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COVID-19-vaccine-milestone-announcement-CSIRO-media-briefingTranscript
COVID-19 vaccine milestone announcement - CSIRO media briefing
[Image appears of a slide showing a circle, half of which shows a photo of a person looking through a microscope and the other half the COVID-19 virus under a microscope and the CSIRO and ausSMCscimex logos and text appears: CSIRO begins testing COVID-19 vaccines, Media briefing 2 April 2020]
Lyndal Byford: Well, good morning and welcome to all of you who have joined us for this online media briefing. Today’s briefing is to announce that CSIRO, Australia’s National Science Agency has commenced the first stage of testing potential vaccines for COVID-19 at its high-containment facility in Geelong. I’m Lyndal Byford from the Australian Science Media Centre and I will be your host and moderator for this morning’s briefing. Before we begin there’s a few quick housekeeping things to go through.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing instructions on the unmute button on the screen and text appears: Key info/instructions, Unmute the presentations, How to ask questions, Recording of this briefing will be made available (2 hour delay, due to processing and upload times)]
First up, by now hopefully all of you will have clicked on the unmute button which you will see on the top right of your screen so that you can hear me. Secondly, you can also ask questions at any time during the briefing. I will put these questions to the speakers at the end of their presentations but you can ask questions by clicking the double speech bubbles with a question mark over the top of them which you see at the right hand side of your screen and please make sure to use this Q&A button and not the single speech bubble with the Chat button above it.
It would be great if you could also include your name and affiliation along with your question and a recording of this morning’s briefing will be made available although we do expect a short, around two hour delay due to processing and upload times with all the web conferencing with technology being rather busy at the moment.
[Image changes to show a photo of the two speakers Dr Rob Grenfell and Prof Trevor Drew and text heading and text appears: Speakers, Dr Rob Grenfell, Director, CSIRO Health and Biosecurity, Prof Trevor Drew, Director, CSIRO Australian Animal Health Laboratory]
So, joining us this morning for today’s briefing we have two speakers. First we’ll hear from Dr Rob Grenfell, who is Director of Health and Biosecurity at CSIRO and following Rob we’ll hear from the Director of CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory, Professor Trevor Drew. So, we will begin now with Rob. Handing over to you now.
[Image changes to show Dr Rob Grenfell talking to the camera and Lynda Byford and Professor Trevor Drew can be seen inset listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: Excellent. So, welcome to you all for this exciting presentation and I’ve lost my slides unfortunately. So, to announce that actually today we are commencing and have commenced the testing of vaccine candidates. Now, what this means is that these are potential vaccines for the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, these developments have obviously taken us a much shorter period of time to actually get to this point. Normally it takes around about one to two years to get to here and we’ve, in fact, actually shortened this to a short period of a couple of months.
So, these pre-clinical trials to make it clear as to where they are is a way of actually determining whether these candidates are in fact effective and also safe to actually progress on to human, human studies. This work has been supported strategically by the CEPI which is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations. And CEPI engaged CSIRO in January to start to get a better understanding of the deadly virus in order to undertake the testing of the vaccines.
The samples themselves for this initial testing were determined by the World Health Organisation and CEPI and they identified two candidates that were ready to move into the pre-clinical testing settings.
[Image continues to show Rob talking to the camera while the other two listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
These two vaccines, one comes from the University of Oxford and the other comes from the US pharmaceutical company Inovio Pharmaceuticals. Now, we understand that these two may be entering into Phase 1 clinical trials in humans in a few months’ time but the important part of this work is that we actually take these through our pre-clinical studies to determine the effectiveness of these vaccines so they can move forward. So, I’ll hand over to Trevor Drew who will talk further about the pre-clinical trial structure.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera while Lyndal and Rob listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Hello everyone. The, the work that we’re doing here at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory is really focussing very much on what we call pre-clinical trials. We were, it was very prescient of CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations, that they had funded our organisation to establish a pipeline for vaccine production generically. We called it Disease X at the time so we were already somewhat prepared for this. But very quickly when the, we were following the emergence of the SARS Coronavirus Type 2, the causative virus of COVID-19 we were able to very rapidly plug in our system into serving the, the needs of the international community in testing candidate vaccines.
We knew from the work that we had done with SARS previously that, that ferrets could well be a very suitable animal model and it is very important that we do do some level of screening in an animal model before any vaccine goes into humans because there’s all sorts of things that can compromise the efficacy of a vaccine. And so, it’s very important that we do this work.
[Image continues to show Trevor talking to the camera while Lyndal and Rob listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
We were the first in the world to confirm that ferrets were indeed susceptible to this, to this virus. It caused a productive infection, what I mean by that is that the virus was able to infect the animals and re…, replicate in the animals and be excreted by them. So, we have progressed now to studying the course of infection in these animals so that we are then able to be in a position to test any candidate vaccines that might be presented to us through the CEPI consortium. And so, we are, we have just done that now.
We have two, two vaccines but different routes of inoculation and the reason for this is that it’s very important that we understand what level of immunity is provided to the lungs where this virus replicates. With most infections you can give an intramuscular infection but we are aware from earlier work with SARS that it’s very important to have immunity in the lung and for this reason we are providing these vaccines both by an intramuscular and, and for one of them an intranasal route as well.
[Image continues to show Trevor talking to the camera while Lyndal and Rob listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
The effectiveness of the vaccine will be assessed by comparing the level of protection afforded by these different vaccines compared to unvaccinated animals and that will allow us to generate some data that we can then present to the international community as a means of assuring that the vaccine is safe and effective.
The important other aspect of this work is that the vaccines themselves can, we know from work with SARS that there is sometimes the potential for them actually making a disease worse so it’s very important in the particular context of this disease that we examine our animal model very carefully for this effect and it’s all to do, all to do with an overreaction of certain arms of the immune system [07:18 crackly sound in recording] disease so we’re very alert to this.
The, I would say that the work that, which we’re involved, we’re not directly involved in developing the vaccine but we are part of a pipeline. However, there are other parts of CSIRO, our organisation, which, which is involved in, in manufacture of, of certain vaccines. So, we, so CSIRO as a whole is contributing significantly to the international efforts to control this disease.
[Image changes to show a step by step flow diagram showing the process of the SARS CoV-2 vaccine research timeline in the CSIRO’s high containment facility]
Is it possible to have the slide, the diagram of the, the flow diagram? That’s the one. So, what we see here if we look at the, the bottom left we see that the SARS Coronavirus 2 there has been detected and we were very grateful to our colleagues at the Peter Doherty Institute who were the first to isolate the virus outside China.
They provided us with a small stock of virus which we were able to replicate and to examine and we’ve been doing a lot of work at this time, understanding how the virus replicates, various characterisation processes and we’ve also been sequencing, not only the virus that we received for our work here, but many other viruses throughout Australia and we have been contributing and others have been contributing those sequences to the international databases so that we can work and understand how this virus may change over time which is another thing we need to be alert to.
Although we are seeing changes, at this time there is no reason to be concerned about the efficacy of a vaccine but we are alert to this.
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen of the flow diagram]
So, we are now at the point where we have developed this biological model, this ferret model and we’ve been working in high containment. What this means that we have very stringent processes to make sure that the virus doesn’t infect our staff or even worse perhaps get into the community.
So, we have a very high bio-secure facility here in Geelong. And so we now have a biological model established and we’ve vaccinated the animals a few days ago and we’re monitoring them over time and then eventually we will, we will challenge the ferrets. By that I mean we will inoculate them with some, some of the virus and then see how they respond compared to, to unvaccinated controls.
The timeline for this is a little bit flexible. We have a vaccine protocol where we are testing the vaccine both with one dose and with a booster dose and we will be conti… leaving a period between the vaccination and challenge with the, with the virus. So, I see us starting to get some results probably around June will be the time when we’re starting to generate results and that we can be able to announce to the international community what our findings are. Out with this there are some, some clinical trials which will be going on but we’re not directly involved in that. I don’t know if you wanted to say something about that Rob?
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen of the flow diagram]
Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, certainly Trevor, to actually talk where they are. So, we have had announcements that we have seen that other clinical trials have commenced with some certain candidates globally. We again would attest that we need to actually do these pre-clinical studies to demonstrate one, that the vaccine is going to work and two, that they’re actually safe before we move on to that setting.
So, the Phase 1 trials really are just to determine, they’re small scale studies, they determine the safety of the vaccine in the human settings. We, at this stage, are not party to the discussions of where those trials will be conducted but we have been told that for one of the candidates they may, in fact, actually start late April, dependent again on the results of our studies on animals and also another one that’s been… the study they’ve commenced as well in another setting globally.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
The Phase 2 trials are where they actually work out whether or not the vaccine itself works and that’s, we may find that there may be an acceleration from that period dependent on what the regulators and in particular the World Health Organisation but also other national regulators like our own TGA and the FDA on how they feel comfortable with the results they’re seeing as to whether we can move into a larger general release because this is a very special time in the sense of a global pandemic and the disaster.
