, the Artemisen derivative drugs and they'd had them for a thousand years, and they weren't particularly interested in doing the conventional randomised control trials. Nick White at that stage recognised the opportunity that these drugs should be trialled in the conventional way to be able to convince the world that they were really truly very effective, and those first trials were done in Vietnam. But very quickly after that it became apparent that there were two main reasons why Vietnam was such a fascinating place to work, and that was primarily they have a very large population, they have more than 90 million people, and secondly, the way the medical system works meant that this hospital where the trials were done was capturing, it was serving as a tertiary referral centre for a population of half of Vietnam, so roughly 45 million. So this meant that lots of rare things came and found their way into this hospital, and therefore you had an ability in collaboration, obviously, with the hospital, to be able to study those diseases in a way that you really couldn't study in any other place. So we studied a lot of dengue, we studied tetanus, we studied tibiumenongitis and typhoid, and cephalitis, all things that are relatively rare, but in this hospital were not that rare, and it enables you to do really big studies. So Vietnam was a fascinating place to start, and in many ways it was just luck, but subsequently has turned out to be a great place to work because they have incredibly good systems really for supporting health, and they're very willing and interested in engaging in research and asking questions, and it's been a phenomenal place to develop friends and collaborations. The world becomes very excited about new things, about new infections, but there are a bunch of infections that just kill people day in, day out. They're important, people recognise they're important, but they're often a little bit underplayed, and those infections are becoming more and more resistant, and you see that the concerns that there are around Artemisinin resistant malaria, for example in this region, and there really isn't a lot being done about it. There should be, but there isn't. Drug-resistant TB is an enormous problem throughout the world, but particularly in Southeast Asia. It's happening so slowly that there doesn't seem to be that much concern. It's much easier to capture people's imagination about the new and the rapid and the scary things that blow up suddenly and then disappear, but these things are just there in the background, just eating away at us, and that's what keeps me awake.