Synopsis

The discovery of rotavirus as the most common cause of acute dehydrating diarrhea at the Royal Children’s Hospital and University of Melbourne in 1973 provided hope for prevention of a major cause of death in young children worldwide. Building from this discovery, MCRI researchers have dedicated 5 decades to understanding the rotavirus and to the development and implementation of rotavirus vaccines. The RV3-BB vaccine is based on a novel human neonatal rotavirus strain identified in healthy newborns in Melbourne in the 1980’s. The RV3-BB vaccine has been developed at MCRI as an affordable, oral rotavirus vaccine to target rotavirus disease prevention from birth.  A birth dose RV3-BB has the potential to offer direct and indirect benefits over routine infant rotavirus vaccine administration. The RV3-BB Vaccine has been licensed to developing country vaccine manufacturers and it is hoped that the BioFarma Indonesia manufactured RV3 vaccine will be licensed in 2026 for use in the Indonesia National Immunisation Program.

Speaker

Professor Julie Bines is a Paediatric Gastroenterologist and Clinical Nutrition Consultant at The Royal Children’s Hospital, Victor and Loti Smorgon Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne and leads the Enteric Diseases Group at Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. Professor Bines has led the development of the human neonatal rotavirus vaccine, RV3-BB vaccine, aimed at preventing rotavirus disease from birth in infants worldwide, including the clinical trials of RV3-BB vaccine in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and Malawi.

Professor Bines is Director of the WHO Collaborative Centre for Child Health and the WHO Rotavirus Regional Reference Laboratory for the Western Pacific Region. Her current research activities include understanding barriers to the effectiveness of oral vaccines in high child mortality regions, Typhoid and Typhoid vaccines and wastewater surveillance in low- and middle-income countries for enteric diseases and Pandemic X. Julie has had a longstanding interest in Clinical Nutrition and understanding the mechanisms associated with intestinal rehabilitation following massive small bowel resection.

Julie was recipient of the 2021 Eureka Prize for Infectious Diseases Research and the 2023 Roger Glass Award for Excellence in Rotavirus Research. In 2021 she was elected to the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.