Development of new Covid-19 vaccines slashed to 100 days as CSL and other biotechs to pull out all stops

Researchers are under mounting pressure to deliver with the development of new vaccines now slashed to 100 days after first Covid-19 shot took a year.

Professor Sharon Lewin of The Doherty Institute. Picture : NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

One of Australia’s leading pandemic researchers says the goal to deliver a vaccine to markets has been slashed to from years to just 100 days as the third wave of Covid-19 sparks another mass retreat from the office.

Doherty Institute director, Sharon Lewin – whose team grew the first sample of Covid-19 in cell culture outside of China in early 2020 – says the pandemic has accelerated the development of a range of treatments, with researchers across the globe needed to respond like never before.

Meanwhile, CSL’s chief scientific officer Andrew Nash has welcomed Moderna’s plans to build an mRNA factory in Melbourne, saying it will strengthen Australia’s biotechnology sector and ability to respond to health crises.

It comes as Victoria’s acting chief health officer Ben Cowie had officially requested that the majority of students wear masks at school, and for people to work from home during the winter wave.

Speaking at The Australian Strategic Forum on Wednesday, Professor Lewin said the “barriers” and timelines normally facing medical research has been “greatly truncated” to respond to the health crisis and future threats.

She said the success of delivering the Covid-19 vaccine in 12 months – when normally it takes years – had raised expectations, which appeared here to stay.

“We’ve had that rapid development to the vaccine, which you have to do in a pandemic, and now so many global agencies are now saying we’ve got to do it quicker. The goal now is 100 days that we should have the vaccine manufactured and put into people’s arms,” Professor Lewin said.

“We’ve certainly learned what’s possible and now we have to take it from there and work out what a sustainable approach is going forward.”

Australia’s biggest health company CSL – which produced millions of doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine under contract – is already preparing for the next pandemic. CSL is replicating the factory it built with the US government in North Carolina to build a new cell-based vaccine facility in Melbourne’s north.

While the factory will be designed to combat influenza pandemics, CSL chief scientific officer Andrew Nash said the facility could be “leveraged” to develop other vaccines.

“I think one thing that we should remember is that even in the face of pandemics, there is still likely to be flu around and the need to vaccinated against the flu,” he said.

“So it‘s not as simple as taking an existing facility that’s making a really important vaccine and shutting down the manufacturing of that vaccine and making something else. We have to find a way to do both. And so if we can have that technology here, if we can leverage that into other vaccines and other organisms, I think that’s extremely valuable.”

CSL had also planned to build a dedicated mRNA factory in Melbourne. But the federal government awarded that contract to US biotech Moderna. Dr Nash said that wasn’t a bad thing.

“The fact that Moderna is setting up down here in Melbourne is a fantastic outcome for our broader pharmaceutical biotech ecosystem.

“One of the issues here is the scale of the sector. There is a great academic sector, great medical research institutes producing really fantastic results. But the capacity to translate that either through partnerships with local pharmaceutical companies or biotech companies has been really limited.

“CSL is really the only company of scale that does wet lab research here in Australia so the fact that a global group is setting up in Melbourne … in the long term is a great outcome for us.”

Moderna announced earlier this year it had developed an Omicron-specific vaccine candidate within 63 days of the variant being first detected in South Africa. It hopes to deliver this vaccine to people’s arms by September.

The speed at which Moderna has developed the Omicron jab gives it hope that it will be able to successfully target further strains of Covid-19.