However, I want to assure you that we stick to the highest degree of safety and quality margins with the development of these and that’s the purpose of our regulator to ensure that no vaccine actually reaches the general market that could in fact actually potentially cause more harm than good. And that’s a very important point to actually make.
[Image continues to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
The, the additional, the additional points to make are, is that there’s a range of other work that CSIRO hasn’t been involved in across here. We’ve been looking at understanding the virus itself, understanding how long it takes to develop, replicate and understanding how it actually affects the respiratory system which, this is in the particular severest forms causes quite severe lung disease.
So, by understanding this we will be able to work and assist others in potential therapeutics and also we’re working on potential point of care diagnostics which will be beneficial as well.
The other work that we have actually done which is, is yielding great interest scientifically is looking at the genomic sequence of the virus and we have certainly identified that there are three distinct clusters globally and we’re looking at how this may in fact actually impact on the severity of the infection that people get and also more importantly on, that we’re actually developing the right structures for a vaccine that may in fact work.
[Image continues to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
And the other point, we are working with the Australian Government and also Victorian manufacturers because our two laboratories, one our Protein Biofactory is in Clayton, and our High-Containment Laboratory is in Geelong, but looking at how we can build local capacity in the Australian sector to respond to such emergencies. The other piece of work that we are doing is looking at the development with local industries on protective gear so that our health workers in particular can maintain a safe work environment. So, I’ll pass back to Lyndal.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. So, thank you Rob and Trevor for those presentations. There’s now an opportunity for journalists to ask questions of our speakers.
[Image changes to show a screen shot showing the Q&A box and a text heading and text appears: Questions, Type your question for the speakers in the question box on the right-hand side of the screen, Lodge questions for speakers]
You can type your questions into the Q&A box which you will see on the right hand side of your screen. I always say that it looks like two speech bubbles together with a question mark over the top, and please make sure to use this Q&A button and not the single speech Chat button that you see above it. And if you can include your name and affiliation along with your question that would be great.
So, we’ve got a couple of questions that have already come in. The first one is from Sharnelle Vella from 7News. She’d like to know, “How many people will be involved in the human trials and what those people’s ages would be? Would they be healthy volunteers or would you trial the vaccine first on people who have COVID-19?”.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: So, I guess in answer to that CSIRO does not conduct human trials. They’ll be conducted by another party and in answer to your question there those studies are set up and well structured. If they are to be conducted in Australia the NHMRC has criteria on how to conduct human research and how it’s actually done. So, that’s probably the best I can actually answer that question at this stage.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: No problems. So, the next question is from Mirjam Guichon, apologies if I’ve mangled that one. “Who is developing the vaccine, the World Health Organisation and a pharmaceutical company? Could you give us some more details about the two vaccines that you’re trialling?”.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: Certainly, CEPI, the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation has been in existence for the last four years and has been working with a number of organisations globally, both university sector, research organisations like our own, and also corporations both small and large on how to actually face a problem that we’re actually in.
So, we’re indebted to the foresight of the founders of CEPI, that’s the Gates Trust and also the Welcome Trust and the World Economic Forum to actually have this work so that we’re actually able to start. So, in answer to that question there is a multitude of samples. CEPI, we understand has six potential candidates to work with and one that you would have heard of a lot is the UQ one which is readying itself for the pre-clinical trials.
The others, Oxford University is the one from UK and the other is the Inovio Pharmaceuticals from the US. Now, all of those candidates actually have a multitude of other companies and organisations involved because no single organisation can actually produce a vaccine. So, it’s, this is a true collaboration across academic, public and also private sectors to in fact actually achieve success at this point.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: I’d just like to add a little bit of technical information to that. The Oxford and the Inovio vaccines are both rather different and there are the, the UQ, University of Queensland one, is again a different type of vaccine as well. So, there are, so vaccine manufacturers are taking many different approaches to this.
The Oxford vaccine is, actually there is proof of principle of this, of this type of vaccine. It is actually what we called a vector vaccine. So, it uses a defective virus actually to, of a different type, to actually introduce the proteins of the, of the SARS Coronavirus Type 2 and introduce it to the immune system but it is unable to replicate. So, it’s essentially a dead vaccine. So, there’s no possibility of becoming ill through this particular type of vaccine but because it has this active element of presentation it is anticipated that it will be quite immuno-stimulatory. So, it will, it will induce a nice immune response.
[Image continues to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
The Inovio vaccine is rather more innovative in that it is made of a nucleic acid. So, it is a bit like our own genetic material and it is presenting just certain proteins, encoding certain proteins of the virus to our immune system and our cells will have to actually generate those proteins and then our immune system will react to it, rather different, but nevertheless exciting and we think that it’s very important to take a multi-pronged approach to this. It gives us the best chance of success.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. Hopefully this is quite a quick question, again Sharnelle from 7News, “Why did you choose to test on ferrets?”.
Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, that’s… off you go Trevor.
[Image shows Rob laughing on the camera and then the image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Rob and Lyndal can be seen inset at the bottom of the screen listening]
Prof Trevor Drew: Well, we had, we have been working with ferrets for a number of years. Our early work on the original virus SARS which occurred in, outbreaks occurred in 2002, 2003, there was a lot of interest and a lot of investment in development of vaccines for this disease and we had used the ferret model in that and we’ve also been using this model in our studies of both influenza, it’s a very good model for influenza and also it’s a very good model for another virus which causes a disease of pigs and of people in, in South-East Asia called Nipah virus. So, we are, we are very used to working with this, with model and so we, we did have prior knowledge both of the model and of the likelihood that SARS Coronavirus Type 2 would infect these animals.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. The next question is from Sue Dunlevy from Newscorp. She asks, “If there are three strains of virus will the vaccines be tested on all three?”.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: I’d say that at this stage there are actually every time we look at the, the displays of the analysis of these various viruses isolated from all over the world we see that there is an increasing level of diversity among them. This happens with, particularly with, viruses of this type where over time they will mutate and if they’re in different areas of the world they will set up their own little clades.
I wouldn’t say at this stage that we’re unduly concerned about, about the diversity that is being displayed because there is a constraint made with this virus which is that it’s got to get into the human cell and one of the proteins that we’re targeting, both with our diagnostics and also with the vaccine, is that it’s a particular protein, if you remember the picture of the virus, it’s the one that’s sticking out on all these stalks. That has to be conserved in order to infect a human so whilst there is some diversity being shown we’re not concerned at this stage but it is important to continue to monitor it.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. We’ve got two questions now that are quite similar. So, we might try and answer them together. So, Gabby Rogers from Channel 9 asks, “Can you please detail how these two candidates work?” and we also have Candice White from 10 News First who’s asking for a bit more information about the vaccines, “Are they existing vaccines or were they developed in response to this pandemic?”.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Well answering the second question first, certainly they were both developed specifically for this vaccine, for this disease but of, but in both cases there was prior experience of developing this type of vaccine. In, in the case of the, the Oxford University one, and actually also the Inovio one, they were, both of those developers were able to start work once they had the genetic sequence of the, of the virus. So, you didn’t actually need the live virus in order to start their work on the development of these vaccines. And I think I covered in quite some detail previously about how these vaccines work. So, I think, to save time we’ll, we’ll accept that second question’s been answered.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: First… and so the next question is from Andrew Beasley. He asks if he understood correctly that one of you said that you are not concerned the efficacy of the vaccine and should we understand that to mean the vaccine candidates do provoke immunity but you’re just testing how much immunity is developed and how safe they are more broadly?
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: I don’t recollect saying that we were worried about the efficacy because it is absolutely essential that these vaccines are effective and also that they are safe. So, it is not just enough to be able to inoculate an animal with the vaccine and show that there is an immune response in a, in a laboratory test. We have to actually do it in the live animal.
The reason for this is, as I briefly mentioned earlier, that with this disease there is some suggestion that an immune response can sometimes be damaging. So, we are alert to this and particularly with this disease and so we have to demonstrate in our, in our biological model, our ferret model that that is not the case and that, that both of these vaccines are both safe and effective in preventing the disease from developing.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: And Lyndal I would just like to pipe in again. We are concerned about the efficacy of this vaccine. That is the essential purpose of these pre-clinical studies, to demonstrate it works. So, to give an example of some of the measures we look at is, does the infected animal shed the virus which of course is an indication of infection.
