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Bio-engineering lab to improve vaccine development

14 December 2005

A bio-engineering laboratory, expected to cut vaccine development times, has been officially opened at Monash by Mr Matt Viney, Victoria's Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation and Industry.

At the launch, from left, Professor Alan Trounson, Professor John Sheridan, Mr Matt Viney, Dr Gareth Forde, and Head of Chemical Engineering Professor Martin Rhodes.

The Victorian Endowment for Science, Knowledge and Innovation -- VESKI -- funded the new facility.

VESKI has awarded a Victorian Innovation Fellowship to Dr Gareth Forde, an expatriate Australian who has returned to Victoria after several years at Cambridge University, UK.

The new laboratory will allow Dr Forde to continue developing the technology needed to produce a new generation of DNA-based vaccines. The new technology is expected to cut development times for vaccines from nine months to one month.

Professor John Sheridan, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Acting Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, and Professor Alan Trounson, Director, Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories, also spoke at the ceremony.

The opening of the new facility at the Clayton campus followed a half-day bio-engineering symposium at which Professor Trounson, as keynote speaker, discussed the use of stem cells in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering.