Most vaccines need a ‘magic’ booster or adjuvant to boost our immune response to the vaccine. But the best adjuvants are too toxic for human use.
Now NZ scientists believe they have created a powerful and safe adjuvant and are trialling it as part of a new cancer vaccine.
How many viruses are there in your blood? How many dangerous nano-particles in your car exhaust?
qViro is a revolutionary New Zealand invention that offers the potential to quickly and cheaply answer these questions. It’s a feature of Ausbiotech – the national biotechnology conference – being held in Melbourne today.
The beta version is the size of a coffee grinder and can muster and count the number of viruses in a sample in minutes. This is a truly portable, desktop instrument that is powered from the USB drive of a computer.
Its competitors are the size of washing machines, may take days to get a result, or cost upwards of $50,000.
Ian Frazer Follow this link to Ian Frazer’s acceptance speech: http://www.uq.edu.au/news/?article=16238 Ian Frazer has created four vaccines to fight cervical cancer. Two of them-Gardasil and Cervarix-are now on the market. Both prevent infection with the virus responsible for most cervical cancers. The other two vaccines are in clinical trials and are designed to treat women…
Milk is complex, and understanding its molecular biology is a difficult but rewarding challenge. Not only are human and cow milk of huge social and economic importance, the milk of other animals reveals much about the evolution and development of mammals – including us. Victorian researchers have created a unique computing resource to share information…
Why don’t elephants (and humans) have thousands of little babies instead of one big one?
The world’s fastest growing abalone—the tropical donkey’s ear abalone, Haliotis asinina—can be bred to grow rapidly and reliably for aquaculture, Queensland biologists have found. And that makes it potentially a high value alternative crop for struggling prawn farmers. The researchers looked at whether they could speed up breeding of abalone for aquaculture using modern technology…
Jamie Rossjohn Proteins are the molecular machines of all life. Their shape is the key to understanding how they function, or malfunction. We can use this knowledge to understand the natural world, and to guide the development of tests, vaccines and drugs to fight disease. Jamie Rossjohn is one of Australia’s leaders in structural biology…