This week's major breakthrough at Melbourne's Doherty Institute, where scientists grew a sample of coronavirus in the lab, has paved the way for the CSIRO to start their work. The CSIRO’s tests will focus on three potential vaccines being developed by other scientists around the world. One of those possible vaccines is a futuristic "molecular-clamp" vaccine being designed by researchers at the University of Queensland. Inside the CSIRO's Geelong laboratory. It is likely ferrets will be infected with coronavirus and used to test the vaccines. Ferrets were also used to test SARS vaccines. The way the virus behaves in the animals will provide crucial clues to how it spreads and how deadly it is. The Queensland university hopes to have a vaccine ready to administer to people across the world within six months.

Australia is the only country outside China to have grown the virus in a cell culture, putting us at the forefront of the fight against the pandemic. The novel coronavirus, known as 2019-nCoV, had infected more than 7700 people worldwide and killed at least 170 in mainland China by Thursday evening. "We will provide essentially the pipeline toward vaccine production," Professor Trevor Drew, head of the CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong, told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Having a sample of the virus, which was grown at the Doherty Institute's lab in the early hours of Tuesday, "has really put Australia in the lead", he said.

Loading "You have to have the virus to be able to do anything," Professor Drew said. The Animal Health Laboratory is one of only five PC4 labs in the world with the special facilities needed to conduct these tests on dangerous pathogens. The whole operation is being conducted under extremely high security. The CSIRO would not confirm when or how the sample of virus was being moved from the Doherty Institute in Parkville, where it was isolated in the early hours of Tuesday, to Geelong. When the virus arrives, scientists will start growing large quantities for testing.

Loading Then they will begin studying the way the novel coronavirus infects human cell cultures in the lab and hijacks their internal machinery to make new copies of itself. That should also reveal how our immune systems react to the virus – vital information that will be fed back to the teams developing potential vaccines. "Our ability to defend ourselves against the virus and the proteins the virus produces ... is pivotal to being able to generate an immune response," Professor Drew said. Normally the process of developing a vaccine takes many years, but the extreme urgency of the situation has many scientists working overtime and through weekends.