Australian University to Collaborate with Moderna for mRNA Vaccine Research

Scott Morrison touring the University of Queensland Vaccine Lab to look over their research as they try to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus on Oct. 12, 2020 in Brisbane, Australia. (Darren England/Getty Images)

The University of Queensland announced its collaboration with Moderna to use mRNA research for vaccine development of diseases that pose risks of causing future pandemics.

The university previously collaborated with CSL—a major biotechnology firm now responsible for the manufacturing of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Australia—on producing a COVID-19 vaccine.

The deal was called off, however, by the Australian government in December 2020 after trials found participants testing false positive to HIV.

UQ’s new partnership with Moderna “will focus on diseases that have the potential to emerge as a future pandemic and diseases that are already a problem in low and middle-income countries, like dengue fever, malaria, tuberculosis and the zika virus,” Prof. Paul Young from UQ said.

Other diseases in consideration include Group A Streptococcus and Whitmore’s disease, which is present in the subtropical areas of Northern Australia.

“This partnership is a coup for UQ with advances in vaccine delivery potentially saving thousands of lives in developing countries,” he said.

In a statement released on Mar. 10, UQ said that the partnership arranged by molecular bioscience researchers Prof. Mark Walker and Prof. Paul Young would allow UQ’s team “to access Moderna’s mRNA platform” to develop vaccines for emerging and neglected diseases.

“Moderna will set up a portal where researchers in this collaborative agreement will have access to their mRNA technology to target these identified pathogens,” Young said.

Walker said that UQ would be getting the “full package” with the university providing the mRNA sequences of the microbial, and Moderna “would provide back to us a formulated vaccine that we would put into pre-clinical studies,” Walker said.

“UQ brings disease-specific expertise to be able to design and test vaccines and demonstrate efficacy—those are the things that UQ does very well,” he said.

Walker said that with this partnership, there is “no doubt that the production of vaccines to target these diseases will be delivered more quickly.”

“Rapid turnaround technology and the identification of a new vaccine to clinical use stage could happen in as little as 100 days,” he said.

Meanwhile, Young mentioned that the partnership could also result in commercial opportunities.

“For example, if the mRNA technology can be successfully applied to generate an effective dengue vaccine, something that has been a goal for many decades, then not only will we be addressing a long-term global disease threat but also helping to support our local biotechnology industry.”

The Zika virus, Group A streptococcus and Whitmore’s disease all have no vaccine approved for use, despite decades of research.

Malaria, tuberculosis, and the dengue virus all have vaccines approved for use, though the vaccines have low efficacy due to complexity in the biomechanism of the diseases.

Young told the Epoch Times in an email that while"this collaborative venture is very much in the discovery research space and there are no guaranteed outcomes... given the success of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccine technology offers a new, validated approach to the delivery of other candidate vaccines.”

Commercial Interests Colliding with Public Health

However, since the COVID-19 vaccine response, there have been growing concerns of “commercial interests colliding with public health,” as mentioned by Nikolai Petrovsky, renowned Australian researcher behind the Australian protein vaccine Spikogen and endocrinologist.

Petrovsky told The Epoch Times that COVID-19 had been used as a springboard for drug firms to secure their dominance in the pharmaceutical industry using mRNA vaccines as the payoff.

Before the pandemic, mRNA vaccines had yet to be approved for broader use in humans. The relatively new technology delivers single-stranded RNA molecules that instruct the body to make a specific protein. The new protein made in the body now “trains” the body’s cells to create an immune response.

Whilst there has been much excitement around the rollout of the technology during the pandemic, researchers conceded that the platform is in its infancy compared to tried-and-tested platforms like protein-based vaccines.

Petrovsky said that many firms, however, were engaged in the “massive hype” around mRNA vaccines, and once the first movers broke ground on a viable vaccine model, what ensued was a “follow the leader” type mentality—typical in corporate competition.

“There wasn’t a lot of time for people to sit down and think things through (during the pandemic). Most companies just grabbed whatever was on the shelf, or in the case of Pfizer, grabbed another small company, BioNTech, and ran with it,” he said.

Once Pfizer and AstraZeneca had successfully settled on their approach to the vaccine, other firms followed suit with Sputnik and Johnson and Johnson “copying” the adenovirus viral vector model of AstraZeneca and Moderna on mRNA.

“Protein sort of got lost in all that,” Petrovsky said. “I guess it was almost euphoria of this completely new technology. It’s exciting, and it sounds sexy.”

But there is growing concern that the new technology could have unintended side effects, with recent findings by a Swedish study on Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines highlighting the consequence between the competition of commercialism and public health.

The study found that when exposed to Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, human liver cells in the lab converted the viral mRNA into DNA as fast as 6 hours after exposure despite CDC claiming that the vaccine would not interact at all with DNA.

For UQ, a university renowned for its research in molecular biology, a commercial partnership poses concerns of competitions of interests between academic research and commercial success.

UQ, however, maintained that “the primary objective of this initiative is to stimulate and support research that addresses the currently unmet needs of vaccine development for neglected diseases of global importance.”

“Commercial opportunities are very much down the line and only where that ultimately supports the dissemination of successful vaccines to the populations that need them.”