A big couple of months for grants – we were humbled to receive a $3m MRFF award to study vaccines against the new COVID variants. Adam, Jen, Hyon-Xhi, Wen Shi, Robyn, Kathleen, Isaac, Hannah and Jane did a fantastic job generating data and putting the grant together. We’re grateful to our partners Kanta Subbarao at the Doherty, Trent Munro at UQ, Jason Lickliter at Nucleus Network, Wai-Hong Tham at WEHI, Kylie Quinn at RMIT, Miles Davenport at UNSW and many others for helping out so generously.
We recently held a “COVID Community forum” recently to thank all our dedicated participants of all our many research studies. It was a great chance to chat and say a heartfelt thanks, give a brief update on our work and for our scientists to meet some of the participants and vice versa. We wouldn’t have made nearly the headway on COVID that we have without the generous help of people enrolling in our studies.
We’ve been working with Jesse Toe and others from the research and commercialisation team at the University on trying to move our COVID treatments and vaccines towards human trials. Jesse kindly gave us a coffee mug for all our work.
Penny recently started with our group as an RA working with Hyon-Xhi and Jen. Thi Do has also started work with Marios as an RA and plans to start a PhD with us in 2022. Timon passed his PhD and is off to Amsterdam for a post-doc there. Hannah passed her PhD also and may be off to Canberra later in the year.