Where Are We At With Koala Chlamydia?

Professor Peter Timms from the University of the Sunshine Coast

David (00:06)

Hello, I'm David Curnow. Welcome to "Where Are We At With...?" the podcast bringing you up to date with the promises of the future made in the past.

Around the world, when people think of Australia, they almost always think of koalas and kangaroos and maybe all the deadly snakes, spiders, jellyfish, et cetera. And also maybe these days Robert Irwin.

Clip from "Dancing With The Stars" ABC (US) and Disney+

Hey, it's not a gratuitous use of the Irwins, they are important to today's episode. Okay, it's also a little gratuitous. I would argue that no other animal is as instantly associated with a single country the way a koala is. And yet the species is under threat in many areas, even on the verge of extinction. Habitat destruction, feral animals like cats, dogs and foxes, cars, even climate change.

But one significant danger is from a disease we tend to think of as a sexually transmitted illness among humans, chlamydia. The word itself comes from the Greek for cloak. Unfortunately, the fact that it's hidden and known as an STD in humans means there tends to be more sniggering about the koalas who suffer it than sincere concern among the general population.

Thankfully, many scientists are doing their bit to help our national icon. None more so than Professor Peter Timms. He's a professor of microbiology at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland and the deputy director for their Centre for Bioinnovation. He's a world-renowned expert on chlamydia in humans and other animals, including koalas. You may have seen or read about him in the news in 2025 as his team succeeded in bringing to market the very first koala chlamydia vaccine. So in this episode, where are we at with koala chlamydia?

Peter Timms, thanks for joining me. What is chlamydia and how did koalas first get it?

Professor Peter Timms (02:12)

chlamydia is a pretty common infection in humans as well as animals. ⁓ And most people will be familiar with chlamydia trachomatis as a sexually transmitted disease and also that it causes ocular disease, eye disease, which is what Fred Hollows was ⁓ trying to solve with surgery. ⁓ Interestingly, koalas get a very similar set of disease symptoms to what humans get. ⁓ But as well as that, microbiologists in particular make up lots of names for chlamydia and chlamydia picorum is the species name that's used for koala chlamydia and that same species infects sheep and cattle. And so the commonly asked question is how closely related is the koala strains to the sheep and cattle strains? We've been involved with that for a long period of time and you think we know the answers, but we still don't quite know the answer. ⁓ And the situation is the strains of chlamydia that are in koalas are very, very similar to the strains of chlamydia in sheep and cattle from a genetic point of view. And we've been looking for some time to find, guess, a smoking gun that would show that it's the same strain of chlamydia. ⁓ And it makes some sort of sense or some possibility, I guess, that sheep and cattle came to Australia from South America and other places in the USA and so on, that they brought their chlamydia with them and they gave those strains of chlamydia to the koala.

It now looks like that's not the case rather than it was the case. It's very similar and it was tempting, but we haven't been able to absolutely pin that down. And if anything, it looks more and more like the koalas have got their own strain of chlamydia or their own strains of chlamydia, which are quite similar to the ones in sheep and cattle. So we can't find any direct evidence that it really did come from sheep and cattle, even though it's appealing and it's a nice story.

David Curnow (03:53)

Absolutely, it is the sort of thing that we immediately leap towards. Europeans arrive bringing their animals, bringing their diseases and look that is the case in many situations, perhaps not this one. Let's take a step back to the chlamydia concept itself because as you mentioned there's a few different varieties and it is confusing for those of us without microbiology 101 when we step back and look at the fact that the overall strain of bacteria is called chlamydia but we in humans also call what is an STD "chlamydia", even though that's not necessarily everything that we can catch from it. How many different types are there?

Peter Timms(04:24)

Yep, lots of different species of chlamydia. The one in him is chlamydia trichomatis and it's got a couple of different strains as well. It's got the one that causes the sexually transmitted chlamydia and it's also got the ocular strain of chlamydia. There are dozens and dozens of them and that's because that's what microbiologists do. And even in koalas, we've been involved in giving names to the strains there and we think there's at least 20 or more strains of chlamydia in koalas that they get. And that's sort of important to try and work out whether some of them are nasty and disease causing and some are not. What's a little bit interesting is the way chlamydia causes disease is that it's not as nasty a disease in some ways as things like Ebola and so on, but what it does is it basically causes scar tissue formation. That's basically what it does. It causes an irritation. So in humans, in females, it causes scar tissue in the fallopian tubes or the tubes, and it just results in blockages and that's how women get become infertile basically and the same sort of thing happens with ocular disease as I mentioned about Fred Hollows ⁓ doing surgery but the, in humans in the eye, the the, the chlamydia causes a scar tissue across the eye and the animal and the human becomes blind that's almost exactly what happens in koalas they get reproductive tract disease in koalas it's a bit different. They get blockages, but they also get big cysts, water-filled cysts, which are actually quite painful and also result in blockages and infertility. And koalas get trachoma as well. In effect, they get scar tissue across the eyes. so chlamydia by and large causes a lot of similar sorts of diseases. Not everywhere, but there's a bit of commonality in there. Amazing. For somebody like me, it's amazing how similar they are.

David Curnow (06:15)

Yeah, and so to clarify, if you have one particular strain of the chlamydia bacterium, does that mean you're only likely to get those symptoms or can you then develop, say, trachoma from the one that causes an STD in humans?

