 My name is Guy Thewates. I'm a director of Oxford University clinical research unit. I work here in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam. Tebumenangitis is a disease caused by a very common and very important bacteria called mycobacterium tuberculosis. In fact, it's a bacteria that kills more people than any other single infectious disease in the world. There are more than 100,000 cases each year and there are somewhere around 18,000 to 19,000 deaths. Most of the disease affects the lung, but about one to five percent affects the brain. And when it affects the brain, it causes something called tuberculosis meningitis. That simply means an inflammation of the meningis, which is the surrounding of the brain caused by the bacteria. And it's a severe disease. It kills around 20, 30 percent of people and leaves another 20, 30 percent severely disabled. The earlier you treat tebumenangitis, the more likely you won't die from it. So, for a doctor, the greatest thing that you can do to save someone's life when you're confronted with someone with this disease is to give early treatment. But the big problem is that it's actually really difficult to detect this disease or diagnose it. And so doctors often are delayed and with every day, with every passing hour, really, the risk of death or disability increases. The problem with tebumenangitis is that it involves the brain and the brain is encapsulated within the body, if you like, by something that divides it from the rest of the body called the blood-brain barrier. And this is a good thing because it stops toxins, for example, that you might ingest getting to the brain and causing the brain to dysfunction. But the bad thing is that it also stops some drugs from getting into the brain and killing the bacteria. So, we've been doing quite a lot of research trying to work out how we can improve the concentrations of these drugs, antibiotics, into the brain. Most recently, however, we've flipped the other way of looking at trying to improve outcomes, and that's by using other anti-inflammatories. And we've had a really interesting trial result using aspirin. So aspirin is a drug that has been available since Hippocrates discovered that extracts of the plants that contain salicylic acid actually control fever. It's an anti-inflammatory agent. And one of the problems with tebumenangitis is that it causes strokes, so the blood vessels get blocked and areas of the brain die. And we figured that we know that aspirin in other strokes prevents other strokes, and it does that by preventing the clots forming. But it also has this anti-inflammatory effect as well. So we did a small trial that was published actually just a couple of weeks ago that showed that the addition of aspirin could also have a major impact on outcome. It could prevent strokes and might prevent death. We need to do a larger trial because it was quite small. We just wanted to test to make sure that it was going to be, well, could be effective and it was going to be safe. But it looks to be both, and so we're going to go ahead and do bigger trials. But that's one of the really exciting findings of the last year or so. We have direct impact, I think, on clinical care and by that outcome, lives. I think it's difficult to quantify how many lives have been saved, but you could look at the first trials, for example, that were done in Vietnam on the new, what were then new in the 1990s, the new Artemisian and derivative drugs. They have saved countless of thousands of lives. Those initial trials were instrumental in changing the way malaria were treated, and we try and do that with every infectious disease that we approach. We try and do work that changes the way people think, that doctors treat and diagnose patients. And I think that is worthy of funding. There's not very many centres around the world that take that approach. Everything we do in Oak Ridge is pretty translational. We place the patient at the centre of almost all of our research, actually, and we ask the question, what can we do to improve the outcome of people with severe infectious disease? The TB meningitis work is absolutely no exception. We say, what are the techniques that we can use to develop to diagnose the disease better? How can we improve treatment? So it's all translational. It's all aimed at improving the outcome of patients directly. And I think if we're not doing that within a reasonable timeframe and you could say, well, five years, for example, then I don't think we should be working here. We've got to be doing things that impact on health, I think, almost directly, and that's what we do.