مصاحبه با مدیر شرکت Vaxine در مورد واکسن ایرانی-استرالیایی اسپایکوژن
uh hi everybody it's a great pleasure that we have professor nikolai petrovsky in this interview today uh as a good introduction nicolai petrovsky is a professor of medicine at flinders university director of endocrinology at flinders medical center vice president of international immunomix society and founder of vaccine that is a company founded by national institute of health to develop novel vaccine technologies this company has developed vaccine against influenza hepatitis b sting allergy malaria japanese encephalitis rabies and hiv i'm very happy that we have you here and let me give the mark if you like to have a short introduction at the beginning well thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk to your audience today so what my major role is is actually as a physician so i care for patients and for the last 30 years or so since i i did my phd as well as my medical degree i've been trying to look at how research can help prevent disease and and treat disease and and so for the last 20 years we've been particularly focused not just on vaccines but specifically on pandemic vaccines and i got involved in pandemic vaccines uh in 2004 when we had the the sars original sars outbreak which you know was a potential pandemic fortunately it got stopped by quarantine and and and much more aggressive uh action um at the start and and it was managed to be eradicated but uh since then i've worked on pandemic influenza vaccines on mers vaccines in camels and of course we when we recognize that there was a problem with with covert very early last year we said we have to make a covert vaccine so that's what i've been doing for the last 18 months is is very much focusing on how do we solve the covert problem both from the point of view of a vaccine but we've also been doing screening for drugs to treat covert as well so so we've been very busy yeah it's very interesting uh actually for the first question i'd like to ask about your company because many people in iran don't know about the company vaccine could you please introduce your company for us actually i told i told a brief introduction but if you tell us more it will be great so vaccine was a company that i founded uh now in 2002 so we're now 19 years old so we're not a young company um and you know i founded it to to focus on development of of vaccines uh particularly against bio threats um and so you know predominantly obviously pandemics so we have some very unique technologies that we use so very cutting edge we make synthetic proteins using insect cells and so we're able to trick the insect cells you know which are grown in a broth into making a protein from the virus but without using the actual pandemic virus we get the insect cells to make the protein we then purify the protein and we also have a special sugar plant sugar which we then add to the protein and that supercharges the vaccine but at the same time because we're using protein and sugar these are normal components of the human body so we don't see any of the safety or bad side effects that you know we've heard reported for some of the other vaccines so what we're trying to achieve is something that's extremely safe but also extremely effective and and we believe our technology and the reason why the u.s government has really supported us for so long in building that technology is obviously they share our belief that this is really the best technology to tackle a pandemic so obviously we have to wait until the clinical trials are finished before we can claim success but already we've seen some pretty impressive results in animal models where we challenge with the virus and can show protection so we're very hopeful that the clinical trials will similarly show extremely good levels of protection wonderful wonderful uh just before jumping to the spikogen vaccine i would like to ask does your company have any vaccine uh other other than spygen i mean currently under commercial production if yes what are they for and where do you export them so at the moment because we're focused on pandemic vaccines obviously you only get to market a pandemic vaccine when you have a pandemic and pandemics fortunately don't happen so often maybe every 15 years or so so currently we don't have a vaccine on the market because we we're just dealing with the new pandemic we did develop a successful swine flu vaccine for during the swine flu pandemic in 2009 but of course that is no longer an issue so but we have a lot of experience in taking these vaccines into human trials and proving they they work um and of course we're we're hoping that spikogen uh will be another example of that success hopefully hopefully uh this question is actually a specifically my interesting question and probably many other biologists and the question is that looking at many successful recombinant vaccines in the past like hepatitis b hpv diphtheria and so on i myself expected that this generation of vaccines would be the first developed against covet 19. were you surprised about the development of mrna vaccines against kobet yes so in fact you know we ourselves have been playing with mrna vaccines in animals for a number of years but the reason that we developed a protein based vaccine for covert at the beginning of last year and and put the mrna vaccine on the shelf was that we thought it was premature there just wasn't any experience in humans there was no safety data so our view and a lot of other vaccine experts was that you know it was too early because we didn't have any safety data on mrna so so we were shocked when of course the us government bypassed any need for animal safety data or long-term human safety data and and approved those vaccines for you so it caught everyone by surprise because normally that wouldn't happen you know you would need years and years of human data uh in clinical trials before you would ever get permission uh to give it to to everybody um so so yes we ha i have to admit but i wasn't the only scientist or vaccine developer who was shocked when that happened was it the right decision well the answer is we won't know until we see what the long-term consequences of those technologies are already obviously we're seeing you know sided effects that weren't predicted uh 12 months ago and i think you know with the mrna we're seeing myocarditis in young men and that was completely unexpected but