Peter Timms(06:33)

⁓ In humans, we know the answer better and we do know that there are there are different sub strains and they and there are there are genital tract strains ⁓ and I could I could talk for hours on this. It's pretty interesting. But there's genital tract strains and there are strains that infect the eye. It's the A, B and C strains that cause eye infections and eye disease. And amazingly, those little chlamydia have evolved precisely to grow on that site in human precisely. The ones in the genital tract are there actually because there's lots of other bacteria like there's bacteria in the gut, there's bacteria in the genital tract and they're actually sucking nutrients out of the other bacteria to help themselves grow in the genital tract. And the ones in the eye have got slightly different genes because they don't do the same thing. So it's amazing sophistication. In the koala, using different genetic techniques, we've got different strains and we can't yet, we don't yet haven't seen patterns where only certain strains infect eyes or urogenital tracts. We've certainly been looking for that. More importantly, we've been trying to see whether there some strains that are pretty harmless and other strains that really do cause more disease. And that might be true. But perhaps as we talk, you'll see that it's other infections that koalas get that probably contribute to whether or not the chlamydia causes more serious disease or not, which is the complex biology of the world.

David Curnow (07:54)

It certainly makes it harder when there's cascading effects and it's not necessarily one single thing. We talked about the fact that you carry these bacteria and they can be transmitted through a variety of means. If you have the bacteria in you, does that mean you have symptoms?

Peter Timms (08:09)

No, not always, not at all. Again, in humans, it's often asymptomatic. That's one of the issues with humans. 90 % the time it's asymptomatic. The same is true in koalas. I divide them into three different categories. Koalas that have low-grade infections and you wouldn't even know they have no outward signs of disease. Koalas that have infections that at some point will develop into the disease. And that's why you want treat them all, might use a vaccine to try and prevent that. It's a bit like COVID, you can get infected, but some people get the disease more than other people get the disease. And then there's animals with actual outward signs of disease. And that can be from a pretty low grade infection, might just be in the eyes, a bit of conjunctivitis, or it could be severe disease. So those of us trying to do things like make vaccines or treat them with antibiotics, they would all you would all take a slightly different approach for each one of those things. And some of them are just hard to stop. It's hard to stop koalas or humans getting chlamydia. You try to stop it progressing.

David Curnow (09:15)

And I understand, we mentioned the fact that there are a variety, there's lots of different types and they can affect different creatures. We can't develop chlamydia from the koala strain and nor they from us, but we can get it from birds, is that right?

Peter Timms (09:31)

Yeah, there's a few so-called zoonotic infections and the strains of chlamydia in birds, another name, are able to jump across to humans. That's the main one. There are some chlamydia in in other things like sheep and so on that could occasionally, there's some sort of stories there of sheep that were pregnant with chlamydia and the sheep farmer's wife is sort of trying to deliver the lamb and so on and has got bathed in it and so on, can get that. But by and large, it's only the bird chlamydia that is infectious to humans. And it's fairly infectious actually, because it creates aerosols. It floats around in the air. It's called "bird fanciers' disease". So people that have aviaries and so on that are breathing in lots of dust and so on and bird aviaries are the ones that get it. But it is a nasty one.

David Curnow (10:23)

And without getting too prurient again, it's because of the dust, not because of their fancy for birds, as it were, that they may develop it. You began your career, ⁓ obviously, a number of years ago, looking at cattle diseases. Pretty early on, though, you were looking at chlamydia in a variety of animals. When did we first realise that koalas suffered from it?

Peter Timms(10:31)

Yeah, sure. trying to think of the day, the timing, it's probably around 1988 or something like that, a bit earlier. They, you know, the veterinarians had seen the chlamydia disease in koalas and then we worked with people in the health department to grow the chlamydia. So that's the, you know, the gold rule, try and isolate it and grow it so you can, you know, have it in the lab and so on. And then we went through a series of my backgrounds in molecular techniques, fancy biotechnology stuff. So we sort of break it down and look to see what the genetic differences were between the different strains. And yeah, I was in a veterinary department initially. So we were interested in birds and a bit of sheep and cattle, cause that's what's important. And then we just used to do a little bit of koala stuff. So we say on the edge of the gel. then what's happened over time is the koalas, the koala side of things has become more interesting to me. And we're going to continue to try and understand disease causation and then treatment as well.

David (11:36)

Yes, because it still affects the other animals, it's still causing issues for them, but in them mostly it's not threatening extinction or least contributing to threat of populations, is it?

Peter (11:47)

But that's correct. I it does cause things like polyarthritis and some of the farmers and indeed there's a vaccine in the UK and in Europe for chlamydia in sheep and sheep in particular, because what it does is it reduces production loss. So that tells you that it does cause problems, it's not, you're right, it's not causing major problems and it doesn't cause death and so on by comparison.

David (12:09)

Yes, yield is a problem for a farmer but not necessarily a species-wide threat. Are there any other Australian animals that are susceptible or can contract it?

Peter (12:18)

They're the main ones. We can go looking for it and we can find it because this is an organism that's learned how to be clever over millions of years probably and cause sort of infections. That's pretty much, but you're right, the koala stands out a little bit as to having more serious disease the chlamydia trachomatis or trachoma in humans is a problem in the indigenous populations. So, you know, the percentage that there are reasonably high in some places, you know, more than 10, sadly, they're more than 10%. It's a disease in Aboriginals, poor hygiene. That's basically how it's allowed to be spread.

David (12:57)

Yeah, it's my understanding is that from, I mean, for most of particularly recent centuries, it was the leading cause of blindness among humans. This strain of the chlamydia that caused trachoma, the eye situations, which quite often spread or allowed to remain by not cleaning the face properly or cleaning around the eyes. And again, as you said, when you go for any sort of web search on it, it often comes up with one of the few developed nations, or the only developed nation in the world that still hasn't stamped out unfortunately is Australia with our First Nations people.

