In this video from the Australian Academy of Science Professor Sharon Lewin AO FAHMS, Director of the Doherty Institute, discusses the latest progress in COVID-19 vaccine development, clinical trials and why both collaboration and competition drive innovation in science.  

On vaccine development: There are hundreds of academics working on vaccine development for all sorts of infections including coronavirus. But to get a vaccine from a good idea in mice into a product in people usually takes a very long time, five to 10 years really, and not many vaccine ideas make it through to the clinic. A bit like how we do drug development. However, you do need a pipeline of new ideas because the ideas that actually get through to advanced stage testing and then might fall over, you need that pipeline ready to go over there for the next product. You can't wait and then go back to the pipeline. So yes, it is complicated, but vaccine development or vaccine ideas are that cornerstone of work in infection and immunity. So many, many academics have fantastic ideas. However, very few of them get the whole way.

On clinical trials: When you're developing a vaccine, usually you go through these steps in a linear fashion. You first of all show the vaccine induces an immune response or is immunogenic in animals. You then show that the immune response protects the animal from infection and that's sort of the preclinical development. And you have a vaccine that induces immunity, is safe in animals and it protects them from to becoming infected. And then the next phase would be to manufacture that vaccine. So it's at a high quality that you can give it to people and you then would enter phase one studies, which are usually small studies aimed at making sure the vaccine is safe and sometimes finding the right dose of the vaccine. And you might also measure whether it's immunogenic in humans. Then you would move to phase two studies, which is a larger study in humans. Again looking at safety and immunogenicity and it might have up to sort of several hundred people in a phase two study and then you'd move into phase three studies, which often involve thousands of people. And that's when you're evaluating in the field, does this vaccine protect people from infection? And if you go through that sort of linear steps of preclinical phase one, two and three, that could take five to 10 years.

On COVID-19 vaccine development: What's happening with coronavirus is very different. That whole timeline is being compressed. But it's quite expensive because it costs quite a bit of money to manufacture vaccines to a grade that's safe for humans, costs quite a bit of money to run phase one and two studies and you might be halfway through that when you show that your animal model shows no protection. So there's a little bit of financial risk, but you know, we're in a position at the moment where time is absolutely critical.

On collaboration in vaccine development: There's over a hundred of these early good ideas. Some of them are being led by small biotech, some of them by big pharma, some of them by academia. And there's not that much coordination at that level. And I don't know whether that's bad. You know, you want innovation. So you know, people that have a great idea should be able to pursue that great idea, but you want competition because that will drive science quicker, but you want to avoid duplication and it is quite a difficult thing to coordinate at that very early end globally.