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MELBOURNE: A professor who believes the coronavirus could have been grown in a laboratory before crossing into humans hopes to be the first ­scientist in Australia to test his COVID-19 vaccine candidate on human volunteers.

Professor of medicine at Flinders University in Adelaide Nikolai Petrovsky is about to inject a COVID-19 vaccine that he has ­developed into humans in an ­attempt to induce an immune response in 75 volunteers. The Adelaide tests will be one of the first of their kind, Phase 1 trials, in Australia. Professor Petrovsky’s views, published in a research paper that made headlines around the world, on the possibility of a lab origin to the virus have been rejected by many in the scientific community but he said many were too quick to dismiss it.

“We’re not saying it’s a likely possibility, we’re just saying it has to be considered as a possibility,” Professor Petrovsky said.

“It shouldn’t be a political question; it’s a scientific question.”

Despite his COVID-19 hypothesis, Professor Petrovsky could end up being the scientist who comes up with a ­successful vaccine. He is the founder of the Adelaide company Vaxine, and says his vaccine candidate, dubbed COVAX-19, is modelled on a ­vaccine the company developed for SARS, which proved effective in animal trials.

“We believe we have got a tremendously effective vaccine,” Professor Petrovsky said.

“We showed that for SARS, and we have got early animal data already showing that everything’s on track for us to have that for COVID-19.

“We built the platform for use in any pandemic.” He is yet to receive regulatory approval for the immunisation part of his vaccine trials, but he has already begun ­recruiting human volunteers.

The vaccine trial comes as the number of people in intensive care units with COVID-19 in Australia dropped to just five. Twenty-eight people are being treated in hospital, and there are fewer than 500 active cases of COVID-19 being managed overall, with most people recovering at home.

COVAX-19 has been tested on mice and monkeys, and animal challenge studies on ferrets are under way. Regulatory approval for the immunisation part of the trial is expected to be granted in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, Vaxine has signed a partnership with South Korean biopharma Medytox to accelerate development and commercialisation of COVAX-19.

Success in human trials is far from guaranteed, but Professor Petrovsky is hopeful.

“We’ve had very good immune responses to the vaccine in all of our models so far,” he said. “Having tested those antibodies that are able to bind to the virus, we know our vaccine is working.

“Obviously, the big step is to show that it translates to human subjects and that it’s protective in humans. But based on our previous experience doing that, taking pandemic flu vaccines from mice and ferrets and monkeys into humans and seeing that they worked, that provides confidence that, similarly here, it is not an ­experimental vaccine platform.”

Vaxine has previously developed a vaccine for swine flu, with the results of the trial published in a peer-reviewed study. It’s also ­developed vaccines for two forms of bird flu. Like those other vaccines, COVAX-19 is a recombinant protein vaccine, which is produced in insect cells and which has an ­adjuvant added to induce a stronger immune response.

The theory that the Wuhan virus could have been man-made has been speculated on in the US — including by President Donald Trump — but has been downplayed by his chief health adviser Anthony Fauci.

A report published in Nature Medicine rejected the lab theory as implausible, and 27 prominent international scientists recently published a statement in The Lancet condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” and saying the research “overwhelmingly” concludes the “coronavirus originated in wildlife”.

Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have denied the virus escaped from their laboratory, where they were conducting research into coronaviruses.

The director of the Institute, Wang Yanyi, slammed the notion it had originated in the laboratory as a “pure fabrication”.

Chinese state media quoted him as saying the theory was baseless as the centre had no live coronaviruses on file that matched the COVID-19 strain.

“Our institute first received the clinical sample of the unknown pneumonia on December 30,” Ms Yanyi told Chinese TV network CGTN. “After we checked the pathogen … we found it contained a new coronavirus, which is now called SARS-CoV-2.

“We didn’t have any knowledge before that, nor had we ever encountered, researched or kept the virus. In fact, like everyone else, we didn’t even know that the virus existed. How could it have leaked from our lab when we never had it?”

But Professor Petrovsky’s recently published paper puts forward several hypothesis as to why the SARS-CoV-2 virus binds so strongly to a receptor molecule in the body, ACE2.

“Typically, you would expect that its binding would be low in ­humans,” Professor Petrovsky said. “And then the virus would mutate to become better at binding to human cells over time.

“The real surprise was this virus looked like it had already been adapted perfectly to humans. That was the sort of punchline that surprised us because that was not what we were expecting. It led us to the conclusion that this virus looked to be human-adapted.

“Then the question is — how could the virus have become human-adapted? A number of scientists have publicly said they don’t believe it could have come from a lab, but they don’t provide a scientific basis for really making that claim.”

The University of Queensland is also producing a recombinant protein vaccine, with human trials of that candidate, dubbed the ­s-clamp, expected to begin in July.

“Every researcher thinks their baby is the most beautiful,” said the chair of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, Jane Halton. “But we need to remember that well over 90 per cent of vaccines fail somewhere in Phase 1 and Phase 2 studies.”