Peter (13:30)

Yeah, that's true. It does cause a problem in other parts of the world as well, Africa and so on, for the same sorts of things. I guess the main point is you might say in advanced countries, chlamydia, trachomatis in the world isn't a problem, but it still exists at 3%, 4 % as a sexually transmitted disease. That doesn't seem to, we're not able to get rid of that. ⁓ So you might say, it's not a problem in humans, but it can be a problem in humans as I sort of mentioned in some parts of the world. However, koalas do stand out as having often higher levels of chlamydia

David (14:08)

Professor Peter Timms is Professor of Microbiology at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He's also the Deputy Director of the Centre for Bioinnovation there at the University. What do we know? You mentioned previously the symptoms. When you see a koala, is there anything obvious that we lay people, if we notice, could tell?

Peter (14:29)

Yep, absolutely. You can see ocular disease, by and large, it's a lower percentage. ⁓ So what it causes in females in particular is urinary tract infections, so urine infections, as well as reproductive tract infections. So you wouldn't see the reproductive tract infections just outwardly, but they do get urinary infections and they urinate and they soil and wet their rump. And so they end up with often clearly smelly, wet, brown, rumps that can be viewed even from the ground. is possible for a koala tree with a pair of binoculars for an experienced person to sort of be able to tell whether they've got disease or not. Probably not. You need to have some sort of background training to do that. But nevertheless, so yes, you can see some of the disease. But again, I can't put a figure on this, but I'm going to say 80 % of the disease will not be visible outwardly.

David (15:23)

when we're talking percentages, we have an estimate, guesstimate of how many of Australia's koalas carry it at any time?

Peter (15:31)

Yeah, that's a good question as well. Our first problem was if you actually don't know how many koalas there are in Australia, it's a difficult challenge and people have been trying to do it in all different sorts of fancy ways these days. But in places like Queensland and New South Wales, particularly northern New South Wales, where 80 % of Australia's koalas are, it's pretty common these days for infection levels to be at the 50 % level. Certainly 30, 40 and 50 in some of the populations ridiculously at 80 % infection levels. That's not always disease levels, but that's infection levels, so high levels of infection.

David (16:06)

Will they get sick? If a koala is carrying it, will it eventually suffer from the chlamydia?

Peter (16:14)

Not necessarily. Some of them will seem to self-resolve. We've been involved in a few longitudinal studies going over five, seven or longer years. And those sort of studies suggest that at least 80 % of the koalas will go on to get clinical disease, outward signs of disease at some point. So even if you capture them today and they might be, you you might do a laboratory test and you might show they're infected, but they have no disease. It's, you know four out of five of them eventually over the next couple of years will go on to get some level of disease.

David (16:48)

You mentioned the fact that there are a variety of strains. Are they regionally based? Is it a different type of populations?

Peter (16:58)

Yeah, both. There are some strains in chlamydia that are more common in certain regions. We focus on this a lot because it's pretty important generally, but it's also important from a vaccination point of view. ⁓ Having said that, there are also some strains that are virtually only seen in the southern part of Australia. And so for us, the question for that is, why is that the case? ⁓ Are certain strains spreading more than others? Do some of them cause more disease than the other? I'm sure there is some association with disease, which might be partly explaining why Queensland and New South Wales has more disease, but it's not quite that simple. Most biology questions are that sort of level of complexity.

Yes, again, not a very straightforward answer, otherwise we probably would have come up with it already.

David (17:44)

You'd hope to think anyway. We mentioned chlamydia, obviously, because that's what we're talking about today. But prior to noticing it, obviously things like habitation loss, as well as predation from introduced animals was a massive threat. Where does chlamydia sit within that in terms of threats to the koala numbers?

Peter (18:09)

Yeah. So my answer to this is always habitat destruction is the number one thing because without trees, nothing else matters. So habitat destruction, either because we're building in roads or train lines or new shopping centres or whatever, is the number one concern. And I'll mention other things as well. Recently, we've been involved in couple of projects where climate change directly with bushfires and droughts and so on. Clearly, we've seen examples of populations that seem to be OK, but in over a period of just a number of years, maps not habitat destruction, because it is a bit hard to measure the impact of that. But droughts and bushfires and so on has allowed chlamydia to go from a probably not a problem to something that's an 80 % problem. These other things on their own are important, but they're probably tipping the balance. The other way to look at chlamydia and how important is that in wildlife hospitals where a lot of animals come in because they're being treated and there are thousands of them come in to lots of, there's enough wildlife hospitals around where it's not unusual for 500 more koalas a year to come in. That's 10 a week, right? They just keep coming in, right? about on average, it's a biased sample of course, because the reason they get to the hospital is either because they've been picked up by somebody, because they weren't well, they've got serious disease or they've been hit by a car or something like that. But about on average, 50 % of the koalas that come in have chlamydial disease. So that tells you straight out. And different populations, I should say, all the, all of hospitals and the veterinarians that treat them are fantastic and they do a great job when they're and the level of care is quite amazing. Despite that, only around 50 % of those koalas make it out. They're often, they're either don't make it or they euthanase because that's a choice of the veterinarian that, you know, it's not going to be a good outcome. And they also get antibiotics and we can talk about that in a minute. There are antibiotics, but even when they do that in females, the best survival rates are around 30%.

David (20:06)

Wow.

