Product & process innovation

Despite safe and effective vaccines being available for a wide range of infectious diseases, prevention and treatment of more complex conditions, including allergy and cancer, remain elusive. Furthermore, vaccines are complex to manufacture, making them difficult to produce to a scale, quality and cost that supports widespread global access. An ongoing collaboration between South Australian biotech company Sementis Ltd and UniSA’s Experimental Therapeutics Laboratory has developed a vaccine delivery platform that can potentially produce easy-to-manufacture vaccines for multiple acute and chronic disease conditions.

In partnership with medical device company, Ferronova, researchers from UniSA’s Future Industries Institute (FII), Dr Aidan Cousins and Professor Benjamin Thierry, have developed a biodiagnostic system to refine cancer detection. The system consists of a magnetic probe and injectable magnetic nanoscale tracers, able to detect the spread of cancer less invasively, more quickly, and more accurately than existing methods. It delivers an accurate and affordable system for the staging of deep or complex cancers, such as head and neck, gastrointestinal and oesophageal cancers.