Meet the Team: Paul Zimmer-Harwood, Research Lead for Clinical Trials

What was the trajectory that brought you to 1Day Sooner?

I regularly volunteered to be a research participant as an undergraduate; although not in clinical trials specifically. Then, during my PhD program, when I studied physiology and human genetics at Oxford, I continued to volunteer for studies. One was a two-week metabolism experiment that had me on an exercise bike for two hours every morning at 70% of my max heart rate, before breakfast, occasionally with blood draws and muscle biopsies mid-ride.

I thought it would be a nice way to get my exercise out of the way, but instead I ended up needing a daily desk nap [Editor’s note: He was also “very badly compensated,” which he mentioned wryly]. Later I volunteered for challenge trials for malaria and COVID, both of which I found less invasive than the metabolism study. It was through study participation that I learned about 1Day Sooner and the work they were doing advocating for human challenge trials.

I started as a volunteer, then became a contract researcher, and am now Research Lead for Clinical Trials. It’s a role that’s hard to put into a single sentence. It’s a mix of research, networking, advocacy, writing, and outreach that I don’t think I’ve come across in any other job I’ve seen described or had myself. There’s a lot more representing the organization than a standard researcher would expect to be doing.

What does your typical day look like at 1Day Sooner? What’s your favorite part of your job?

My days differ throughout the week and require balancing a number of different responsibilities. Some days I’m at a co-working space in the Netherlands, deep in a stack of immunology papers. Other days I’m on a call with a principal investigator at the National Institutes of Health asking about the status of their research. Papers are useful, but the publication cycle lags behind the research cycle, so if I want to know what is really happening I need to talk to people directly.

What excites me most are those moments when a new line of inquiry opens up unexpectedly. Sometimes one finding leads to another in rapid succession and I get to go down really interesting rabbit holes. I get to feel like I’m gliding through a web of ideas. It’s almost addictive and it tends to happen in the morning or at the end of the day, when there are fewer distractions. It becomes so rewarding that it’s hard to stop working sometimes.

Is there something you or your team has accomplished that you’re particularly proud of?

One of the projects that has been a major focus is mapping the potential Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) vaccine landscape. One product of that work has been a paper in Nature Reviews Immunology, co-authored with T. Jake Liang and Seung Bum Park. I’m proud of that work because it constitutes a step towards HCV elimination and because it represents the formation of a research network. It’s tangible, having built a network.

This is a small world—but it’s one that is populated by an enthusiastic and dedicated community of researchers—so I ended up speaking with almost everyone in the field to research the piece. By the time I attended my first HCV vaccine conference, I already knew the room and felt that they knew me. I’m excited to have a growing network of collaborators who are working together to move the field forward.I’m also really proud to work for an organization that is participant-centered. The Cooperative Participant Organization shows where our advocacy meets our research, and it sits at the heart of what 1Day Sooner does by representing the interests of clinical trial volunteers.

You recently attended the CanHepC Annual Meeting & 15th Canadian Symposium on HCV in Toronto, Ontario. What was most valuable about the meeting?

The benefit of building a network of researchers was evident at the meeting. It brought together leading researchers in HCV immunology from around the world, including Jordan Feld from the University Health Network, to work toward scientific consensus on the most promising preclinical vaccine candidates.

This is incredibly important, because HCV vaccine development faces a structural problem. There’s minimal commercial interest in the disease, which means the coordinated push of a major pharmaceutical company, with its funding leverage and regulatory influence, is largely absent. What the field has instead is a community of researchers who need to speak with one voice to persuade funders and policymakers to act. The conference was an attempt to establish that voice and to agree on which preclinical characteristics matter most in a vaccine candidate. As a researcher, if you can show that the whole community has reached agreement about the best course of action, then you’re more likely to have success.

What did your presentation cover?

My own talk focused on what motivates people to enroll in clinical trials. I presented data showing that participant decision-making isn’t driven by risk assessment alone. Practical concerns matter enormously, including how the trial will affect daily life, whether dietary needs will be accommodated during isolation, how easy it is to reach the study site, etc. A proposed HCV challenge trial in Canada is already taking many of these concerns seriously. An advisory panel that includes people with lived experience of hepatitis C, as well as prospective challenge participants, is helping shape the study’s design from the ground up.

Is there a future aspect of your work that you’re looking forward to?

Working at a small organization with a global outlook means that things are always changing. Some people might find that nerve-wracking, but I’m curious to see where our work will lead us in six months or a year. 

That said, I’m excited about the potential of a “social value metric,” which would quantify not just a trial’s risks, but its potential impact. We know that impact matters to potential trial participants when they weigh whether to enroll. But that information can be scientifically complex and difficult to assess. The metric would draw on established disease burden databases to ask concrete questions: how many people could this trial help if it succeeds, and what is the track record of progress in this area? My hope is to create something useful for researchers and participants alike.