Peter (20:25)

So that tells you of animals that are coming in, that's there with our best efforts at the moment, 30%. So that tells you that disease on its own is a major impact. And there was a study, I don't know if it's actually a number of years back now, where there was a population in the Brisbane area that we knew had 5,000 koalas at one point and then 1,000 koalas as that was observed and people were able to follow it. And they did some modelling to sort of try and answer the question you just asked. If we and modelers do modelling things, which is good. And they said, you know, if we change the habitat destruction or we change the disease and we did all those sorts of things. And the answer come back that was only if you change the impact of political disease, could you take a population that was in decline to one that was stable or increasing again. And part of the reason for that is there's a lag period with habitat destruction, right? Now, if you knock trees down, have to plant five times number of trees are knocked down. But by and large you won't plant them in the same place because you've done it for a reason. And so that's actually not going to help this generation of koalas pretty much at all. So it's disease that was the thing that was clearly standing out where you can make the biggest impact on population health because while individual koalas are important it's the population as a whole. In fact it's the female, breeding females, that's all that matters.

David (21:50)

Yeah. Am I right? I read somewhere that part of the problem too is when we talk habitat loss, a lot of people imagine tree clearing, for instance, as you said, wide scale tree clearing. And then certainly that is habitat loss. But because of the way koalas treat their home range, as it were, and particularly the males, I suppose, even just putting a road through an area effectively loses that habitat because they can no longer roam their usual range.

Peter (22:07)

Yep.

David (22:18)

Does that then also put pressure on populations from a genetic diversity perspective and a stress perspective when it comes to disease?

Peter (22:25)

yeah, you're right. People have done some pretty good work to understand koala's home range and they now know that they need some trees where they eat the leaves, but they need other trees where they don't eat the leaves that issues them as a safe refuge or a staging point to go from A to B to C. So that's why, again, you need a complex ⁓ habitat environment there for them to be, you can't just give them the trees they need to eat the leaves. And koalas, particularly male koalas, are driven by trying to find female koalas. So they'll go across roads unless you go really out of your way to put a lot of, which they do these days, course, fences that are pretty well designed. So you're right. As soon as you put a road through the middle of an area, it would be fair to say that even though we can do, or we, say we, others can do the sort of the mapping and so on. Some koalas only move for a couple of kilometres other koalas move for 20 or 30 kilometres. So it's not as simple as doing that. The question of translocation is pretty important one because picking koalas up and putting them somewhere else, there's two sides to this. One side is governments have been not wanting for a long time to support that. And that's because if I'm a shopping centre developer, I'll give you a million dollars to make my problem go away. Just pick them up and put them somewhere else, take a photo and so on. And we know that by and large, many times when you do that, they look good. The politicians there, the koala scampers up the tree and we take a photo and we know that a year later, half of them are not there anymore because we put them somewhere where they didn't want to be. And sometimes it's in areas of habitat where there aren't many koalas or there no koalas. And we go, put them there. And we go, well, there's a reason there's no koalas, right? There's something they don't like. And it's as complicated as this, these animals live on eucalyptus leaves. They're getting all their energy from that. And it makes a difference whether the same trees grow on one side of the hill or the other side of the hill, because there'll be different nutrients in the soil and there'll be different nutrients in the leaves. We can't work it out, but they can. matters whether there's been a drought. And so the nutrient content, it matters all of those things. So we are a long way short of working out how we would pick them up and put them somewhere else.

David (24:46)

Koalas have their own version of terroir, the appreciation of sight when it comes to their diet, not just humans and wine. Let's briefly talk about that because a creature that evolved to only eat a diet of very specific eucalyptus leaves, a substance which is highly toxic to most creatures, it has to make treating them generally, let alone searching for a vaccine, all the more harder.

Peter (25:10)

Yeah, absolutely. There's two problems there. And you're right, these koalas have evolved to have in their liver a lot of enzymes that break down the toxins in the leaves that they need to do that, which is fine. That's what they do. But it also means that when we give them antibiotics, they break them down too. ⁓ And so in humans where you might get one tablet of antibiotic for tetra-treacherous sex-transmitted disease or whatever, in koalas, they need to get daily doses. I think now we're down to about 14 days, but it was not uncommon for it to be 28 days. So you really have to hit them hard with the antibiotics because they're trying to break them down and you're trying to get high enough levels to kill the chlamydia. So we're giving them high doses of antibiotics. And of course, the problem is they don't digest the eucalyptus leaves. It's the bacteria in their gut that digest the eucalyptus leaves. And they're very refined and specialized bacteria and so the antibiotics we're throwing at them are going to kill off and destroy a lot of those bacteria. So the koalas that get antibiotic treatment in hospitals, for instance, get dysbiosis. So it's the same as when you get your own antibiotics from your doctor and you might take a probiotic to try and balance it back out. The same sort of problem, except you're not going to die if your gut bacteria destroyed for a while, but koalas are going to die if that's the case.

David (26:32)

Yeah, effectively we can cure you, but you just can't digest the one thing you eat in the world. But you'll be fine.

Peter (26:37)

Yeah, the treatment can be worse than a disease at times. Having said that, veterinarians are pretty good and they go to a lot of trouble to nurse these koalas through. But again, of course, some of them don't make it through that. And there's lots of work going on to try and work out how you might give koalas probiotics. And I can tell you what they do. They take a koala that's been hit by a car that's died and they scrape out the cecum because there's different parts of the gut, they're all different. And they just put that in a bottle and they basically can feed that short term back to some koalas as a probiotic because you're basically giving them back the bacteria they need. It's pretty crude and needs to be better and not available for everything, but it tells you where the problem is, guess.

