A more effective seasonal flu vaccine developed by South Australian researchers is about to be tested in clinical trials across the US.
The flu shot - believed to be the first human drug in the world to be completely designed by artificial intelligence - was working well early in the season, with effectiveness about 47 per cent in February.
But this decreased substantially during a second wave of a tougher flu strain, with effectiveness at just 9 per cent, as reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Flinders University professor Nikolai Petrovsky developed the technology behind the vaccine using adjuvants - substances that act as a turbocharger to enhance their ability to protect against infection.
He said artificial intelligence (AI) was going to play an increasingly dominant role in drug discovery and design.
Although computers have been used in the past to help in drug design, this vaccine technology was independently designed by an AI program called SAM (Search Algorithm for Ligands), created by the Flinders-based team.
Professor Petrovsky said current flu vaccines do provide some protection, but his team had demonstrated a lot can be done to improve their effectiveness.
Associate Professor Dimitar Sajkov, said a number of influenza patients seen this year had received the 2019 vaccine, highlighting the need to develop a better flu shot
"It is tremendous to see such a promising vaccine that we developed with the very first human trials being done at Flinders, progressing on to the world stage," Dr Sajkov said.
"In 2009 the team at Flinders were the first in the world to develop a new swine flu vaccine to combat the 2009 pandemic."
The Flinders trials confirmed both the effectiveness and speed with which this new vaccine could be delivered, resulting in many awards including the AMP National Innovation Award at the Telstra Business Awards.
The US clinical trial will take about 12 months to complete and aims to recruit 240 healthy volunteers.
The trial is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the US National Institutes of Health.
Professor Petrovsky expressed gratitude to the US government for providing long term funding for research that led to this breakthrough.
"It takes decades to develop a new human vaccine and this is extremely hard to achieve under Australian funding models which tend to be short term."
