Roll up those sleeves and get your arm holes ready, a new vaccine may be on the horizon. Yep, there’s not one but two new COVID jabs being developed thanks to a couple of medical gods in Melbourne, and my Vaxussy is ready. Jabussy? I dunno, just roll with it.
The two new vaccines are being developed by the Doherty Institute and Monash University respectively. According to both parties, this new bad boy could potentially be more effective than every vaccine currently out there. Hot stuff.
Both jabs will soon start the human trial phase at the exact same time, which is apparently a “world-first” for vaccines but I’m not a nerd so stuff like that doesn’t excite me. What does excite however is the idea of being absolutely railed by the world’s most effective COVID vaccine. Get! It! In! Me!
“We actually think our vaccine is going to be better than the existing ones — not just as good as them,” Leader of Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences’ vax team, Professor Colin Pouton told the Herald Sun.
“We are really excited about getting into the clinic because we need to see that it’s working in humans.
“We’re very confident, but we need to see it’s working.”
The vaccines aim to make a more “targeted attack” against COVID than your well-known Pfizer or AstraZeneca girlies do.
Bear with me for a moment because I’m about to get sciencey.
Both of these vaccines claim to be more effective due to the fact that they purposely target the tip of COVID’s spike protein, which is the most dangerous area. Other vaccines just target the entire protein in general, which gets the general job done but is not as laser-focused.
Before these jabs can get in our arms though they both must pass the trial stage. A select group of 114 Melburnians will be jabbed with one of the vaccines at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. This stage is expected to go for about three months and will start very soon.
“There’s a number of reasons why we think they’re going to be better,” Doherty Institute director Professor Sharon Lewin told the Herald Sun.
“This vaccine targets a smaller part of the spike protein and therefore it may give you a more efficient immune response, so your immune response isn’t wasting time on the other parts of that spike protein.
“We’ve had some very good results in the mouse models showing that the vaccines are highly immunogenic and they protect very well from infection, including from other variants.”
Well, there you have it folks. It may take some time until we see either of these Melbourne vaccines out in the world strutting their juices, but someday soon we may have said juices swimming inside of us. Doesn’t that excite you?