David (27:22)

Yeah, a little bit like, I suppose, faecal transplants that have been tried in a variety of species, including humans, just trying to recreate that gut flora that's needed.

Peter (27:24)

Absolutely. Yep, and it does work in humans. It's pretty crude, but it tells you that yes, that's why the level of animals that come into wildlife hospitals by the time they get through the euthanasia stage and then they're also the treatment stage and so on. The success rate at the other end is below 30%. And so clearly, well not clearly, as good as the veterinarians are and as good as the antibiotics are, it's not a solution, that solution alone and you're still going to lose the battle. of course, that's where I guess vaccination or other means of treatment can come in.

There is no money in saving koalas. Everything any of us do costs money. Even the antibiotics supplied by one of the antibiotic pharmaceutical companies out of the goodness of their hearts. They've made a different version of the antibiotic that's used for koalas. Strangely.

David (28:24)

Professor Peter Timms is our guest on Where Are We At With. We're discussing koala chlamydia today, one of the many threats, unfortunately, to one of the most iconic species in the world, let alone Australia. You mentioned that there's not a lot of money in it.. everyone

love koalas. You'd think there'd be more money for trying to cure the koala than, say, the lesser spotted warbler, or whatever it might be that's suffering from a problem. Has there not been an international focus?

David (28:54)

Okay, a quick side note here on something you may have seen in your socials over the past few years, a time when a good thing was done for slightly the wrong reason, but it still helps.

John Oliver is a comedian and host of an American news satire program called “Last Week Tonight”. And a few years ago, as part of a series of practical jokes, actor Russell Crowe funded a koala treatment ward at Australia Zoo in John Oliver's name.

Clip of "Last Week Tonight" HBO.

David

See? Mentioning Robert Irwin at the start wasn't completely gratuitous.

Peter (29:49)

First of all say that the Australian governments, both the federal government and state governments have been good to us. They have provided some money now over a period of time and they are genuine. However, it's been a difficult process and the amount of money by comparison to get work done has been modest. I travel the world a bit and everybody talks about koalas and everybody says the same thing. They say two things, surely the governments will give you plenty of money to save the koalas. go, well, not really. "Surely some individually wealthy individuals will look at saving the koala." And I'm sure that's true. And, and, and who knows how the end of this podcast, the person that hasn't, hasn't given money or has is getting nearer the end of their life and wants to do something with $5 million or something. Maybe that'll happen. but most of those people are already doing good things with their money and so on. And Americans in particular would say, surely, surely it's so important. And surely the answer is, well, not as surely as you think Australians are sometimes a little bit apathetic.

They all want to save the koala. I'll give you an example. They all want to save the koala, they sometimes have trouble getting their hand in their pocket to give them money out. And indeed, we did some other publicity semi-recently and we got a lot of publicity from it. And scientists like myself don't like doing that. We really don't. But one of the reasons you do it is to spread the word, makes the university itself very happy. But as well, because you never know who will... who will hear about things and indeed from something like today's podcast, who will hear about things and go, I didn't really know or I didn't appreciate. I'd like to make a difference. So I guess we were forever reaching out to find there are a of good people in the world. not not critical of those people at all, but they all assume somebody else will do it. And that's a good cause.

See in the koala situation there are different, I'm going to call them populations of koalas, little groupings. I call it a series of dry islands. So they're not on islands, but we're building stuff between them. Little green patches are separated from each other now. And what's happening every day. There are less koalas today than there were yesterday. That's the reality. And each of those sometimes those little mini areas are going, you know, 500 koalas, 200 koalas, 100 koalas, and they just disappear and people go, oh, we had to build a new road through there, that's all there was to it. And so that's happening in lots of places. So that's how it's happening. The New South Wales government's probably a better than the Queensland government. They're going out and looking, money to identify populations of koalas that have extra value. I mean, they all have value, but extra value that might be genetically important or they're big enough or whatever and going, we should put some effort into looking after that area. So that's a good thing.

David (32:48)

You were part of a really quite extensive and broad effort a number of years ago to sequence the koala genome, but 54 people involved, really quite an extensive effort.

Peter (32:56)

Yeah, yeah, it was a very big deal at the time and it still is. And it was a really good example of, you know, driven by universities, but also the Australian Museum and others and internationally, lots of people. And at that time, I'm sure you're probably aware that sequencing genomes like human genomes used to be a huge, huge expense and it's just got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And so, yeah, that was a major thing and it it alone ⁓ did show us things we didn't know about. Some things you perhaps should have known about. We could find all the genes that koalas use to digest the eucalyptus leaves, for instance. And surprise, surprise, they've got a lot of olfactory genes in their noses to smell leaves. Of course they have, right? That's what they do. You give them a series of leaves and they'll sniff them and we can't work it out, but certainly they can and so on.

David (33:52)

And you look at a koala and let's be honest, its nose is not small, it is not a minor feature, it's obviously evolved the olfactory senses for a particular reason. That's one of the things that we identified, I understand, the ability to not just smell the right type of leaf, but even if it's juicy or even if it's full of water.

Peter (34:01)

Absolutely. They seem to be able to do all of that. And also, know, other things as well about how they survive on relatively little water. But we do know now the koalas do drink a bit. Sometimes they sit in trees when it rains, the fork of the tree or whatever diverts the water to run down. When I say to you, yes, of course it does. And they take advantage of that in the wild. They do actually drink some of that water and they actually choose trees on purpose for that reason. Of course they do, right? When I say it aloud, you go, that's... That's not it, of course.