you know it looks to be real and of course with the astrazenec and no virus type approach you know we we've all heard about the problems of blood clots and and deaths from that um so so yeah i guess we thought a protein-based approach was the best approach we knew that it was going to take at least a year because to develop a synthetic protein to produce it to characterize it you know is extremely complex and so you know the fastest vaccine development uh you know previously uh i think was four years for mumps um and and so we were thinking look we'll take about a year to a year and a half and and we're obviously very close now to the end of that journey so so the fact that other vaccines came in earlier was a surprise we still think that protein based vaccines as you mentioned the the hepatitis b the human papillomavir these are some of the best vaccines ever made so we think that when the protein vaccines finally get on the market they will take over the market from these other technologies but of course we're going to need to see the data and but if we're right we think everyone will switch to protein vaccines going forward and again covert is not going to go away uh you know it's probably here forever and uh which is the reality and so we're going to need vaccines that we can have you know uh you know in the future uh maybe indefinitely and and so we need very safe reliable vaccines and i think protein based uh synthetic you know protein based vaccines are the perfect answer but it has taken a bit longer yeah yeah i do i agree actually i took that hepatitis b vaccine when i was young like 15 16 and i still have those antibodies in my body in the last test they showed i have a huge amount of that antibody on my body uh they are safe i do i agree uh let's see how it will be the result of the next and last actually human trial phase let me ask you about the collaboration with cinegen uh how did this happen i mean regarding the u.s sanction against iran most of the companies hesitate to cooperate with iranian companies so we are interested to know about this collaboration and how it began so we've always as a company because i'm a clinician so to me you know i'm not particularly interested in politics my job is to help people and and you know prevent disease and prevent suffering and and i see that as a global responsibility and i think most doctors have the same attitude if they're in a war and an enemy is wounded you know the doctor from this side will treat the wounded from the other side they don't discriminate so obviously you know my view is i want to see my vaccine available to everyone in every country that has a problem with covet 19 and i'm not going to be influenced by the politics uh i think that would be you know again um against the culture of our company our company has always said in a pandemic we want to help everybody the poorest people you know they can come from different politics we don't care um because we see that as our job and and so when synergen approached us last year because they were looking again for potential solutions and they assessed our technology as being one of the best in the world based on on the data at that time of course we we were very happy to engage with them we realized they were incredibly good company we wouldn't just partner with any company you know even in the us like we select our partners and but cinegen had all of the right credentials they're a very young enthusiastic team they very much care about people so you know as a drug company they're not there just for profit that they you could see that they see their role as as providing medicines to stop disease so they shared the same vision that we shared that the health of people is the only thing that's important and as if a company we can help that by working together then i think you know we had such a common philosophy that it was a natural fit even if as you say you know there may be issues with with politics elsewhere we put that aside the idea here was just to help uh people and and work together and it's been a really a tremendous collaboration we've been so impressed with you know the quality of their work with their dedication with the fact they don't cut corners they do everything uh you know very properly um it's been a great experience and and we've been surprised and other people now is asking us the same question and are similarly surprised when they see the quality of the work the quality of the data you know because i think as you're right there's been a lot of propaganda uh you know people go oh an iranian company and maybe it's the quality is not uh as good it's not true and as i say cinegen uh have really amazed us in how professional they are perfect that's that's amazing just uh a quick uh question in the apprentices did you come to iran did you travel to iran to check the company or to visit the company no so as you know in australia we can't leave australia oh i completely forgot oh yeah yeah yeah so yeah synergen did invite uh me to go over to the launch of the phase two trial and i had to apologize and say it's not possible uh you know because of the you know the the situation with obviously australia not allowing people in or out um and and anyway i mean that the problem would be that we're just too busy to even be able to take a week off to travel so hopefully when this is all over when we've uh when our vaccine has solved the problem globally certainly it will be one of the first places that i'll visit because i'd love to to meet the team in person we do a lot of zoom calls um so i know the team very well but uh it would be wonderful to sit down uh you know with them in person yeah it would be a great trouble i promise you uh actually uh the next question is about the uh kind of the collaboration i mean could you please let us know how synergent collaborates with vaccine i mean uh where they involved in designing the vaccine or they are just responsible for production of the spicogen or anything else yes so obviously we developed all the technology here and it's a cutting-edge technology so it's not something that you know people could do easily so we transferred all of the tools um you know to cinegen so that they can produce the the vaccine but ultimately it is you know our vaccine so we you know we um design the vaccine we produce it here and then we transfer the different pieces to synogin and then they have to work out how to produce