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What inspired you to specialize in the field of vaccine development?
After completing my medical specialist training, I undertook a PhD in the immunology of Type 1 diabetes at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne (Victoria, Australia). While the project focused on basic immunology mechanisms underlying this disease, our ultimate aim was to develop a vaccine against Type 1 diabetes. I was involved in human testing of various diabetes vaccines; but unfortunately, none of these were successful. This led to my view that such attempts were premature and more is needed to be known about both diabetes itself and what causes it in order to have a chance of designing an effective vaccine. I then had a chance meeting with Peter Cooper, a scientist from the Australian National University in Canberra, who had been working on a sugar compound called inulin, which he thought would make vaccines more effective. I tested this idea in mice in my laboratory at the Canberra Hospital in combination with a diabetes antigen to find whether like oil emulsion adjuvants it would help induce autoimmune diabetes; at the same time, I also tested it in combination with a more traditional hepatitis B vaccine. Thankfully it did not work for the diabetes antigen, but worked extremely well for the hepatitis B vaccine; so we then formed a company, Vaxine Pty Ltd (South Australia, Australia), to further advance this work, naming the sugar adjuvant we had discovered Advax (TM) . From there, we were successful in 2005 in getting major funding from the NIH to apply this idea to the development of more effective biodefense vaccines, such as for anthrax, pandemic influenza, ebola and smallpox. This is an exciting and fast-moving area. For example, we hope in the immediate future to test Advax for its ability to enhance the immunogenicity of a vaccine against the new H7N9 high pathogenicity avian influenza virus that has recently caused multiple deaths in China and could potentially turn into the next big pandemic virus.
As the Chairman of Vaxine Pty Ltd what do you feel has been the biggest achievement of Vaxine to date and what are the future directions of the company?
Perhaps the biggest achievement of Vaxine in a broader context...