Adelaide's Flinders Medical Centre is to trial a new vaccine that could play a critical role in the event of a global influenza or bird flu epidemic.
The sugar-enhanced vaccine will be subjected to the world's largest ever single-centre trial with 1,000 people taking part.
The new vaccine already has been demonstrated to improve flu immunity in healthy people with the new trial to test if it improves immunity in the elderly and those with chronic disease.
"Although the vaccine is still in its trial stage, we believe it could be the world's best defence against an influenza or bird flu epidemic," said the South Australian Health Service chief investigator Dimitar Sajkov.
The new vaccine uses a natural sugar to boost its potency and researchers believing it to be 10 times more effective than vaccines currently available.
In the event of a pandemic it could allow health officials to stretch existing supplies to protect 10 times as many people as would be protected with a traditional vaccine.
"In a trial of 200 health volunteers last year we were able to demonstrate that the enhanced vaccine was not only safe and well tolerated, but also very effective in terms of improving the ability of the vaccine to induce immunity towards the flu virus," said Flinders Medical Centre team leader Nikolai Petrovsky.
"Vaccination is the best way to prevent the spread of flu and the more effective we can make the vaccine the better."
The new trail will target four groups, people with chronic lung disease, with heart disease and with kidney disease and healthy people aged over 60.
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