So, if the vaccine is effective the exposed animal and the immunised exposed animal should not be shedding virus which is really one of the measures that we’ll be looking at. There are multitudes of others that we’ll be looking at to demonstrate that the vaccine itself is actually working. So, efficacy is the principal reason for clinical, pre-clinical studies.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Excellent. We now have a question from Frances Mao from the BBC. She wants to know, “How does this Australian test compare with vaccine trials elsewhere? What’s going on elsewhere in terms of vaccine work and is CSIRO the only organisation testing these two particular vaccines?”.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: That’s a great question. The answer is we know that there are a multitude of laboratories around the world that are, that are commencing studies at various levels but some of those are still at the stage before us in the sense of getting themselves ready for pre-clinical. Others have actually moved into Phase 1 human trials already. The point here is that the Oxford one we understand is also being tested in another species internationally. The reason for that is that the FDA requires, has the two animal rule before you can move into the human platform. But Trevor you may have some to add to that one as well.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Yes, one of the, you mentioned the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, it is very important that not only do we generate the, the level of evidence that shows that these vaccines are both safe and effective but also that they were done under a quality standard that is acceptable to the FDA. And, and here in Geelong at the Australian Animal and Health Laboratory we have, we do have those accreditations in place that, that allow us to deliver to the required standard. The, I do know that there is some work being done in the UK and also in the US on vaccine development and in particularly on trials of vaccines but as far as I understand it I think we here at CSIRO are the first people to have achieved this stage of trialling, pre-clinical trialling in an animal model.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: And just a follow-up question for that, “Do you know how many vaccines are being tested globally at the moment and how many have gotten to this stage of testing?”.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr. Rob Grenfell: I don’t, we actually don’t have a clear answer to that unfortunately. That would be a question I would put to CEPI to get a definitive answer.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Yes, and of course CEPI are not the only group that are trialling such vaccines although they are probably the major contributor to this, to this work.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Excellent. So, the next question is from Jackson Ryan from CNET. He has a couple of questions, “Can you explain the ferret model a bit more? Was this developed after SARS for a, you know, potential new disease Coronavirus and how similar is the physiology between a ferret and a human?”.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: That’s definitely your answer Trevor. You’re the international expert here.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Right, so, so the ferret we do know does have the specific receptor on cells in its lungs to be able to, for the virus to be able to infect it and this, this receptor is called Ace 2. And, this particular receptor is seen on a number of animals but certainly ferrets do provide the best model for us to use because of the similarity of that receptor with the human Ace 2. So, this virus is, is, seems to be able to replicate not only in the lungs but also in the intestine so, and this is why we have found that viruses excreted both in humans and in the ferrets in faeces as well as by the respiratory route. So, we’re finding that the virus is being excreted from the nose from the mouth and from the anus.
So, it’s very important that we understand fully what is happening not only in the human but also what is happening in the ferret and compare them. The one thing that we have seen is that in the small number of animals that we’ve done, relatively small compared to the number of people that are infected, that we are not seeing overt clinical disease.
[Image continues to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
So, we’re not seeing disease in these animals although they do seem to perhaps have a slight temperature and they do replicate the virus. We are undertaking some detailed pathology at the moment to visualise the virus, see where it, how widely it is distributed within the, within the animal and therefore this will then provide us with a very nice comparator so that when we compare the disease or the replication of the virus in vaccinated animals, hopefully there won’t be any, but we will be able to apply a very stringent comparison with animals that have not been vaccinated. So, that’s in the deta… in the detail of it.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, so the ferret model is one that we have been familiar with, with using on a multitude of other pathogens but most importantly our team has deep experience in using it with, as Trevor mentioned, the previous outbreak of SARS in the early 2000s to demonstrate it worked. So, it meant tweaking that. We’ve also used this model in understanding pathogens such as Nipah and also Ebola in the past and so our scientists are highly skilled in using this as a, as a versatile model in understanding these particularly dangerous viral insults.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: We’ve got a related question now from Sue Dunlevy. She says, “When ferrets were given a vaccine for SARS in 2003 they developed a more severe form of the disease when they contracted it even though they were being given a vaccine. Is there a risk this could happen again? Can you explain what happened then and does it mean that vaccine didn’t work?”.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Yes, so, so a very good pick up by that journalist and this is exactly why we are not only studying different vaccines but also by giv… when they are being given by different routes and that’s exactly why we’re doing this. We are obviously alert to the fact that in some instances when a, when a human responds to the disease sometimes that immune reaction can actually cause damage to the lungs in particular but possibly also damage to other organs.
So, this is why we are very careful and want to fully understand both the course of disease in an infected animal and also in a vaccinated and then challenged animal. Your journalist is absolutely right, that, that there was some res… an immune response and essentially what the basis of this immune response is that when cells of the immune system see an infected cell they tell it to kill itself. So, this, this, this signal can cause overt damage to the lung if the, if there are a lot of cells in the lung which are infected at that time. And there are also other arms of the immune system that can also damage the tissues so we need to make sure that any vaccine that we, that we trial, we need to measure its ability to produce a defensive immune sys… immune response which actually gets rid of the virus but without causing this overt damage to, to the tissues.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and Trevor and Rob can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Lyndal Byford: OK the next question is from Candice White from 10 News First. She said, “There must be some level of confidence in these vaccines that have led you to progress to these… this particular point. What is it about these two that you’re trialling?”.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: These, these vaccines were chosen for trialling by a group comprising CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the WHO, the World Health Organisation. And both WHO and CEPI looked together at the vaccines that had been submitted and which were ready at the time that we were ready and they have chosen these two for the first trial.
I’m quite sure that there will be other submissions later on that we will then undertake and, to, and assess in due course. The main reason that, that these vaccines I understand were chosen was because they, they both had evidence that was provided which was, was compelling enough to the, to CEPI and WHO that they, that they were ready to go.
[Image continues to show Trevor talking to the camera while Lyndal and Rob listen in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
The, the, the one from Oxford which is, as I mentioned is what we call a vector vaccine, it’s a defective adeno virus actually that, that is used and it, it, does allow a very, very small amount of expression of the, of the, of the viral protein of SARS but it doesn’t actually multiply in the host. So, so it’s a very good way of, of stimulating enough of the immunity to get a good response but it is not in any way risky because there’s no replication of the, of the virus, not like a, a, an attenuated virus that, that are sometimes used with vaccines. For the Inovio vaccine it is a nucleic acid vaccine. So, it’s essentially as I said using the genetic material of the, of the virus to, to generate some viral proteins by the, by the hosts themselves.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. So, a question from Anna Maria Tallis, “Does this new understanding of the structure of the viral protein have any implications on the vaccine that’s being tested now?”.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: The… we know that there is obviously a lot of emerging evidence around, emerging information around the particular structure of the viral protein that, that we’re targeting which is called the spike protein and this seems to be the one which offers the best chance of protection. But it may ultimately be that, that there may be other vaccine… other viral proteins involved which could be included in maybe a second generation or third generation vaccines. It’s still very early to know exactly what is, what is going to be the best vaccine but, but our models shows that it has the best chance of demonstrating that.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Thank you. Sharnelle Vella from 7News is just asking, “Do you know which other species, I think she means the Oxford vaccine, is being tested on? So, they’re both being tested on ferrets by CSIRO but do we know what other species they’re being tested on?”.
Prof Trevor Drew: I’m afraid I don’t know… I don’t know if you know Rob.
[Image changes to show Trevor listening on the main screen and then the image changes to show Rob talking while Trevor and Lyndal listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: No, we, we are… have scant information on the rest of the, we just know that by, by the grapevine that there were bits and pieces going on but most of this work again, a quest… these are questions that I would be directing towards CEPI to get the definitive answer.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: OK, Sarah from Gizmodo Australia is asking, “What’s the timeline from now until a potential vaccine being released? When June comes around and your initial results are released, is that when it will go into human clinical trials? I think you mentioned it may go into human clinical trials earlier if results are promising”.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera on the main screen and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset on the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: That’s correct. So, so we’re expecting we will have our definitive answers by the end of June. Obviously we’ll be doing a lot of monitoring on there and also the, the manufacturers of these particular candidates will be in close contact with us with regards to how things are progressing. We understand that the Oxford example, was in fact actually being touted for Phase 1 human trials somewhere around about late April early June. That’s one of the information we’ve heard. Again, I would ask you to seek for clarification from CEPI for further information or clarification on those points but that’s actually our understanding on that.
As for the Inovio vaccine we’re, we’re unclear as to when they may start Phase 1 trials. The journey from Phase 1 to Phase 2 again depends on how safe and how effective the vaccine is and so through that progression these things take time again. We’re still sitting on that, that, you know, 18 months has been the time that we’ve actually put ourselves on these but we may in fact find we’re shortening because remember we’ve actually shortened our time to get to this point considerably. So, we, we are optimistic but the end of the year would be an optimist’s view, early next year would be closer to the reality all the things working well.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: We just have a follow up question about ferrets from Jackson at CNET. He’s asking, “Does this mean if he has a ferret at home it could theoretically catch COVID without him even knowing?”.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Well, I think there is a theoretical risk. Whether that would actually happen I think would depend on a lot of different factors and I’m not really in a position to, to be able to judge whether or not a ferret in, in a, in an ordinary environment would, would become infected. Certainly what we are doing is we are actually getting quite a large amount of virus and, and spraying it into the nose of ferrets. So, it’s a rather, rather an artificial system of infecting an animal so, I can’t really say whether or not ferrets would actually acquire the infection naturally.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera on the main screen and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset on the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: So, Trevor probably the other point is to actually talk about the so called intermediary animal because I’m sure that everyone has read about the, the, I guess, almost the presumed evolution of this virus coming from bats but having an intermediary animal which is yet unidentified. In SARS we had a Pacific cat and in MERS we had the dromedary camel as being the so called intermediary. And the way the intermediary animal works is that the virus jumps from the primary species to the next species and actually goes through a mutation phase that allows it to spread to humans. So, bats are not infectious to humans to our knowledge. It’s the intermediary animal that is there.
