"There's a lot of steps ahead of us but we'll try our best."Dr...

"There's a lot of steps ahead of us but we'll try our best."

Dr Chappell said their systems would use a DNA sequence provided by China, produce a protein and deliver it with an adjuvant to develop an immune response.

Dr Chappell said the virus was about 75 per cent similar to SARS so they could use what they knew about it to develop a vaccine.

He said bat viruses were the closest known relative to the virus, but there were "a lot of unknown" facts.

Dr Chappell said they aimed to produce an injectable dose to send syringes

with the vaccine around the world.

"The best-case scenario if everything works perfectly, we aim to have the material ready for dosing humans in 16 weeks and we've got a long way to go to get there," he said.

"Once it's shown to be safe in humans and effective, we'll be manufacturing doses in parallel and hopefully have something that's ready to be used at the scale required as soon as possible.

"Best-case scenario, this will be all over and we're not required. That's what we're hoping for but we're preparing for the worse so [we're expecting to produce] millions of doses.