David (34:40)

You're right, it makes sense, at the same time, we're almost not drummed into us, but one of the articles of faith of koalas is that's right, they don't drink, they get their moisture from the eucalyptus leaves.

Peter (34:48)

Right. Yeah. So people did some work and you said, well, some nice work in the bushfire and drought area and they put bowls of water on the ground and the koalas came down and drank out of them. you know, that's putting a bit more.

David (35:04)

"Just because humans say you don't doesn't mean we don't."

Peter (35:06)

No, that's right, that's right. But it tells you though, it would appear that those koalas are also within an area of habitat, that they're choosing trees for all different reasons other than just eating the leaves.

David (35:19)

One of the other things I understand that was identified within that genetic sequencing was the fact that joeys don't have an immune system when they are born and that can affect, suppose, their susceptibility to chlamydia in early months.

Peter (35:33)

Yeah, joeys, it's a pretty tough thing. I'll tell you why in a minute. But yes, they are heavily dependent because they're in the pouch for a while. So they're heavily dependent on their mothers for milking and other animals are too, but the koalas are more so. what joeys get is they get for a different reason. They get a dose of chlamydia from their mothers because their mothers have to give them the bacteria they need for their gut and they're so-called coprophagic, which means they literally regurgitate semi-fecal matter, if you like, or from there. And it's a soft pasty thing, so they spit it out and give it to their koala, their joeys, because they need them to have a dose of bacteria.

Clip from "Schitt's Creek" Canadian Television Corporation

"Ew David!"

Professor Peter Timms

And at the same time, if they've got any chlamydia to give them, they probably give them that as well. So it's a catch-22. So it's sort of their lifestyle, if you like, is a little bit hazardous, I guess, at the same thing. But you're right, joeys early on, their immune system is slowish to develop.

David Curnow (36:39)

and we didn't probably haven't covered this earlier and I should have in terms of transmission of the bacteria itself what are the methods within koalas that that happens.

Peter (36:51)

So, know, we don't have absolute proof, but we do know that sexual transmission is the major method. All other methods might happen, but they're at such a low level that it's whatever. There is some evidence or suggestion that males fighting between each other and so on might transmit something when they rise to eyes. We know that mother to young. So we know that sexual transmission and mother to young is the two roots by which it does. We did some early stuff to where we could show that flies could land on chlamydia secretions. And that's what happens in humans and in indigenous people and trachoma and so on. Fly transmission is, and sometimes you'll see koalas with flies all around them. but by and large, they're the two ones, mother to young and sexual transmission. And you can see in populations where there are dominant males that are chlamydia positive. And that's sort of relevant as well when you potentially think about how you might use a vaccine, for instance, to vaccinate can't vaccinate every single koala in if you wanted to anyway. And even in a population, you can't do it. So if you're thinking about how you can be most effective in vaccinating sometimes male koalas that are dominant and having sexual interaction, it would be one of the ways you would think of doing that.

David (38:07)

sort of trickle-down economics so to speak except in this case it actually hopefully would work. What about susceptibility to or resistance to illness? What did the sequence and did we learn anything in that regard?

Peter (38:10)

Yeah. Not directly from that, we still don't know the answer to that. The original genome was a pretty major achievement, but of course now, not of course, out of the University of Sydney, but again, a larger group, more than 100 koala genomes have been sequenced now. And we were part of a group that specifically went to answer that question, and we didn't come away with the answer, right? There are genes, of course, and some of them you can link them. It's no different to cancer in humans and looking for the genes. there is something in there. There's no doubt. It's complex. might be 50 contributors and you're looking for someone. If you look hard enough, you'll find certain things that are linked, no doubt there is some genetic component, but it looks to be minor, more than major. I quite like doing different things. And so we did work with a modeler a little while back. It was quite disconcerting actually because we looked at this question and said well you know what matters is the strain of chlamydia, some genetic factor even if we don't know what it is, the microbiome, these other virus infections, the environment, all these things and they try to quantitate that and they take the data you got and they crunched all of that and they come back and said that's really good I reckon you're still missing half of the causes here. I don't like that answer right?

I'm a microbiologist. I want everything to stack up neatly. And they're saying there's clearly a lot. is a multifactorial causation here. There's no doubt that your chlamydia presence, absence are a major one. Australian chlamydia, there's something in there, but it's not a major thing. But when they look for, you know, by their modelling methods, and I can't describe that to you because it's, know, it's hokey pokey. But they came back and said, even when you put all these other things into it.

David (39:48)

Yeah.

Peter (40:13)

we reckon still half of the things you don't know about are still missing. So that tells you how complex it is to solve it, which is why our vaccination attempts or chlamydia by and large, we're not suggesting that vaccination can solve it and it can't. It doesn't even do a great job for nearly every single koala. But if it's safe and it can make a contribution of certain percentage, that's got to be helpful at the end of the day.

David (40:40)

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned the fact that there's lots of different other factors. So let's talk retrovirus briefly because some people have heard of chlamydia and koalas, hopefully quite a lot of Australians you'd hope, but retrovirus is another one where we're seeing that it's causing its own issues.