The issue there of companion animals is a question that comes up a lot. The, the answer to that is we don’t know the answer to that at this stage and we are aware that some of our companion laboratories globally are starting to look at this, this perplexing problem as to whether humans are giving the animals the infections or whether animals are in fact giving those infections back. We have a lot of experience in RNA viruses particularly influenza and we do not that there are animal vectors in influenza. So, at this stage we need to sort out the knowledge as to, to where and what is the truth here.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: If I could just briefly add to that. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that companion animals play any role in the epidemiology of, of this disease. So, so there is very, very scant evidence that animals can, there’s a case of two dogs and one cat I think is the entire database of evidence that companion animals can be, become infected and in all cases the, the, their owners were infected. So, we think that it’s far, far more likely that the animals were infected from the human than anything like the other way round.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. And Sue Dunlevy from Newscorp asks, “Many people with COVID-19 don’t have any symptoms, others have mild symptoms while others, are, are, you know, very severe and dying. Will the same vaccine help everyone? Do we know if it is likely to be like the flu vaccine which is only effective in about 60% of people?”.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera on the main screen and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset on the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, look the, the answer to that Sue is simple at the moment. We don’t have answers to that, that’s why we’re doing these studies. So and, those are in fact actually the questions that need to be answered along the journey of doing this. The pre-clinical is pretty, is pretty firm on does it work or doesn’t it work, and is it safe or is it not safe. We move into the Phase 1s and 2 studies that’s actually when you start to work out its effectiveness across different populations. And it may not be until the Phase 3 studies, which are really what we call the post-market analysis, which will in fact give us the richness of the information that you’re asking in that question.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: And so, Gabby Rogers from Nine is just wondering if you could elaborate on the, sort of, three distinct clusters of the virus that are round at the moment?
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Well the… although we say there’s, there’s, there’s three clusters in fact every time we look there’s more of them. They are very closely related. Either we’re talking about, if we look at the genetic code of the virus it’s about 30,000 bases long. So, it’s, it’s quite a big virus in comparative terms and of those 30,000 bases maybe only one, two, three, four, five are different and this might constitute a slightly different clade.
In other cases we can see that there’s bits of the genetic, the genome of the virus, the, the genetic material of the virus has actually been, source elements have been deleted and this might also affect the, either the ability of the virus to, to grow in certain conditions. So, if we, so we can’t, we do know that these viruses don’t exist as a single virus but they actually exist as a cloud of subtly different viruses and this is called a Quasar species.
[Image continues to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
And when you get this, this cloud of viruses moving into different parts of the world you may find that one particular clade within that cloud gets an advantage because of the, because of the environment that it’s in. It might find itself subtly more suitable to a new, to a new population of people than one in another, in another country and so that will then start to grow and that will then start to dominate as a different, a different clade of virus. We don’t know, we have no knowledge yet about what relevance this has to the disease that we see but that’s partially the reason why we’re being very assiduous in understanding the diversity of this virus as it’s disseminated around the world.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: OK, we’ve got a couple more final questions. Candice White from 10 News is asking, “How much hope should people and the health sector place on this development? Are you heading into this with a high degree of confidence or are you being careful not to offer false hope?”.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera on the main screen and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset on the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, we are, we’re balanced with regards to where we are. I would have to say that we are optimistic. We’re buoyed by the collaboration that’s occurring globally with regards to trying to solve this problem. I cannot recall an example of where the world science teams have actually worked together in such harmony to try to solve a problem such as perplexing.
That in itself gives us a lot of hope in the sense of where we are. So, balanced in the sense that we know that the journey from here has still got a lot of technical pitfalls and a lot of challenges along the way. I guess the other message that I’m really clear, clear to put out is that public health measures that we’re undertaking at the moment in social distancing, case tracking and also quarantining are essential in decreasing the rate of new infections every day.
[Image continues to show Rob talking to the camera on the main screen and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset on the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
The reason that we’re doing that is if we can keep the rate of new infections every day below certain levels we can in fact then mean that those poor individuals that do get severe disease and need to be hospitalised will receive the care they need. If we don’t do that we will end up with hospitals being overwhelmed and situations that we’re now seeing in places like New York, Italy and Spain. So, those public health measures need to be held in place until we are actually safe with vaccines that can, in fact, actually eradicate or at least control fairly systematically this disease and outbreak.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Fantastic. But just a couple of quick questions to finish on. “What do you think about the trials using the BCG vaccine as a way to generally boost the immune response to, you know, help the immune system fight against COVID-19?”. That’s from Anne Marie at Tallis.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Well, as, as a general comment we do know that particularly for respiratory diseases but more generally viral diseases there is a particular compound called interferon which is generated in response, as a very early response to, to infection. And we also know that this interferon is, is not specific to one particular virus, one particular pathogen.
So, it may well be that other vaccines may stimulate a, a sort of a non-specific induction of this interferon which may, if it’s timed absolutely perfectly, it may, may actually help to resist an infection by another virus. But I would say that interferon is generally speaking, is, is very transient in its induction and it disappears quite quickly. So, it’s certainly something that I would not rely on in any way. I don’t know Rob if you’ve got any comments to make being the medic here.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera on the main screen and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset on the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: The BCG vaccine remains a fascinating vaccine in the sense of how it works and I think from Trevor’s of how it works. We have seen some close reactivity across the micro-bacterium species so in things, diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis which are caused by these. We unfortunately haven’t seen its activity against some micro-bacterium elsewhere to any degree. But Australia largely ceased its immunisation programmes for BCG through, in the late ‘80s. So, there is a cohort of Australians who have had the BCG vaccination through that period, the 1970s to the 1980s in particular.
We’ll watch this. Obviously there’s, there’s no reason for us to leap out and take BCG for the vaccinations until the studies and I understand the Walter Eliza Institute is commencing some conducting of the study here with the Murdoch Institute. So, we’ll have to wait and see whether or not that actually offers us some degree of hope.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Just a couple of quick questions. You’ve I think described the types of vaccines that are in these two trials at CSIRO but could you give some broader background on the types of vaccines that are generally being trialled against COVID?
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Sure, the, the other one that we know about, the University of Queensland, is also quite an innovative vaccine and what it essentially does, it is called a molecular clamp. So, it has a, a, a, base, a molecule in which the spike protein of the virus is embedded and then that is what constitutes the vaccine. So, it is a, simply a way of presenting the viral protein to the immune system of the host.
The little bit of a challenge there is that, that with these proteins on their own, even if they’re within this larger molecular clamp are not really able to induce immunity on their own very effectively. So, they have to have a chemical added to them and there have been many different chemicals used in this process over, over the years in various sorts of inactivated vaccines. These are, are viruses which have been killed and then mixed with a chemical and you’re inoculated with that.
So, there are, there are a whole range of choices of these different chemicals. They called adjuvants and these, the choice of adjuvant is something that has to be done through, really through trial and error. And I understand that is what the, our colleagues at the Doherty, sorry at the University of Queensland are, are working on at the moment, choosing the best adjuvant that will combine with their vaccine to induce the best immune response.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: And will that be a vaccine that you will end up trialling?
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera and Lyndal and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: We will, we certainly stand ready to trial it. We, we have the current trial going on at the moment. Because of the, the nature of this virus and its infectivity we, we are having to do it at a level of high-containment and we only have a limited amount of space to be able to do this work. So, once these trials are finished we will be ready to commence further, further trials.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: And a final question now from Sarah from Gizmodo. She says, “Will all the vaccine candidates be tested with both nasal sprays and intramuscular injections and are there any other methods of delivery being tested?”.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera on the main screen and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset on the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, we’re only aware that those are the two methods and again the Inovio vaccine is an injectable vaccine and it really depends on the platform that the vaccine sits on as to how it’s actually delivered. So, the attenuated viral ones can be administered by the intranasal route and have been successful in other human vaccines that we have used. So, that’s the method. It’s really just the technology that is used or the basis of that vaccine and its structure that will determine how you administer it.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: So, just to clarify, the Oxford is being administered intranasally and the Inovio one is being administered intramuscularly? Oh that’s a terrible…
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera on the main screen and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset on the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: So, so, so Inovio is intramuscular and the Oxford one is both, intranasal and intramuscular.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. Well that brings us to the end of all of our questions.
[Image changes to show a slide showing a circle, half of which shows a photo of a person looking through a microscope and the other half the COVID-19 virus under a microscope and the CSIRO and ausSMCscimex logos and text appears: CSIRO begins testing COVID-19 vaccines, Media briefing 2 April 2020]
So, thank you to Rob and Trevor for answering those as diligently as you have and that’s it for today’s event and we’ll have a full recording of the presentation and the Question and Answer session available and we’ll post that to Scimex shortly but it’ll also be available from CSIRO.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
So, that’s it. Thanks again to today’s speakers and thank you everybody for joining us at this online briefing.
