South Australia’s Novel Response to Coronavirus

14 August 2020

Pictured: Professor Nikolai Petrovsky at the Vaxine offices in South Australia.

As the quest for a vaccine for COVID-19 continues, our podcast gets a research update from the Vaxine team based at Flinders University in South Australia.

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky is the Director of Endocrinology at Flinders Medical Centre, a Professor in the School of Medicine at Flinders University and the founder of Vaxine Pty Ltd, an Adelaide-based biotechnology company specialising in pandemic vaccine design.

Vaxine has just finished a Phase I in-human clinical trials of their vaccine candidate COVAX-19, and at this stage it’s looking promising.

Professor Petrovsky spoke with our Chief Operating Officer Stuart Dignam about the progress, challenges, conundrums and hurdles of developing and manufacturing a vaccine against COVID-19.

“We were one of the only groups in Australia who actually developed a successful SARS coronavirus vaccine, in response to the 2003 SARS outbreak,” Prof Petrovsky explains.

“We demonstrated that was highly effective in animal models and we are one of the few groups who have been there before, and shown that we had an effective technology.

“So certainly we know you can protect against coronavirus, and we think it’s an urban myth that there is no such thing as a successful coronavirus vaccine because we’ve actually been there and done it before.

“We are 100-per-cent convinced that we will be able to deliver an effective and safe COVID-19 vaccine.”

Check out the full interview here.

Also, if you missed Part 1 and Part 2 of our interviews with the University Queensland’s vaccine team, you can listen to our chat in February and in June 2020.

It’s great to see the commitment and passion of Australian scientists, researchers and industry hard at work developing vaccines and treatments to help save lives and care for COVID patients. Let’s give them our support!