A team of researchers led by Dr. Keith Chappell and Professor Paul Young at the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia, with funding from Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), is working to establish a vaccine pipeline that can deliver vaccines to affected communities within a timeframe that can halt the spread of an emerging epidemic. The team’s rapid response pipeline aims to produce a new vaccine, demonstrate its safety and indicators of efficacy, and manufacture more than 200,000 doses for potential field deployment. Triggering the pipeline only requires the sequence of the virus genome, something that can now be determined swiftly in the field from a patient sample. Viral surface proteins can then be synthesized in the laboratory, with UQ’s molecular clamp technology ensuring the recombinant protein produced will fold into a structure that reliably mimics the active form of the same protein that’s present on the virus’s surface.
To facilitate the rapid production of their vaccine candidates, the UQ team has chosen the Gibco ExpiCHO Expression System. The ExpiCHO system is uniquely suited to this project since the same cGMP-banked ExpiCHO-S Cells can be used for the entire manufacturing process: from early preclinical work using transient expression, to full-scale manufacturing employing a clonally selected, high expression–stable cell line. UQ is proud to be working to implement and validate this rapid-response vaccine pipeline, which they hope will be an important component of the global response against future viral epidemics.
