Health
Mutant lab: Is this Australia’s new defence against COVID variants? – Brisbane Times
Deep inside a layer of concrete and a few centimetres of steel sits a lab it is hoped will be key to keeping Australia safe from vaccine-busting coronavirus variants….
CoV-2 is reasonably fussy about what cells it grows in. Melbournes Doherty Institute made a global breakthrough in January when it managed to grow the virus in monkey kidney cells.
But only about one in every five COVID swabs will grow in the monkey cells. If a rare variant turns up, there is every chance the cells wont be able to culture it potentially leaving scientists blind.
Separately, the Kirbys Institutes Dr Anupriya Aggarwal had been working on a project to build a cell COVID-19 would greedily…
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