Coronavirus: Australian volunteers raise their arms for vaccine trial

Hopes rise that vaccine could be available within a year as Brisbane, Melbourne volunteers take part in Australia’s first human clinical trials.

Australian human trials for a potential coronavirus vaccine will begin next week. Picture: AFP

Volunteers in Brisbane and Melbourne are set to be injected with a potential coronavirus vaccine in the first human clinical trials to take place in Australia, as hopes rise that a COVID-19 vaccine could be available within a year.

More than 100 Australians have volunteered to be injected with a vaccine being developed by the US biopharma Novavax, with the first dosing to begin next week.

The Australian company Q-Pharm is conducting the phase 1 clinical trial of that vaccine, and 131 people in Brisbane and Melbourne are set to be injected.

It comes as Australian ­researchers begin to recruit more than 2000 healthcare workers to take part in a clinical trial that will test whether the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine is effective in preventing COVID-19.

Fourteen hospitals across the country are taking part in the ­hydroxychloroquine trial being run by the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.

Lead investigator for the trial, Marc Pelligrini, said test tube studies — which showed hydroxychloroquine can inhibit the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 — had provided hope that the drug may be effective as a preventative treatment. US President Donald Trump is currently taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19, against the advice of the US Food and Drug Administration.

“Our number of cases is low in Australia, and this really gives us the perfect opportunity to dedicate our resources to being prepared for potentially a next wave,” Professor Pelligrini said. “We need to be clear that this virus is not going to go away, it will be a threat for a very, very long time. And we really need to be prepared and discover new drugs that might be able to prevent people getting infected and getting sick.”

The hydroxychloroquine clinical trial comes as the stocks of US pharma Moderna surged on news that the biotech’s nucleic acid vaccine candidate was safe and stimulated an effective immune response to SARS-CoV-2 in a small number of human volunteers. Moderna’s announcement sent the US stockmarket soaring.

In Brisbane and Melbourne, there’s been demand from Australian volunteers to be injected with the Novovax vaccine candidate. Q-Pharm, which is part of the ­Nucleus Network phase 1 clinical research organisation, will now begin to choose healthy people from a pool of volunteers.

There are 11 vaccine candidates currently in the early states of human clinical trials around the world. They include several from China, which are in the most ­advanced stages of development, the Moderna vaccine candidate, a candidate being developed by researchers at Oxford University and being tested in Australia by the CSIRO, and the Novavax candidate, among several others.

Q-Pharm’s principal investigator Paul Griffin said many vaccine candidates looked promising.

Novavax’s candidate has been dubbed NVX-CoV2373. It was created using nanoparticle technology to generate antigen derived from the distinctive coronavirus spike protein. A vaccine adjuvant aims to enhance the immune response and stimulate high levels of neutralising antibodies.

Professor Griffin said he hoped to see positive results from the early human trials of Novavax’s vaccine candidate, as well as from the upcoming phase 1 trials of a vaccine being developed by researchers at the University of Queensland, which Q-Pharm will also be testing.

“It’s really remarkable that we’ve been able to progress so quickly,” Professor Griffin said. “I think they’re both really good candidates. If they weren’t really promising they wouldn’t even be contemplating trialling them in humans.”

Human trials of the UQ vaccine candidate are now just weeks away. A Dutch company is currently conducting preclinical studies of the UQ vaccine.

The candidate, dubbed the S-clamp, has already been found to have the ability to raise high level of antibodies that can neutralise SARS-CoV-2, in preclinical tests.

UQ said it was working on a “robust package of preclinical and safety data” that was required to get the go-ahead to launch phase 1 human trials in early July.

Both the UQ vaccine and the Novavax candidate have been funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is helping finance the development of several other vaccines. The chair of CEPI’s board, Jane Halton, estimated there were about 130 vaccines in development globally. “There’s a huge volume of numbers of candidates being looked at, and that’s by definition a good thing,” Adjunct Professor Halton said. ”The more shots on goal we have, the better the chance of getting something successful.

“I think the pandemic is unprecedented, and what’s been happening on vaccine development is in exactly the same category.’’