AIBN Seminar Series: Creating Vaccines at Pandemic Speed

We are pleased to present Associate Professor Keith Chappell to speak about his work as part of the Rapid Response Vaccine Team at UQ.

Date: Thursday, 5 August 

Time: 12 - 1pm

Venue: Online Via Zoom

Click here to access the free seminar.

Abstract

The last 18months has been a wild ride for the Rapid Response Vaccine Team at UQ. The University of Queensland and partner organisations, including CSL have developed a SARS-CoV-2 subunit vaccine that completed pre-clinical development and entered phase I human trials within 6 months of the sequence information on SARS-CoV-2 being released. This vaccine consisted of the spike protein held in its pre-fusion conformation by UQ's rapid response molecular clamp platform. The structure of the purified spike protein has been resolved to 5Å resolution and shown to adopt a conformation equivalent to that on the surface of the virus. When formulated with MF59 adjuvant (Seqirus), this vaccine was shown to be safe and to elicit a strong neutralizing immune response at a similar magnitude to those currently in use. Unfortunately, however, due to the molecular clamp containing short peptide sequences from a HIV-1 protein, this vaccine elicited an immune response that interfered with some HIV diagnostic tests and so was not progressed beyond phase I. This year the Rapid Response Vaccine Team have been focusing on re-engineering a molecular clamp2.0 that does not include HIV sequences, validating this new vaccine platform and developing a new purification method.

Presenter: Associate Professor Keith Chappell, Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology / School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, UQ

Associate Professor Keith Chappell is a Molecular Virologist and group leader within the University of Queensland. His research is focused on vaccine development and the understanding of medically and environmentally significant viruses, including koala retrovirus. His work has improved our understanding of KoRV genetic diversity, mode of transmission and the fundamental process of genome immunity which mitigates against disease. Keith is one of the inventors of a UQ's molecular clamp platform and throughout 2020 he was the co-leader of the University of Queensland program to produce a vaccine for COVID-19.