The University of Melbourne will get over $1.5 million to accelerate trials of two next-generation “targeted and tunable” COVID-19 vaccine. It comes as SARS-COV-2 mutations spread worldwide posing questions about the effectiveness of existing vaccines. Announcing the funding on Dec. 3, Minister for Health Greg Hunt said: “These vaccines offer a number of potential advantages to ‘first-generation’ COVID-19 vaccines, and do not require storage in the extremely low temperatures needed for the Pfizer vaccine.” One of the universities vaccines is an mRNA vaccine similar to those produced by Pfizer/ BioNTech, used in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. The other is a protein vaccine with tunable capabilities to tackle new strains such as those recently emerging from in the UK and South Africa, both of which are alleged to be more transmissible than the original CCP virus that spread from Wuhan, China in 2019. Head of the Vaccine and Immunisation Research …