Peter (40:47)

Yeah. we've done some work in the past, so we're not retrovirus experts, there are good ones at the University of Queensland. ⁓ It's, from my point of view, it's a complex and interesting beast, but what's interesting about it is that it comes in different flavours as well, of course it does, but it's a retrovirus. So it's a virus that goes in and it gives a normal infection like your flu virus or whatever, but it's also retro, and then that means it puts some of its DNA into your DNA. And so, so it puts some of its DNA into your genes. So, and that's, that's an issue. And so, because that's how retroviruses work. We're full of bits of retroviruses from in the past. And I, you know, we've kept the ones that are good. So, so as complex as that is, there's been a number of studies, we've done some, but others have done better studies, quite frankly. And there's no doubt that there is some relationship between different types of retrovirus and disease from chlamydia. So there would appear to be a relationship there, but it's a complex one again. It's probably not surprising because these retroviruses and other animals can do something to the immune system. So they can make you or the animal a little bit more susceptible to things in a complex way. haven't worked that out yet, but nevertheless, there's no doubt there is some association between some of the strains and so on and so on and so on. So that's important because the retrovirus is a new virus in koalas.

It hasn't been in koalas forever. People still can't work it out. It's certainly more than 200 years ago, but it might not be more than 20,000 years ago. So it's in an evolutionary point of view, that's relatively. And what's happening is this retrovirus is spreading before our eyes, probably from the north of Australia to the south. So Queensland, every single animal has retrovirus, 100%. But when you get down to Victoria and so on, it hasn't reached all the koalas there yet. So it's still spreading before our eyes. It's a complex way of spreading, but nevertheless. So what that, that's pretty interesting, right? In fact, the human world is pretty interesting koalas because of the retrovirus. There is no other retrovirus on the planet that is doing it right now. So it will over time come to a bit better balance with the koala host. That's what happens. That's what's happened to us.

But what's important there potentially is if the retrovirus is contributing to some degree to chlamydial disease in a co-infection way, and there's probably others as well, there's other viruses in koalas that are also probably doing it, that possibly makes a difference as to why some animals get more disease and less disease. It probably also explains to some degree why northern koalas, Queensland and New South Wales koalas, by and large have more more infections and more disease. Scientists will argue about, we know the absolute answers to that? And the answer is we don't. So their hypothesis is more than they are proven things. But that might be explaining why it's not just Australian chlamydia. It might be the Australian chlamydia combined with the retrovirus background. So that's a challenge for the koala survival, right? Some pretty complicated things happening.

David (44:14)

Yeah. Particularly when you're talking about the challenges that it already faces, the external factors that are there. This is not a thriving population worldwide. It's a fairly isolated species and getting more and more isolated, it'll make it hard. Let's talk then about vaccine because obviously when you see an animal, a human with an illness, let's see if we can come up with a way of preventing it happening. When did you start looking into developing a vaccine?

Peter (44:24)

Yeah. I've been interested in chlamydia vaccines, I guess, for 15 to 20 years. Probably a series of things happened at the same time, is I was interested in, know, sheep and cattle vaccines first. I'm interested in human chlamydia vaccines, partly because there's more money in human stuff than there is in it. And I've worked with some good people when I was back at QUT doing, you know, mouse model stuff, because that's where you do all that sort of stuff then I moved to the University of Sunshine Coast just short of 10 years ago. But even before we moved, I've become very focused. I'm a very applied person, so I'm very focused on koala vaccine. I'm not going to do any mouse studies on what I'm going to do, the work in koalas. So the problem with that is is that it's hard to do well controlled studies in koalas, right? There's males and females, there's different ages, there's different genetic backgrounds, there's different everything. So when you do a study in koalas, you don't get a nice, answer. But my approach has been, yes, but I'll get the answer of the host that matters. I won't get a mouse answer. I don't need to make a vaccine for mice, And know, immunologists get upset with that. ⁓ I often say one bad trial in koala is better than 10 good trials in a mouse.

But anyway, so I guess we've been pretty heavily becoming more... more heavily focused on koala vaccines for the last more than 10 to 15 years now. And it's gone through a series of steps. The best way to describe it is first trial, then healthy koalas that are chlamydia negative in a sanctuary, and then try to develop a bit of how you formulate the vaccine, then going into animals where we've had opportunities to work with others that are already capturing the animals and to do sort of sub studies. ⁓ Again, and that's been good, looking at koalas that are not infected yet and to stop them getting infected. Can I tell you, you can just about not do that. You can't do it with COVID, you can't do it with the flu. No vaccines, not many vaccines do that. But the animals that are infected, but are still look healthy and you're gonna try and stop them going from infected and healthy to... You want to reduce their infection levels, you can't take them down to zero. All these microorganisms are smarter than us. They've worked out ways to stop that. But if you take them down, the infection levels lower, you might reduce transmission. No proof of that. But the main one then we got to talk what really matters is disease and disease in females. So to try and stop animals that are infected, that look healthy today from getting disease tomorrow, that's an important thing or to stop them from getting more serious grades of disease. So that's where we've done things. And there's no doubt that each of those things does show a promise and does show a positive effect, but it's not 100%. And so I've been frustrated with that a while ago. In fact, we did this sort of study. There was a study in Southeast Queensland where we were involved in hundreds and hundreds of koalas over seven year period or more. And I talked to the research, go in the time I said, but we can get data across this period of time. There's more than 200 koalas have been vaccinated and there's a lot that haven't. We can just compare the ones that got it and didn't. And he says, well, you're going to like it and you're going to hate it. The best I can give you is about 50 to 60%. I go, no, that's not good enough. And then I've come to realise that that is good enough. And there's enough statistics behind that that says, you know, it can do that. It cannot completely stop this.

And it's, all the reasons we've talked about are probably mixed in with that, right? Could you make a better vaccine? Yeah, and we're already making the next version of the vaccine already there. And we've also, most vaccines, as you would be aware, most vaccines do require boosters, just about all vaccines do. There's some, know, the flu vaccine, know, couple of those ones. And so we, semi-early on, decided that for an animal like a koala, it needed to be a single dose vaccine. Probably not immunologically perfect but practical that's where I've been.

