 Don't you think it's time we stopped using eggs to make vaccines? That technology was invented in the 1930s, well before the structure of DNA was figured out. With modern technology, we can sequence a virus in days, but it can take months or years to turn that into an effective vaccine. And when we get a vaccine, it's too expensive to use in the developing world. That's not good enough. Modern biotechnology and bioengineering can change that. At the University of Queensland, we are researching new approaches to vaccine engineering that will completely change the way vaccines are designed and made. We make recombinant protein in cells such as E. coli. This cell is already used to make medicines such as insulin. For vaccines, we have made it so productive that it can make millions of doses of vaccine per litre of fermentation liquid in 24 hours. We then purify the protein using industry accepted methods for the large-scale recovery of biological products. Once we have pure protein, we assemble it into a particle inside a chemical reactor using scalable chemical engineering approaches. This particle is called a virus-like particle, or VLP. It is not infectious, but to your immune system it looks like the real thing. So your immune system learns to fight a real virus by practicing on our VLP first. VLPs are already used as vaccines. What we've done is figure out how to mass produce VLPs very quickly and at a fraction of their current cost, and to use them to address new diseases. Our advantages of cost and speed mean we can probably do things never before dreamed of. For example, mass produce new vaccine against influenza before a pandemic starts, and deliver very cheap vaccine to the developing world. Because we have a platform technology, we can address many different diseases. We have active research into malaria, influenza and rotavirus. Now, let's go into the laboratory and the team can tell you about our latest research results. The VLP platform can be used against different diseases. We do this by first selecting a disease-specific module and then incorporating that into the VLP platform. There are concerns that this approach will not work if people already have antibodies to the VLP platform. We also wonder whether you can make the vaccine better simply by adding extra disease-specific modules. So these are questions we've answered in the paper published in the biotech and bioengineering journal recently. We've designed VLPs containing a specific module for group A stradococcus, a highly contagious bacterium that causes serious heart problems in developing countries and also Aboriginal people in Australia. It was very important that we make sure that the VLP had the highest quality. First, the protein used to make VLPs was prepared to a level of purity needed for human use. We then assembled the protein into VLPs and checked with advanced light scattering methods that they had the right structure and size. We then vaccinated mice with VLP containing no modules. First, to generate a very high level of antibodies against the VLP platform. We then injected the VLP that had been engineered with modules specific to the stradococcal bacterium. Remarkably, we found that the mice developed a very high response against stradococcus. So the pre-existing antibodies did not make the vaccine less effective. In the same study, we also tested the effectiveness of VLPs having extra modules. The VLP containing a lower number of modules was just as effective. So, more is not always better. Another stunning discovery was that we could use a dose 200 times lower than a group A stradococcus vaccine in clinical trial and still achieve about the same level of immune response. We are very encouraged by these pre-clinical results. We've also published a separate study showing proof of concept that the VLP can be given very easily using tunnel drops of liquid delivered to the nose. The data showed that the VLP provided some protection and could stop disease spreading between individuals. We've resolved a number of critical questions around this breakthrough VLP approach and it's starting to look very promising, but there is still much to do. So we're expanding our effort to include supercomputer design, structural analysis and process economic analysis. This last effort is telling us that the vaccine is going to cost around 1 cent per dose. That's transformational. Now we're all heading back to work. The future beckons.