This session will provide a comprehensive overview of the worldwide COVID-19 vaccine landscape. It will cover the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and the vaccine approaches being taken to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, including some of the more novel approaches. It will describe the frontrunner constructs in pre-clinical and clinical trials and summarise the emerging results from phase I to III clinical trials. It will also discuss some of the many challenges and how these are being overcome, including safety issues, scale-up and worldwide distribution.
Professor Katie Flanagan is Head of Infectious Diseases at Launceston General Hospital, Clinical Professor at the University of Tasmania; Adjunct Professor in the School of Health and Biomedical Science at RMIT; and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Immunology and Pathology at Monash University. She is Honorary Secretary of the Australian Society for Infectious Diseases (ASID) and Chair of the ASID Vaccination Special Interest Group (VACSIG). Katie is also member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) and Chair of the ATAGI COVID-19 Vaccine Utilisation and Prioritisation Committee. Alongside her clinical role she has a long history of infectious diseases and vaccine research worldwide. Her PhD at Oxford University was in the immunology of malaria vaccine design. She has led multiple clinical trials of novel and licensed vaccines, with a particular interest in sex differences in immunity and non-targeted effects of vaccines. Her current research involves applying systems biology techniques to study the impact of changing immunity in early life and with advancing age on responses to vaccination.