[Image appears of a slide showing a circle, half of which shows a photo of a person looking through a microscope and the other half the COVID-19 virus under a microscope and the CSIRO and ausSMCscimex logos and text appears: CSIRO begins testing COVID-19 vaccines, Media briefing 2 April 2020]
Lyndal Byford: Well, good morning and welcome to all of you who have joined us for this online media briefing. Today’s briefing is to announce that CSIRO, Australia’s National Science Agency has commenced the first stage of testing potential vaccines for COVID-19 at its high-containment facility in Geelong. I’m Lyndal Byford from the Australian Science Media Centre and I will be your host and moderator for this morning’s briefing. Before we begin there’s a few quick housekeeping things to go through.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing instructions on the unmute button on the screen and text appears: Key info/instructions, Unmute the presentations, How to ask questions, Recording of this briefing will be made available (2 hour delay, due to processing and upload times)]
First up, by now hopefully all of you will have clicked on the unmute button which you will see on the top right of your screen so that you can hear me. Secondly, you can also ask questions at any time during the briefing. I will put these questions to the speakers at the end of their presentations but you can ask questions by clicking the double speech bubbles with a question mark over the top of them which you see at the right hand side of your screen and please make sure to use this Q&A button and not the single speech bubble with the Chat button above it.
It would be great if you could also include your name and affiliation along with your question and a recording of this morning’s briefing will be made available although we do expect a short, around two hour delay due to processing and upload times with all the web conferencing with technology being rather busy at the moment.
[Image changes to show a photo of the two speakers Dr Rob Grenfell and Prof Trevor Drew and text heading and text appears: Speakers, Dr Rob Grenfell, Director, CSIRO Health and Biosecurity, Prof Trevor Drew, Director, CSIRO Australian Animal Health Laboratory]
So, joining us this morning for today’s briefing we have two speakers. First we’ll hear from Dr Rob Grenfell, who is Director of Health and Biosecurity at CSIRO and following Rob we’ll hear from the Director of CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory, Professor Trevor Drew. So, we will begin now with Rob. Handing over to you now.
[Image changes to show Dr Rob Grenfell talking to the camera and Lynda Byford and Professor Trevor Drew can be seen inset listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Rob Grenfell: Excellent. So, welcome to you all for this exciting presentation and I’ve lost my slides unfortunately. So, to announce that actually today we are commencing and have commenced the testing of vaccine candidates. Now, what this means is that these are potential vaccines for the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, these developments have obviously taken us a much shorter period of time to actually get to this point. Normally it takes around about one to two years to get to here and we’ve, in fact, actually shortened this to a short period of a couple of months.
So, these pre-clinical trials to make it clear as to where they are is a way of actually determining whether these candidates are in fact effective and also safe to actually progress on to human, human studies. This work has been supported strategically by the CEPI which is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations. And CEPI engaged CSIRO in January to start to get a better understanding of the deadly virus in order to undertake the testing of the vaccines.
The samples themselves for this initial testing were determined by the World Health Organisation and CEPI and they identified two candidates that were ready to move into the pre-clinical testing settings.
[Image continues to show Rob talking to the camera while the other two listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
These two vaccines, one comes from the University of Oxford and the other comes from the US pharmaceutical company Inovio Pharmaceuticals. Now, we understand that these two may be entering into Phase 1 clinical trials in humans in a few months’ time but the important part of this work is that we actually take these through our pre-clinical studies to determine the effectiveness of these vaccines so they can move forward. So, I’ll hand over to Trevor Drew who will talk further about the pre-clinical trial structure.
[Image changes to show Trevor talking to the camera while Lyndal and Rob listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Prof Trevor Drew: Hello everyone. The, the work that we’re doing here at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory is really focussing very much on what we call pre-clinical trials. We were, it was very prescient of CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations, that they had funded our organisation to establish a pipeline for vaccine production generically. We called it Disease X at the time so we were already somewhat prepared for this. But very quickly when the, we were following the emergence of the SARS Coronavirus Type 2, the causative virus of COVID-19 we were able to very rapidly plug in our system into serving the, the needs of the international community in testing candidate vaccines.
We knew from the work that we had done with SARS previously that, that ferrets could well be a very suitable animal model and it is very important that we do do some level of screening in an animal model before any vaccine goes into humans because there’s all sorts of things that can compromise the efficacy of a vaccine. And so, it’s very important that we do this work.
[Image continues to show Trevor talking to the camera while Lyndal and Rob listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
We were the first in the world to confirm that ferrets were indeed susceptible to this, to this virus. It caused a productive infection, what I mean by that is that the virus was able to infect the animals and re…, replicate in the animals and be excreted by them. So, we have progressed now to studying the course of infection in these animals so that we are then able to be in a position to test any candidate vaccines that might be presented to us through the CEPI consortium. And so, we are, we have just done that now.
We have two, two vaccines but different routes of inoculation and the reason for this is that it’s very important that we understand what level of immunity is provided to the lungs where this virus replicates. With most infections you can give an intramuscular infection but we are aware from earlier work with SARS that it’s very important to have immunity in the lung and for this reason we are providing these vaccines both by an intramuscular and, and for one of them an intranasal route as well.
[Image continues to show Trevor talking to the camera while Lyndal and Rob listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
The effectiveness of the vaccine will be assessed by comparing the level of protection afforded by these different vaccines compared to unvaccinated animals and that will allow us to generate some data that we can then present to the international community as a means of assuring that the vaccine is safe and effective.
The important other aspect of this work is that the vaccines themselves can, we know from work with SARS that there is sometimes the potential for them actually making a disease worse so it’s very important in the particular context of this disease that we examine our animal model very carefully for this effect and it’s all to do, all to do with an overreaction of certain arms of the immune system [07:18 crackly sound in recording] disease so we’re very alert to this.
The, I would say that the work that, which we’re involved, we’re not directly involved in developing the vaccine but we are part of a pipeline. However, there are other parts of CSIRO, our organisation, which, which is involved in, in manufacture of, of certain vaccines. So, we, so CSIRO as a whole is contributing significantly to the international efforts to control this disease.
[Image changes to show a step by step flow diagram showing the process of the SARS CoV-2 vaccine research timeline in the CSIRO’s high containment facility]
Is it possible to have the slide, the diagram of the, the flow diagram? That’s the one. So, what we see here if we look at the, the bottom left we see that the SARS Coronavirus 2 there has been detected and we were very grateful to our colleagues at the Peter Doherty Institute who were the first to isolate the virus outside China.
They provided us with a small stock of virus which we were able to replicate and to examine and we’ve been doing a lot of work at this time, understanding how the virus replicates, various characterisation processes and we’ve also been sequencing, not only the virus that we received for our work here, but many other viruses throughout Australia and we have been contributing and others have been contributing those sequences to the international databases so that we can work and understand how this virus may change over time which is another thing we need to be alert to.
Although we are seeing changes, at this time there is no reason to be concerned about the efficacy of a vaccine but we are alert to this.
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen of the flow diagram]
So, we are now at the point where we have developed this biological model, this ferret model and we’ve been working in high containment. What this means that we have very stringent processes to make sure that the virus doesn’t infect our staff or even worse perhaps get into the community.
So, we have a very high bio-secure facility here in Geelong. And so we now have a biological model established and we’ve vaccinated the animals a few days ago and we’re monitoring them over time and then eventually we will, we will challenge the ferrets. By that I mean we will inoculate them with some, some of the virus and then see how they respond compared to, to unvaccinated controls.
The timeline for this is a little bit flexible. We have a vaccine protocol where we are testing the vaccine both with one dose and with a booster dose and we will be conti… leaving a period between the vaccination and challenge with the, with the virus. So, I see us starting to get some results probably around June will be the time when we’re starting to generate results and that we can be able to announce to the international community what our findings are. Out with this there are some, some clinical trials which will be going on but we’re not directly involved in that. I don’t know if you wanted to say something about that Rob?
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen of the flow diagram]
Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, certainly Trevor, to actually talk where they are. So, we have had announcements that we have seen that other clinical trials have commenced with some certain candidates globally. We again would attest that we need to actually do these pre-clinical studies to demonstrate one, that the vaccine is going to work and two, that they’re actually safe before we move on to that setting.
So, the Phase 1 trials really are just to determine, they’re small scale studies, they determine the safety of the vaccine in the human settings. We, at this stage, are not party to the discussions of where those trials will be conducted but we have been told that for one of the candidates they may, in fact, actually start late April, dependent again on the results of our studies on animals and also another one that’s been… the study they’ve commenced as well in another setting globally.
[Image changes to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
The Phase 2 trials are where they actually work out whether or not the vaccine itself works and that’s, we may find that there may be an acceleration from that period dependent on what the regulators and in particular the World Health Organisation but also other national regulators like our own TGA and the FDA on how they feel comfortable with the results they’re seeing as to whether we can move into a larger general release because this is a very special time in the sense of a global pandemic and the disaster.
However, I want to assure you that we stick to the highest degree of safety and quality margins with the development of these and that’s the purpose of our regulator to ensure that no vaccine actually reaches the general market that could in fact actually potentially cause more harm than good. And that’s a very important point to actually make.
