Aussie scientists to assess multi-use pandemic vaccine

Australian scientists will pit a prototype multi-use pandemic vaccine against one of the proven Covid jabs in human testing to ready it to be rolled out for the next global emergency.

Keith Chappell is a member of the UQ molecular clamp science team, developing a vaccine platform for future pandemic agents. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

Australian scientists will pit a prototype multi-use pandemic vaccine against one of the proven Covid jabs in human testing to ready it to be rolled out for the next global emergency.

The Clamp2 platform is re-­engineered from the University of Queensland Covid-19 vaccine that dramatically fell over in late 2020, blowing a hole in the ­nation’s pandemic response.

The development team went back to the drawing board to eliminate the glitch that caused the original molecular clamp vaccine to return false positives for HIV and turned it into a one-stop preventer for a range of pandemic threats.

In addition to counteracting future strains of the coronavirus, it is designed to protect against zoonotic menaces such as the Australian Hendra virus and the closely-related Nipah virus in south Asia, haemorrhagic fevers including Lassa virus and Ebola, rodent-borne arenavirus and influenza types that also jump from animals to people, making them more deadly.

Project leader Keith Chappell, one of the inventors of the clamp technology, said the plan was to have a ready-to-go vaccine within 100 days of a pandemic agent being genetically sequenced.

Dosing begins in first human trial of the UQ Covid-19 vaccine in 2020. Although the vaccine fell over, it has been re-engineered to create the Clamp2 platform to counteract future coronavirus and other viruses. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Supplied

“The big thing we’re aiming for is pandemic protection that can be applied to any of seven families of viruses that pose the biggest threats,” the molecular virologist told The Australian.

“So the next time something like Covid comes along, we’ll be ready to respond as quickly as possible and hopefully prevent the world from ever being in this sort of situation again.”

Recruitment has opened for the proof-of-concept clinical trial involving 70 healthy volunteers in Brisbane, aged 18-50. Unlike conventional phase-1 studies, the testing will reach beyond proving the second-generation vaccine is safe for people to use.

Immunity levels generated by Clamp2 will be compared against Novavax, with half the trial group receiving the US-made Covid shot, the others the UQ vaccine.

Dr Chappell said the team was confident the reworked platform would come through human testing – the make-or-break stage at which the original vaccine failed, just as drugmaker CSL was gearing up to manufacture it.

Asked if there were any nerves after that let-down, he said: “Absolutely not. We are 100 per cent confident and excited to see how these results turn out. It has been two years in the making to get back to this point and, you know, we’re very close to the finish line and eager to get there.”

Had it been difficult for team members to pick themselves up? “Yeah, I’m not going to lie. We had some pretty low times and what happened at the end of 2020 was hard for everyone to take,” Dr Chappell said. “But we stuck with it and I’m really proud of what the team has achieved.”

If the trial matches the promising preclinical results, where the reformulated vaccine produced stabilised antigens and induced strong immune responses in the lab, the researchers will call it a day. For now.

Dr Chappell said there was no need for an additional Covid vaccine when those available in Australia, including Novavax, were doing the job safely and effectively. The UQ team wouldn’t proceed with the large and costly stage 2-3 human trials required to secure regulatory approval, effectively putting the project on ice until it was needed.

But they would continue to work on reducing the deployment time, currently about 150 days, down to the 100-day target set by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation in pouring $8.5m into the research.

Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles said Clamp2 shaped as a “fantastic step forward” in containing pandemics.

Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles. Picture: Dan Peled/NCA NewsWire

The chief medical officer of Nucleus Network, the specialist company in charge of the clinical trial, Jason Lickliter, said: “Should there be a future global disease outbreak, this will potentially allow us to respond faster.”

Dr Chappell said the only certainty about the next pandemic was it was bound to happen. He is closely following the spread of avian flu from wild bird populations to farmed minks in Spain last year and to seals off the US coast.

This has given rise to concern the H5N1 virus could adapt to be transmitted more easily by mammals and on to humans, unleashing a new pandemic. People are rarely infected but can become dangerously ill when they are and face a higher risk of death than with Covid. “It kind of seems like it’s just a matter of time before it jumps over into the human population,” Dr Chappell said.