USQ whoops it up for cough vaccine

Australian developers of a genetically-engineered vaccine against whooping cough are taking some of the wraps off their work in a bid to attract funding for human clinical trials.

International patent applications were filed in December on the vaccine which the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has been quietly developing for the past five years.

Research team leader Prof TK Mukkur said the new vaccine enjoys several potential advantages over existing vaccines for whooping cough, a disease which still kills up to 600,000 children worldwide per year.

As well as being non-invasive -- that is, delivered by nasal drops or sprays rather than by injection -- the new vaccine should be cheaper to make, he said.

It is also claimed to cause fewer side-effects than the injectable whole-cell pertussis vaccine DTwP which has been a major weapon against whooping cough for much of the past 50 years.

The research is jointly funded by USQ and Brisbane company Delta Biotechnology.

A microbiologist who worked in North America before coming to USQ, Mukkur declined to elaborate on the breakthrough that led to the new vaccine. "I'll just say we made a discovery and have had good luck with the development of a genetically-engineered, non-invasive whooping cough vaccine that has the potential to be used intranasally," he said.

Work to date has been based on a mouse model however if fundraising efforts are successful, development could advance to Phase I human clinical trials within 12 to 18 months, Mukkur said.

Limited toxicology studies have been done and the team is in the process of cross-checking its results by evaluating its vaccine in a second mouse model.

The global market for whooping cough vaccine market is an estimated $AUD2.9 billion annually.

Mukkur publicly flagged the breakthrough earlier this year while presenting a paper on the usefulness of therapeutic antibodies against bacterial infectious diseases at a science conference in India.

The development of vaccines against human and animal infectious diseases is a principal field of research for Mukkur's five-member USQ research lab.

Another is the identification of immunomodulatory compounds from natural products which has pinpointed two groups of molecules that could play an important role in combating intracellular infectious diseases and cancer.