[Image continues to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
The, the additional, the additional points to make are, is that there’s a range of other work that CSIRO hasn’t been involved in across here. We’ve been looking at understanding the virus itself, understanding how long it takes to develop, replicate and understanding how it actually affects the respiratory system which, this is in the particular severest forms causes quite severe lung disease.
So, by understanding this we will be able to work and assist others in potential therapeutics and also we’re working on potential point of care diagnostics which will be beneficial as well.
The other work that we have actually done which is, is yielding great interest scientifically is looking at the genomic sequence of the virus and we have certainly identified that there are three distinct clusters globally and we’re looking at how this may in fact actually impact on the severity of the infection that people get and also more importantly on, that we’re actually developing the right structures for a vaccine that may in fact work.
[Image continues to show Rob talking to the camera and Lyndal and Trevor listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
And the other point, we are working with the Australian Government and also Victorian manufacturers because our two laboratories, one our Protein Biofactory is in Clayton, and our High-Containment Laboratory is in Geelong, but looking at how we can build local capacity in the Australian sector to respond to such emergencies. The other piece of work that we are doing is looking at the development with local industries on protective gear so that our health workers in particular can maintain a safe work environment. So, I’ll pass back to Lyndal.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking and Rob and Trevor can be seen listening inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. So, thank you Rob and Trevor for those presentations. There’s now an opportunity for journalists to ask questions of our speakers.
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You can type your questions into the Q&A box which you will see on the right hand side of your screen. I always say that it looks like two speech bubbles together with a question mark over the top, and please make sure to use this Q&A button and not the single speech Chat button that you see above it. And if you can include your name and affiliation along with your question that would be great.
So, we’ve got a couple of questions that have already come in. The first one is from Sharnelle Vella from 7News. She’d like to know, “How many people will be involved in the human trials and what those people’s ages would be? Would they be healthy volunteers or would you trial the vaccine first on people who have COVID-19?”.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: So, I guess in answer to that CSIRO does not conduct human trials. They’ll be conducted by another party and in answer to your question there those studies are set up and well structured. If they are to be conducted in Australia the NHMRC has criteria on how to conduct human research and how it’s actually done. So, that’s probably the best I can actually answer that question at this stage.
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Lyndal Byford: No problems. So, the next question is from Mirjam Guichon, apologies if I’ve mangled that one. “Who is developing the vaccine, the World Health Organisation and a pharmaceutical company? Could you give us some more details about the two vaccines that you’re trialling?”.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: Certainly, CEPI, the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation has been in existence for the last four years and has been working with a number of organisations globally, both university sector, research organisations like our own, and also corporations both small and large on how to actually face a problem that we’re actually in.
So, we’re indebted to the foresight of the founders of CEPI, that’s the Gates Trust and also the Welcome Trust and the World Economic Forum to actually have this work so that we’re actually able to start. So, in answer to that question there is a multitude of samples. CEPI, we understand has six potential candidates to work with and one that you would have heard of a lot is the UQ one which is readying itself for the pre-clinical trials.
The others, Oxford University is the one from UK and the other is the Inovio Pharmaceuticals from the US. Now, all of those candidates actually have a multitude of other companies and organisations involved because no single organisation can actually produce a vaccine. So, it’s, this is a true collaboration across academic, public and also private sectors to in fact actually achieve success at this point.
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Prof Trevor Drew: I’d just like to add a little bit of technical information to that. The Oxford and the Inovio vaccines are both rather different and there are the, the UQ, University of Queensland one, is again a different type of vaccine as well. So, there are, so vaccine manufacturers are taking many different approaches to this.
The Oxford vaccine is, actually there is proof of principle of this, of this type of vaccine. It is actually what we called a vector vaccine. So, it uses a defective virus actually to, of a different type, to actually introduce the proteins of the, of the SARS Coronavirus Type 2 and introduce it to the immune system but it is unable to replicate. So, it’s essentially a dead vaccine. So, there’s no possibility of becoming ill through this particular type of vaccine but because it has this active element of presentation it is anticipated that it will be quite immuno-stimulatory. So, it will, it will induce a nice immune response.
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The Inovio vaccine is rather more innovative in that it is made of a nucleic acid. So, it is a bit like our own genetic material and it is presenting just certain proteins, encoding certain proteins of the virus to our immune system and our cells will have to actually generate those proteins and then our immune system will react to it, rather different, but nevertheless exciting and we think that it’s very important to take a multi-pronged approach to this. It gives us the best chance of success.
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Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. Hopefully this is quite a quick question, again Sharnelle from 7News, “Why did you choose to test on ferrets?”.
Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, that’s… off you go Trevor.
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Prof Trevor Drew: Well, we had, we have been working with ferrets for a number of years. Our early work on the original virus SARS which occurred in, outbreaks occurred in 2002, 2003, there was a lot of interest and a lot of investment in development of vaccines for this disease and we had used the ferret model in that and we’ve also been using this model in our studies of both influenza, it’s a very good model for influenza and also it’s a very good model for another virus which causes a disease of pigs and of people in, in South-East Asia called Nipah virus. So, we are, we are very used to working with this, with model and so we, we did have prior knowledge both of the model and of the likelihood that SARS Coronavirus Type 2 would infect these animals.
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Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. The next question is from Sue Dunlevy from Newscorp. She asks, “If there are three strains of virus will the vaccines be tested on all three?”.
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Prof Trevor Drew: I’d say that at this stage there are actually every time we look at the, the displays of the analysis of these various viruses isolated from all over the world we see that there is an increasing level of diversity among them. This happens with, particularly with, viruses of this type where over time they will mutate and if they’re in different areas of the world they will set up their own little clades.
I wouldn’t say at this stage that we’re unduly concerned about, about the diversity that is being displayed because there is a constraint made with this virus which is that it’s got to get into the human cell and one of the proteins that we’re targeting, both with our diagnostics and also with the vaccine, is that it’s a particular protein, if you remember the picture of the virus, it’s the one that’s sticking out on all these stalks. That has to be conserved in order to infect a human so whilst there is some diversity being shown we’re not concerned at this stage but it is important to continue to monitor it.
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Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. We’ve got two questions now that are quite similar. So, we might try and answer them together. So, Gabby Rogers from Channel 9 asks, “Can you please detail how these two candidates work?” and we also have Candice White from 10 News First who’s asking for a bit more information about the vaccines, “Are they existing vaccines or were they developed in response to this pandemic?”.
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Prof Trevor Drew: Well answering the second question first, certainly they were both developed specifically for this vaccine, for this disease but of, but in both cases there was prior experience of developing this type of vaccine. In, in the case of the, the Oxford University one, and actually also the Inovio one, they were, both of those developers were able to start work once they had the genetic sequence of the, of the virus. So, you didn’t actually need the live virus in order to start their work on the development of these vaccines. And I think I covered in quite some detail previously about how these vaccines work. So, I think, to save time we’ll, we’ll accept that second question’s been answered.
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Lyndal Byford: First… and so the next question is from Andrew Beasley. He asks if he understood correctly that one of you said that you are not concerned the efficacy of the vaccine and should we understand that to mean the vaccine candidates do provoke immunity but you’re just testing how much immunity is developed and how safe they are more broadly?
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Prof Trevor Drew: I don’t recollect saying that we were worried about the efficacy because it is absolutely essential that these vaccines are effective and also that they are safe. So, it is not just enough to be able to inoculate an animal with the vaccine and show that there is an immune response in a, in a laboratory test. We have to actually do it in the live animal.
The reason for this is, as I briefly mentioned earlier, that with this disease there is some suggestion that an immune response can sometimes be damaging. So, we are alert to this and particularly with this disease and so we have to demonstrate in our, in our biological model, our ferret model that that is not the case and that, that both of these vaccines are both safe and effective in preventing the disease from developing.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: And Lyndal I would just like to pipe in again. We are concerned about the efficacy of this vaccine. That is the essential purpose of these pre-clinical studies, to demonstrate it works. So, to give an example of some of the measures we look at is, does the infected animal shed the virus which of course is an indication of infection.
So, if the vaccine is effective the exposed animal and the immunised exposed animal should not be shedding virus which is really one of the measures that we’ll be looking at. There are multitudes of others that we’ll be looking at to demonstrate that the vaccine itself is actually working. So, efficacy is the principal reason for clinical, pre-clinical studies.
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Lyndal Byford: Excellent. We now have a question from Frances Mao from the BBC. She wants to know, “How does this Australian test compare with vaccine trials elsewhere? What’s going on elsewhere in terms of vaccine work and is CSIRO the only organisation testing these two particular vaccines?”.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: That’s a great question. The answer is we know that there are a multitude of laboratories around the world that are, that are commencing studies at various levels but some of those are still at the stage before us in the sense of getting themselves ready for pre-clinical. Others have actually moved into Phase 1 human trials already. The point here is that the Oxford one we understand is also being tested in another species internationally. The reason for that is that the FDA requires, has the two animal rule before you can move into the human platform. But Trevor you may have some to add to that one as well.
