While I was in Oxford I decided to close my lab. I kept it going for a year or two but it's just… it’s just not a great idea to be a… a absentee landlord and also I… although the work that I did in Oxford has actually turned into something fascinating because when I got there, Raymond Dwek, Professor Dwek, you know, he and I talked about what I'd work on, and I said, you know, there's not an awful lot known about the glycobiology of hepatitis B virus. Now, we knew the… there had been some work on attachment sites where the sugars tie on, and, as you know, a lot of infectious agents and virus, a lot of them have sugars on them, like HIV is… is loaded with sugar, it's kind of a sweet virus in the sense it's got lots of sugar attachments, and HBV, hepatitis B virus, has three attachments sites, I think that's still the current view and not much was known about it. But these… these sugars have an awful lot to do with the, what you might call the destiny of the… of… of a cell or a protein, protein in… it depends on the tropism, you know, and how it interacts, how it enters the cell, so it's really vital stuff. So I said, okay, we'll do a kind of systematic study of the glycobiology, and… and that was the kind of overall framework but then… but Raymond was working on, you know, the effect… synthetic sugars that would interfere with glycosylation, so the notion was if you could… and he was studying that in terms of the changes in rheumatoid arthritis and cancer and a whole bunch of other really fascinating stuff. I said, so the argument was, well, interfering with glycosylation may affect some aspects of hepatitis B virus. We started that work when I was there and it's continued ever since, there… there are several therapies that are in various stages of trial, none of them have been… I think there's... no wait, I think some of them are still at a stage two, I think, there's some going on, it's been taken up by more and more companies and, you know, it's promising and not here yet. But… but meanwhile a great deal was learned about the assembly of the virus, its tropism and how it, you know, how it… and how it interacts with stuff out… that's not produced by the gene. The… the interesting thing about glycosylation, it's a post-translation of event, and that greatly changes the character of the protein, so that means you can have the same proteins with different glycosylation so, again, that's a non-deterministic biochemical level character of genes, and it's not often taken into account that all… all proteins aren't created the same. They're created the same but they don't change, they don't end up the same because the post-translational events are affected by some… what you eat essentially or a whole bunch of other phenomenon.