it you know using their factories in iran so it's very much a collaboration but in terms of the science because there's 20 years of investment in the science obviously that that comes from our side but their job is to is to manufacture it to maintain the quality uh and then to obviously make it available uh in iran brilliant thank you thank you for your answer and uh i wanna ask about the result of uh animal or human uh clinical trials could you please inform us about the results of the animal or human phase one clinical trials where these results published in any journal and if yes how were the results i mean the percentage of immunization so so obviously in in terms of the effectiveness of a vaccine that is mainly assessed in animal models because we can't challenge humans with the virus so the only time you get human protection data is in phase three which so so we're in phase three now but um so phase one and two are just to establish really the safety of the vaccine which we've successfully done and also to look at what types of antibodies the the vaccine is producing in in the human subjects and does that antibody kill the virus if you put it in a test tube and we've been able to to show that but most as i say of the the real data on how well does the vaccine work we generate in animals so ranging from hamsters to ferrets to monkeys we've seen extremely good protection across all of them which is is obviously very very promising we've also seen that we are blocking transmission of the virus which is important so if we have someone who's vaccinated or an animal that's vaccinated and we give them the virus those animals are not infecting other animals who haven't been vaccinated which is quite exciting because no one else really has shown that so we think that our vaccine has these unique abilities and we've also been testing what happens if in the animals if we vaccinate with our vaccine and then we give them the different uh variant viruses so you know the south african virus or the delta virus and and obviously we're collecting uh data to support the fact that our vaccine does protect against uh the different variants as well as the original uh virus uh yes so we've published um the uh the mouse and the the ferret challenge data it's actually um in fact i think the journal is just about to publish the paper it's been accepted and uh at the moment we're we're preparing the monkey study for publication and also the the phase one and phase two clinical trial data for publication so it's a lot of work but uh i guess our focus is very much on getting the vaccine all the way through because the academic side and publishing side of course is important but the priority is actually getting the vaccine available yeah exactly that's right oh actually you partially answered my next question but let me ask because i plan to ask uh you are ever of the new source cover strains like delta and lambda that have chronovirus pygiene mutations so do you expect these mutations will affect the spicogen fpkc or can we expect second and third generations of spicogen so we've to be honest we already um are producing second and third generation spikogen um because it's not in when you're in a pandemic you don't just do it one thing at a time uh you do multiple things so you know we have second and third generation uh really ready to roll uh obviously you know we we need to get those uh new you know versions of the vaccine um you know we've done animal testing we then will need to do some human testing but yes we're ready you know we're just preparing for instance lambda as we speak um to include it in the vaccine because you know it could be the next delta um so we're always looking at the different viruses and and building the the vaccine specifically for those variants so if it's needed we can move immediately to the next generation so so yeah we can't sit on our hands unfortunately um you know the virus is going to keep changing and the beauty of of the platform we're using for spicogen is we designed it so you could make very very fast changes some of the other vaccines it's not quite so easy to change them and so that's one of the advantages of the technology yeah yeah that's really interesting uh actually it's my last question and as the last question let me ask when do you think the vaccine will be available for public immunization so you know the the answer is um really as soon as we get the phase three data um and uh you know if the vaccine is giving the protection that we expect um then of course we would expect that it would be authorized uh for sale at that time so you know that could be as little as two or three months away so already we have to prepare for that possibility because we don't want to end in a situation where it gets approved but we don't have any vaccine and we've seen that happen for instance with sputnik where you know the russians haven't been able to supply countries including iran with the amount of vaccine they promised so it's not just a matter of developing the vaccine but also making sure that when the vaccine is approved that the biggest problem is going to be meeting the demand because i think already you know we have people all around the world saying we want you know your vaccine we want a recombinant protein vaccine so the minute it's approved the problem is going to be uh how do we meet that demand yeah yeah that's really true oh perfect uh is there anything that you want to say and i didn't ask about no look i think you asked all the right questions that's fine that's perfect i'm really happy that you uh attended in this interview that we had uh in this interview it can make much more trust much more uh connections between two countries especially people probably who are scared from taking vaccines because they know this generation of vaccine could be very safe and very effective thank you so much for attending on this interview a it's been a pleasure and as i say anything we can do to improve relations between countries uh you know you know covet is a global crisis there's no country that's escaped it's one opportunity for every country to come together actually to work out how to solve this this crisis so we're hopeful that this should bring everyone closer together not not drive them further apart yeah hopefully thank you a lot thank you a lot thanks for giving your time to us have a nice day pleasure okay see you then bye
2021-08-22 19:52
