David Maher

And that can have a small impact on the effectiveness of the vaccine.

And you know, every so often we get a season where you might get this mismatch and it makes the vaccine not as effective as it should be.

That issue is completely removed with the use of the mammalian cells because they're a better match to us as people.

When we grow these cells in the laboratory, we just want a very safe cell line that can be used over and over again.

And this cell line, which was produced years ago, like you said, it's just a very convenient, easy way to grow the cells in the laboratory rather than using human cells.

We built this new facility out at Tullamarine.

It's replacing the facility we had here in Melbourne that used the egg based technology.

It's capable of producing 150 million doses of pandemic vaccine within the first wave of the pandemic, which is around about sort of four to six months time.

So we target to have at least two doses for every Australian in those initial months of a pandemic.

We had the same sort of timeframes for the egg-based vaccines.

With the new technology, I think it just adds an enormous amount of robustness, better matches, supply chain security control, and we can store all of the raw materials.

It can be sitting there as a stockpile for us, ready to go, rather than needing a risky supply chain with chickens.

It is.

I actually got my Fluad shot yesterday, which is giving away my age a bit.

Yeah, so we still make that in eggs.

So eggs are still a very good method for making the flu vaccine in terms of its effectiveness.

We are looking eventually to shift to a cell-based vaccine for the elderly, but that's still a couple of years away.

Yeah, it's to do with the growth characteristics of the individual strains.

Some strains grow better in eggs and in cell.

And so the WHO, the World Health Organization, does all of the surveillance globally and chooses the strains for the individual seasons.