What We Do
The Vaccine Trials Group delivers high impact research to guide vaccination policy and best practice across Australia. Our laboratory team supports studies led by our team, industry partners, and national and international collaborators.
At the heart of our work is a collective focus on high quality laboratory processes, starting with the preparation and processing of samples from study participants to carefully planned experiments. We are working to uncover how vaccines interact with the body, and how our immune system responds to protect us against infection.
Over the past year, our laboratory team have processed and analysed more than 4,000 samples from a wide range of studies. Our lab is set up to manage complex logistics, making sure every sample is handled carefully and stored correctly, so that results are accurate and reliable across all our projects.
2025 Highlights
We are expanding our laboratory with new tools that will help us to better understand how the immune system responds to vaccines. Thanks to recent funding received to expand this work, we are now developing advanced tests to show how different parts of the immune system work together to fight infections. These improvements will allow us to study new vaccines and vaccination schedules, and we’re looking forward to sharing more of these results in future publications.
We’re proud to be part of a national study called BOOST-IC, which is looking at the safest and most effective COVID-19 booster strategies for Australians with weakened immune systems. This project brings together experts from across the country, including Monash University and leading hospitals and research institutes. Our laboratory team have analysed nearly 2,000 blood samples to see how COVID-19 booster vaccines work to protect this vulnerable population. This work builds on our expertise from another major study, the PICOBOO Platform Adaptive Trial, where our team have been helping to analyse the immune responses of healthy adults receiving COVID-19 boosters since 2022.
We also extend a big congratulations to our very own Immunology Researcher, Dr Sonia McAlister, for receiving a 2025 BrightSpark Fellowship to study how maternal vaccination affects babies’ immune responses. Sonia will be undertaking advanced training in Europe for the first half of 2026, with the aim of bringing these techniques back to WA.