Chicken virus key to vaccine development

Published: 2-Nov-2005


Researchers at the University of South Australia have started developing novel vaccines by using a chicken virus to stimulate or suppress the body's immune system.

Dr John Hayball, a biomedical researcher from UniSA's Sansom Institute, is interested in improving vaccines to use in the treatment of infections, autoimmune diseases and cancer. Along with Dr Michael Brown (Royal Adelaide Hospital) and Dr Paul Howley (Virax Holdings) he recently won a three-year Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant with industry partner Virax Holdings to develop fowlpox virus vector technology.

Virax - a biotechnology company based in Melbourne that is developing various promising immune-based therapies for HIV/AIDS, other infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases and cancer - has already used the technology to develop an HIV vaccine that is in clinical use, and is funding the development of a novel fowlpox virus-based vaccine for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer.

'Effective treatment of some diseases such as cancer requires the body's immune system to be triggered into action. On the other hand, autoimmune diseases are better treated if the immune system can be dampened,' said Dr Hayball. 'We can select genes that work against a disease and insert them into a virus, in our case the fowlpox virus. If we inject the modified virus into a patient where it targets certain immune cells, then we might be able to switch the immune system on or off and so help the body to treat itself.'

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