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Prof Trevor Drew: Yes, one of the, you mentioned the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, it is very important that not only do we generate the, the level of evidence that shows that these vaccines are both safe and effective but also that they were done under a quality standard that is acceptable to the FDA. And, and here in Geelong at the Australian Animal and Health Laboratory we have, we do have those accreditations in place that, that allow us to deliver to the required standard. The, I do know that there is some work being done in the UK and also in the US on vaccine development and in particularly on trials of vaccines but as far as I understand it I think we here at CSIRO are the first people to have achieved this stage of trialling, pre-clinical trialling in an animal model.
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Lyndal Byford: And just a follow-up question for that, “Do you know how many vaccines are being tested globally at the moment and how many have gotten to this stage of testing?”.
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Dr. Rob Grenfell: I don’t, we actually don’t have a clear answer to that unfortunately. That would be a question I would put to CEPI to get a definitive answer.
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Prof Trevor Drew: Yes, and of course CEPI are not the only group that are trialling such vaccines although they are probably the major contributor to this, to this work.
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Lyndal Byford: Excellent. So, the next question is from Jackson Ryan from CNET. He has a couple of questions, “Can you explain the ferret model a bit more? Was this developed after SARS for a, you know, potential new disease Coronavirus and how similar is the physiology between a ferret and a human?”.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: That’s definitely your answer Trevor. You’re the international expert here.
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Prof Trevor Drew: Right, so, so the ferret we do know does have the specific receptor on cells in its lungs to be able to, for the virus to be able to infect it and this, this receptor is called Ace 2. And, this particular receptor is seen on a number of animals but certainly ferrets do provide the best model for us to use because of the similarity of that receptor with the human Ace 2. So, this virus is, is, seems to be able to replicate not only in the lungs but also in the intestine so, and this is why we have found that viruses excreted both in humans and in the ferrets in faeces as well as by the respiratory route. So, we’re finding that the virus is being excreted from the nose from the mouth and from the anus.
So, it’s very important that we understand fully what is happening not only in the human but also what is happening in the ferret and compare them. The one thing that we have seen is that in the small number of animals that we’ve done, relatively small compared to the number of people that are infected, that we are not seeing overt clinical disease.
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So, we’re not seeing disease in these animals although they do seem to perhaps have a slight temperature and they do replicate the virus. We are undertaking some detailed pathology at the moment to visualise the virus, see where it, how widely it is distributed within the, within the animal and therefore this will then provide us with a very nice comparator so that when we compare the disease or the replication of the virus in vaccinated animals, hopefully there won’t be any, but we will be able to apply a very stringent comparison with animals that have not been vaccinated. So, that’s in the deta… in the detail of it.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, so the ferret model is one that we have been familiar with, with using on a multitude of other pathogens but most importantly our team has deep experience in using it with, as Trevor mentioned, the previous outbreak of SARS in the early 2000s to demonstrate it worked. So, it meant tweaking that. We’ve also used this model in understanding pathogens such as Nipah and also Ebola in the past and so our scientists are highly skilled in using this as a, as a versatile model in understanding these particularly dangerous viral insults.
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Lyndal Byford: We’ve got a related question now from Sue Dunlevy. She says, “When ferrets were given a vaccine for SARS in 2003 they developed a more severe form of the disease when they contracted it even though they were being given a vaccine. Is there a risk this could happen again? Can you explain what happened then and does it mean that vaccine didn’t work?”.
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Prof Trevor Drew: Yes, so, so a very good pick up by that journalist and this is exactly why we are not only studying different vaccines but also by giv… when they are being given by different routes and that’s exactly why we’re doing this. We are obviously alert to the fact that in some instances when a, when a human responds to the disease sometimes that immune reaction can actually cause damage to the lungs in particular but possibly also damage to other organs.
So, this is why we are very careful and want to fully understand both the course of disease in an infected animal and also in a vaccinated and then challenged animal. Your journalist is absolutely right, that, that there was some res… an immune response and essentially what the basis of this immune response is that when cells of the immune system see an infected cell they tell it to kill itself. So, this, this, this signal can cause overt damage to the lung if the, if there are a lot of cells in the lung which are infected at that time. And there are also other arms of the immune system that can also damage the tissues so we need to make sure that any vaccine that we, that we trial, we need to measure its ability to produce a defensive immune sys… immune response which actually gets rid of the virus but without causing this overt damage to, to the tissues.
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Lyndal Byford: OK the next question is from Candice White from 10 News First. She said, “There must be some level of confidence in these vaccines that have led you to progress to these… this particular point. What is it about these two that you’re trialling?”.
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Prof Trevor Drew: These, these vaccines were chosen for trialling by a group comprising CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the WHO, the World Health Organisation. And both WHO and CEPI looked together at the vaccines that had been submitted and which were ready at the time that we were ready and they have chosen these two for the first trial.
I’m quite sure that there will be other submissions later on that we will then undertake and, to, and assess in due course. The main reason that, that these vaccines I understand were chosen was because they, they both had evidence that was provided which was, was compelling enough to the, to CEPI and WHO that they, that they were ready to go.
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The, the, the one from Oxford which is, as I mentioned is what we call a vector vaccine, it’s a defective adeno virus actually that, that is used and it, it, does allow a very, very small amount of expression of the, of the, of the viral protein of SARS but it doesn’t actually multiply in the host. So, so it’s a very good way of, of stimulating enough of the immunity to get a good response but it is not in any way risky because there’s no replication of the, of the virus, not like a, a, an attenuated virus that, that are sometimes used with vaccines. For the Inovio vaccine it is a nucleic acid vaccine. So, it’s essentially as I said using the genetic material of the, of the virus to, to generate some viral proteins by the, by the hosts themselves.
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Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. So, a question from Anna Maria Tallis, “Does this new understanding of the structure of the viral protein have any implications on the vaccine that’s being tested now?”.
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Prof Trevor Drew: The… we know that there is obviously a lot of emerging evidence around, emerging information around the particular structure of the viral protein that, that we’re targeting which is called the spike protein and this seems to be the one which offers the best chance of protection. But it may ultimately be that, that there may be other vaccine… other viral proteins involved which could be included in maybe a second generation or third generation vaccines. It’s still very early to know exactly what is, what is going to be the best vaccine but, but our models shows that it has the best chance of demonstrating that.
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Lyndal Byford: Thank you. Sharnelle Vella from 7News is just asking, “Do you know which other species, I think she means the Oxford vaccine, is being tested on? So, they’re both being tested on ferrets by CSIRO but do we know what other species they’re being tested on?”.
Prof Trevor Drew: I’m afraid I don’t know… I don’t know if you know Rob.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: No, we, we are… have scant information on the rest of the, we just know that by, by the grapevine that there were bits and pieces going on but most of this work again, a quest… these are questions that I would be directing towards CEPI to get the definitive answer.
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Lyndal Byford: OK, Sarah from Gizmodo Australia is asking, “What’s the timeline from now until a potential vaccine being released? When June comes around and your initial results are released, is that when it will go into human clinical trials? I think you mentioned it may go into human clinical trials earlier if results are promising”.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: That’s correct. So, so we’re expecting we will have our definitive answers by the end of June. Obviously we’ll be doing a lot of monitoring on there and also the, the manufacturers of these particular candidates will be in close contact with us with regards to how things are progressing. We understand that the Oxford example, was in fact actually being touted for Phase 1 human trials somewhere around about late April early June. That’s one of the information we’ve heard. Again, I would ask you to seek for clarification from CEPI for further information or clarification on those points but that’s actually our understanding on that.
As for the Inovio vaccine we’re, we’re unclear as to when they may start Phase 1 trials. The journey from Phase 1 to Phase 2 again depends on how safe and how effective the vaccine is and so through that progression these things take time again. We’re still sitting on that, that, you know, 18 months has been the time that we’ve actually put ourselves on these but we may in fact find we’re shortening because remember we’ve actually shortened our time to get to this point considerably. So, we, we are optimistic but the end of the year would be an optimist’s view, early next year would be closer to the reality all the things working well.
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Lyndal Byford: We just have a follow up question about ferrets from Jackson at CNET. He’s asking, “Does this mean if he has a ferret at home it could theoretically catch COVID without him even knowing?”.
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Prof Trevor Drew: Well, I think there is a theoretical risk. Whether that would actually happen I think would depend on a lot of different factors and I’m not really in a position to, to be able to judge whether or not a ferret in, in a, in an ordinary environment would, would become infected. Certainly what we are doing is we are actually getting quite a large amount of virus and, and spraying it into the nose of ferrets. So, it’s a rather, rather an artificial system of infecting an animal so, I can’t really say whether or not ferrets would actually acquire the infection naturally.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: So, Trevor probably the other point is to actually talk about the so called intermediary animal because I’m sure that everyone has read about the, the, I guess, almost the presumed evolution of this virus coming from bats but having an intermediary animal which is yet unidentified. In SARS we had a Pacific cat and in MERS we had the dromedary camel as being the so called intermediary. And the way the intermediary animal works is that the virus jumps from the primary species to the next species and actually goes through a mutation phase that allows it to spread to humans. So, bats are not infectious to humans to our knowledge. It’s the intermediary animal that is there.
