• The University of Queensland and CSL COVID-19 vaccine candidate has been axed after some HIV tests returned false positive results.
• CSL and the University of Queensland highlighted that there were no adverse effects among the 216 participants who took part in the trial.
• The federal government will no longer proceed with the vaccine and will instead take up 20 million extra doses of the vaccine candidate from Oxford/AstraZeneca.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

The vaccine candidate from the University of Queensland and Australian biotech company CSL is no longer going ahead.

The companies announced on Friday they will no longer go ahead with phase 2/3 of the vaccine clinical trials following results from phase 1.

While there were “no serious adverse events or safety concerns” reported among the 216 participants who took part in phase 1 of the trial, several presented false positive tests for HIV.

“Follow up tests confirmed that there is no HIV virus present, just a false positive on HIV tests,” CSL said. “There is no possibility the vaccine causes infection.”

The vaccine was scrapped as it could impact public confidence in vaccines and present implications for HIV testing.

“It is generally agreed that significant changes would need to be made to well-established HIV testing procedures in the healthcare setting to accommodate rollout of this vaccine,” CSL added. “Therefore, CSL and the Australian government have agreed vaccine development will not proceed to phase 2/3 trials.”

Chief Scientific Officer for CSL, Dr Andrew Nash said in a statement, “This outcome highlights the risk of failure associated with early vaccine development, and the rigorous assessment involved in making decisions as to what discoveries advance.”

The CSL/University of Queensland vaccine candidate was one of four vaccines the federal government had earmarked for Australians once they proved effective. It includes the candidates from Novavax, Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca.

Phase 1 of the trial UQ/CSL trial, however, will continue, with the data to be submitted for peer review publication in the future.

While it was a disappointing outcome, UQ Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Terry said she was proud of the UQ team and thanked everyone involved in the trials.

UQ vaccine co-lead Professor Paul Young added that while there is a possibility of revising the vaccine, it would take a lot of time.

“Doing so would set back development by another 12 or so months, and while this is [a] tough decision to take, the urgent need for a vaccine has to be everyone’s priority,” he said in a statement.

“I said at the start of vaccine development, that there are no guarantees, but what is really encouraging is that the core technology approach we used has passed the major clinical test. It is a safe and well-tolerated vaccine, producing the strong virus neutralising effect that we were hoping to see.”

The federal government will now get an additional 20 million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine candidate.

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