A new human clinical trial for a Covid-19 vaccine is underway at the University of Queensland, in collaboration with pharmaceutical company CSL.
Starting on July 13, about 120 adult volunteers in Brisbane are participating in the initial study of the vaccine to check that it’s safe and induces a sufficiently strong immune response.
The University of Queensland has a solid reputation for advances in medical science, especially vaccines. Professor Paul Young is the head of the University of Queensland’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences.
He says, “We’re highly confident because we’ve already gone through immunogenicity studies in mice and shown that our vaccine induces extremely high levels of neutralizing antibody higher than any I’ve seen in other corresponding vaccine approaches.”
As of July 13, the World Health Organization counted 23 vaccine candidates in human clinical trials plus 137 in earlier, pre-clinical studies.
“We’ll be testing not only whether the vaccine is safe, but also doing a dose escalation. So we’ll be determining the ideal dose and we’ll be doing some fairly solid immunology on the immune responses that those individuals provide.”
Scientists at the university have broken ground by creating the molecular clamp.
“We’re hoping that it will be a long-lived antibody response, but also one that has stimulated, a very strong memory such that if one encounters the virus again, maybe even years later, that memory can kick in.”
The university is working with pharmaceutical company CSL to accelerate manufacturing. In fact, CSL began figuring out how to make large amounts of the vaccine material well before the experimental shot had entered initial human testing.
Dr Andrew Cuthbertson is an executive director at CSL in Melbourne.
He says, “We believe we could make somewhere between 15 to 50 million doses by the end of this calendar year. And we could make something like one hundred million doses over the next 12 months.”
He adds, “I think we will have those millions of doses available, but they won’t be available for mass vaccination of the community until we’ve generated the clinical trial data to support a license for the vaccine.”
Andrew says that everyone is working on the basis that the experimental vaccine will be successful. But, science is inherently risky and things fail. Fortunately, there are many teams and vaccine approaches in this race. What’s critical is that enough of them make it over the finish line — and fast.
“It’s really, really important. It’s really hard, technically challenging. Challenging to make a vaccine and also challenging to test it appropriately and make sure that it’s safe and effective and appropriate for use in large groups of people around the world.”
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