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RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

Vaccine technologies used to develop COVID-19 vaccines

Paul Selleck A * and Ian Macreadie B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A CSIRO Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, Private Bag 24, Geelong, Vic. 3220, Australia.

B School of Science, RMIT University, Bundoora, Vic. 3083, Australia.




Paul Selleck has been at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, now the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness since, 1983. In this time he was head of the Avian Disease Diagnostic Laboratory, incorporating the National, OIE and FAO Reference Laboratory for Avian Influenza and Newcastle Disease and an OIE Reference Expert for Avian Influenza and Newcastle Disease. He was also involved in the Australian equine and swine influenza outbreaks in 2007 and 2009 respectively and has worked with Hendra, Nipah and SARS at physical containment level 4. Paul now works extensively in Asia, running training courses on biosafety and biosecurity and laboratory diagnosis. He also audits laboratories and runs training courses on quality systems and ISO laboratory accreditation.



Ian Macreadie is an Honorary Professor of RMIT University and is Editor-in-Chief of Microbiology Australia. In the 1980s with colleagues at CSIRO he developed a viral subunit vaccine for infectious bursal disease virus, using a novel yeast expression system. He maintains a keen interest in preventatives for SARS-CoV-2.

* Correspondence to: Paul.Selleck@csiro.au

Microbiology Australia 43(1) 40-43 https://doi.org/10.1071/MA22013
Submitted: 1 February 2022  Accepted: 20 February 2022   Published: 14 April 2022

© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the ASM. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY).

Abstract

In December 2019, cases of atypical pneumonia were diagnosed in hospital patients in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. The disease, now known as COVID-19 is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). As case numbers increased and spread across the planet many companies scrambled to develop vaccines to control the infection and disease. Prior research on SARS-CoV-1, new vaccine technologies and unprecedented funding have allowed vaccines to be developed and approved in record time, without the usual pauses and bypassing any of the requirements of the vaccine approval process. This paper is a review of the current literature on some of the vaccines targeting SARS-CoV-2 and of the new technologies used to produce them.

Keywords: cell culture, COVID-19 vaccines, expression systems, recombinant virus vaccines, SARS-CoV-2, subunit vaccines, vaccines, vaccine technologies.


References

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