The issue there of companion animals is a question that comes up a lot. The, the answer to that is we don’t know the answer to that at this stage and we are aware that some of our companion laboratories globally are starting to look at this, this perplexing problem as to whether humans are giving the animals the infections or whether animals are in fact giving those infections back. We have a lot of experience in RNA viruses particularly influenza and we do not that there are animal vectors in influenza. So, at this stage we need to sort out the knowledge as to, to where and what is the truth here.
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Prof Trevor Drew: If I could just briefly add to that. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that companion animals play any role in the epidemiology of, of this disease. So, so there is very, very scant evidence that animals can, there’s a case of two dogs and one cat I think is the entire database of evidence that companion animals can be, become infected and in all cases the, the, their owners were infected. So, we think that it’s far, far more likely that the animals were infected from the human than anything like the other way round.
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Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. And Sue Dunlevy from Newscorp asks, “Many people with COVID-19 don’t have any symptoms, others have mild symptoms while others, are, are, you know, very severe and dying. Will the same vaccine help everyone? Do we know if it is likely to be like the flu vaccine which is only effective in about 60% of people?”.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, look the, the answer to that Sue is simple at the moment. We don’t have answers to that, that’s why we’re doing these studies. So and, those are in fact actually the questions that need to be answered along the journey of doing this. The pre-clinical is pretty, is pretty firm on does it work or doesn’t it work, and is it safe or is it not safe. We move into the Phase 1s and 2 studies that’s actually when you start to work out its effectiveness across different populations. And it may not be until the Phase 3 studies, which are really what we call the post-market analysis, which will in fact give us the richness of the information that you’re asking in that question.
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Lyndal Byford: And so, Gabby Rogers from Nine is just wondering if you could elaborate on the, sort of, three distinct clusters of the virus that are round at the moment?
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Prof Trevor Drew: Well the… although we say there’s, there’s, there’s three clusters in fact every time we look there’s more of them. They are very closely related. Either we’re talking about, if we look at the genetic code of the virus it’s about 30,000 bases long. So, it’s, it’s quite a big virus in comparative terms and of those 30,000 bases maybe only one, two, three, four, five are different and this might constitute a slightly different clade.
In other cases we can see that there’s bits of the genetic, the genome of the virus, the, the genetic material of the virus has actually been, source elements have been deleted and this might also affect the, either the ability of the virus to, to grow in certain conditions. So, if we, so we can’t, we do know that these viruses don’t exist as a single virus but they actually exist as a cloud of subtly different viruses and this is called a Quasar species.
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And when you get this, this cloud of viruses moving into different parts of the world you may find that one particular clade within that cloud gets an advantage because of the, because of the environment that it’s in. It might find itself subtly more suitable to a new, to a new population of people than one in another, in another country and so that will then start to grow and that will then start to dominate as a different, a different clade of virus. We don’t know, we have no knowledge yet about what relevance this has to the disease that we see but that’s partially the reason why we’re being very assiduous in understanding the diversity of this virus as it’s disseminated around the world.
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Lyndal Byford: OK, we’ve got a couple more final questions. Candice White from 10 News is asking, “How much hope should people and the health sector place on this development? Are you heading into this with a high degree of confidence or are you being careful not to offer false hope?”.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, we are, we’re balanced with regards to where we are. I would have to say that we are optimistic. We’re buoyed by the collaboration that’s occurring globally with regards to trying to solve this problem. I cannot recall an example of where the world science teams have actually worked together in such harmony to try to solve a problem such as perplexing.
That in itself gives us a lot of hope in the sense of where we are. So, balanced in the sense that we know that the journey from here has still got a lot of technical pitfalls and a lot of challenges along the way. I guess the other message that I’m really clear, clear to put out is that public health measures that we’re undertaking at the moment in social distancing, case tracking and also quarantining are essential in decreasing the rate of new infections every day.
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The reason that we’re doing that is if we can keep the rate of new infections every day below certain levels we can in fact then mean that those poor individuals that do get severe disease and need to be hospitalised will receive the care they need. If we don’t do that we will end up with hospitals being overwhelmed and situations that we’re now seeing in places like New York, Italy and Spain. So, those public health measures need to be held in place until we are actually safe with vaccines that can, in fact, actually eradicate or at least control fairly systematically this disease and outbreak.
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Lyndal Byford: Fantastic. But just a couple of quick questions to finish on. “What do you think about the trials using the BCG vaccine as a way to generally boost the immune response to, you know, help the immune system fight against COVID-19?”. That’s from Anne Marie at Tallis.
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Prof Trevor Drew: Well, as, as a general comment we do know that particularly for respiratory diseases but more generally viral diseases there is a particular compound called interferon which is generated in response, as a very early response to, to infection. And we also know that this interferon is, is not specific to one particular virus, one particular pathogen.
So, it may well be that other vaccines may stimulate a, a sort of a non-specific induction of this interferon which may, if it’s timed absolutely perfectly, it may, may actually help to resist an infection by another virus. But I would say that interferon is generally speaking, is, is very transient in its induction and it disappears quite quickly. So, it’s certainly something that I would not rely on in any way. I don’t know Rob if you’ve got any comments to make being the medic here.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: The BCG vaccine remains a fascinating vaccine in the sense of how it works and I think from Trevor’s of how it works. We have seen some close reactivity across the micro-bacterium species so in things, diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis which are caused by these. We unfortunately haven’t seen its activity against some micro-bacterium elsewhere to any degree. But Australia largely ceased its immunisation programmes for BCG through, in the late ‘80s. So, there is a cohort of Australians who have had the BCG vaccination through that period, the 1970s to the 1980s in particular.
We’ll watch this. Obviously there’s, there’s no reason for us to leap out and take BCG for the vaccinations until the studies and I understand the Walter Eliza Institute is commencing some conducting of the study here with the Murdoch Institute. So, we’ll have to wait and see whether or not that actually offers us some degree of hope.
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Lyndal Byford: Just a couple of quick questions. You’ve I think described the types of vaccines that are in these two trials at CSIRO but could you give some broader background on the types of vaccines that are generally being trialled against COVID?
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Prof Trevor Drew: Sure, the, the other one that we know about, the University of Queensland, is also quite an innovative vaccine and what it essentially does, it is called a molecular clamp. So, it has a, a, a, base, a molecule in which the spike protein of the virus is embedded and then that is what constitutes the vaccine. So, it is a, simply a way of presenting the viral protein to the immune system of the host.
The little bit of a challenge there is that, that with these proteins on their own, even if they’re within this larger molecular clamp are not really able to induce immunity on their own very effectively. So, they have to have a chemical added to them and there have been many different chemicals used in this process over, over the years in various sorts of inactivated vaccines. These are, are viruses which have been killed and then mixed with a chemical and you’re inoculated with that.
So, there are, there are a whole range of choices of these different chemicals. They called adjuvants and these, the choice of adjuvant is something that has to be done through, really through trial and error. And I understand that is what the, our colleagues at the Doherty, sorry at the University of Queensland are, are working on at the moment, choosing the best adjuvant that will combine with their vaccine to induce the best immune response.
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Lyndal Byford: And will that be a vaccine that you will end up trialling?
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Prof Trevor Drew: We will, we certainly stand ready to trial it. We, we have the current trial going on at the moment. Because of the, the nature of this virus and its infectivity we, we are having to do it at a level of high-containment and we only have a limited amount of space to be able to do this work. So, once these trials are finished we will be ready to commence further, further trials.
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Lyndal Byford: And a final question now from Sarah from Gizmodo. She says, “Will all the vaccine candidates be tested with both nasal sprays and intramuscular injections and are there any other methods of delivery being tested?”.
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Dr Rob Grenfell: Yeah, we’re only aware that those are the two methods and again the Inovio vaccine is an injectable vaccine and it really depends on the platform that the vaccine sits on as to how it’s actually delivered. So, the attenuated viral ones can be administered by the intranasal route and have been successful in other human vaccines that we have used. So, that’s the method. It’s really just the technology that is used or the basis of that vaccine and its structure that will determine how you administer it.
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Lyndal Byford: So, just to clarify, the Oxford is being administered intranasally and the Inovio one is being administered intramuscularly? Oh that’s a terrible…
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Dr Rob Grenfell: So, so, so Inovio is intramuscular and the Oxford one is both, intranasal and intramuscular.
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Lyndal Byford: Fabulous. Well that brings us to the end of all of our questions.
[Image changes to show a slide showing a circle, half of which shows a photo of a person looking through a microscope and the other half the COVID-19 virus under a microscope and the CSIRO and ausSMCscimex logos and text appears: CSIRO begins testing COVID-19 vaccines, Media briefing 2 April 2020]
So, thank you to Rob and Trevor for answering those as diligently as you have and that’s it for today’s event and we’ll have a full recording of the presentation and the Question and Answer session available and we’ll post that to Scimex shortly but it’ll also be available from CSIRO.
[Image changes to show Lyndal talking to the camera and the Trevor and Rob can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
So, that’s it. Thanks again to today’s speakers and thank you everybody for joining us at this online briefing.