New treatment aimed at 'stopping coronavirus in its tracks', page-74

No mention of Biotron or its compound anywhere including the CSIRO covid-19 website. CSIRO is all go for a vaccibe.

CSIRO BEGINS TESTING COVID-19 VACCINES

CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, has commenced the first stage of testing potential vaccines for COVID-19. The testing, expected to take three months, is underway at CSIRO’s high-containment biosecurity facility, the Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) in Geelong.

To prepare for disease outbreaks, last year CSIRO partnered with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a global group that aims to derail epidemics by speeding up the development of vaccines.

In January, CEPIengaged CSIROto start working on the virus SARS CoV-2, which causes the disease COVID-19. In consultation with the World Health Organisation, CEPI has identified vaccine candidates fromThe University of Oxford(UK) andInovio Pharmaceuticals Inc. (US) to undergo the first pre-clinical trials at CSIRO, with further candidates likely to follow.

The latest milestone builds on CSIRO’s growing work to tackle COVID-19, which has included scaling up other potential vaccine candidates at its biologics production facility in Melbourne.

CSIRO’s COVID-19 research so far

Current rapid work on COVID-19 spans virus and vaccine:

• CSIRO was the first research organisation outside of China to generate sufficient stock of the virus —using the virus strain isolated by the Doherty Institute — to enable pre-clinical studies and research on COVID-19.
• CSIRO successfullyestablished a biological modelin February 2020, the first in the world to confirm ferrets react to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). Researchers have quickly progressed to studying the course of infection in the animals – a crucial step in understanding if a vaccine will work.
• CSIRO researchers confirmed, after studying SARS CoV-2’s genomic sequence that the virus is presently changing into a number of distinct ‘clusters’ and are now starting to look at how this may also impact on the development of a vaccine.

For more information on CSIRO’s COVID-19 work, visit:www.csiro.au/COVID-19