David (49:06)

It's a bit hard to get the koala to take two and call you in the morning for the next batch. It makes it a little bit tricky. I did want to ask too, when we look at the not necessarily genetic side, but the efficacy in a specific animal side, given the fact that their closest relatives are wombats, and that's what 40 odd million years ago, does it make it hard that they only the type of its species anywhere?

Peter (49:10)

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. There's nothing close to it. And I won't give you too much science, but there is one or two other marsupial animals that people breed and so on, but they're so far removed from it that I made a decision early on that there's nothing close. And some other diseases, are things that are close. In the human world, I must admit the human community world is pretty interested in what we do.

Not just because we know, but because this is a real world investigation here. You can take a vaccine in the real world where there is sexual transmission of chlamydia and koalas at all different levels and all the dynamics that in the human chlamydia world you're up against as well and ask how difficult is this going to be. So we've had a pretty good interaction with that. The trials are not perfect. That's frustrating, but the results are interesting

David (50:16)

Professor Peter Timms is our guest on "Where Are We At With...?" today. We're koala chlamydia and he is a member of the team that has developed a chlamydia vaccine in koalas. As he said, it's not perfect yet, but by goodness, it's a lot better than things we've had before. Let's talk a bit about it because you said we've had to combine a few different elements to come up with what this end result is.

Peter (50:54)

Yeah, there are six components in the vaccine now. Three of them are the antigens, the chlamydia parts. There's all different ways of making vaccines and some people know about mRNA vaccines and so on. But I'll come back in a minute and tell you why we've stuck with the one we've done. So there are three different proteins from three different strains and the adjuvant itself has got three different components. all vaccines have an adjuvant that's designed to stimulate the immune response in some way, or form.

So this one's got three different paths to it. It doesn't really matter what the parts are, but we worked with our Canadian partner there. That's a major important part of this whole thing. They are involved in human vaccines as well, but they're also involved in vaccinating some strange animals in Canada. Bison, for instance, you would want to catch them twice, right? So the vaccine is semi-complicated, I guess, from that point of view. And indeed, that's one of the strengths of the current vaccine, but also one of the weaknesses. It's actually a little bit more expensive. It's pretty hard to quantify that. And it's a little bit hard to make. Now, the reason we've stuck with that is that we are testing some more variations on the vaccine now, but I'm driven by taking research through a applied phase and a development phase to an endpoint. There's not much point of me, sort of a joke, I twisted around a bit to the wife, one point. There's not much point to me having my tombstone that said, "He tried really hard for a long way and he didn't quite make it". There's no money in that. So I'm pretty driven by trying to get through this. We spent the last three years and it's a tough thing to do. And indeed, veterinary vaccines are nearly the same standard as human vaccines. You might think they might get an easier run, but they don't get an easier run. And there's reasons for that. We, let me just use one example. I know more about glass vials and the stoppers that go in them than you would think you need to know, right? These are the things that have to be controlled to the nth degree. And you know, you go, I guess so. All the solutions and it's a bit like, I also give the other examples with like McDonald's. keep coming back to McDonald's because you know you get the same product. And the APVMA that approved the vaccine are all about batch control. You need to know that when the next batch is the same as this batch. So everything scientists and researchers do in the lab is the opposite of that. They're forever changing things. So you can't keep changing it. All your data has to be on the last final version that you haven't changed. So that's one of the reasons we've stuck with the current version.

David (53:33)

Yeah, and in terms of administering, I'm assuming it's an injection. Can it be done by anyone?

Peter (53:37)

So in fact, ⁓ if you gave the vaccine intranasally as a spray, scientifically it should work better.

We've done that trial and it actually didn't work better, when you spray something up the nose of a koala, they don't like it. And indeed, the veterinarians said, well, of course they don't. They've got super-sensitive noses designed to do all these things. So we suggest we would much rather have an injectable vaccine.

Peter (54:10)

when you're trying to deliver intranasally. So one of the questions we ask ourselves, we like asking the hard questions because people like you do anyway, how will you ever vaccinate animals out in the wild? And we talk about how we can vaccinate lots of them anyway. And so we've done one study, not perfect, but have less where we said, let's let's try and vaccinate 50 % of the animals in a area. So we went in, or we, again, it's not we, ⁓ they flew drones in at night, because drone technology is pretty good these days. It's heat sensing and the AI part of it from a computer is this a possum or a koala is pretty bloody good these days. So you can fly drones into the area at night, work out how many koalas you think there are in the area.

In that particular case, put a little fence down around the tree. Okay, you don't have to do the other sorts of things. Capture that koala and you can vaccinate half of them and not the other half. But at the same time, you take one of their little faecal pellets because you can do quality DNA fingerprinting or genetic fingerprinting of koalas from their faecal pellets to know which koala it is. Pretty nice high tech stuff. And so then you come back six months later and you don't capture the koalas, you just use your detection dogs to go in and find the faecal pellets on the ground and work out whether they came from a koala that you captured or a koala that you never captured. Was it a vaccinated group or not? ⁓ Beautiful, beautiful study. Didn't work out as powerful as we want. It didn't fail, but it didn't show much. It showed a slight improvement. And the main reason was the level of chlamydia in the population was lower than we wanted it to be to start with. As sad as it sounds, we wanted 50 % of the koalas to be infected because then we can see a difference, right? That's the stats of science, but it didn't. But what it tells you is we're, I guess, trying to do things that are very applied and very out there. Could you eventually go back to the aerosol vaccination? We could fly drones in an aerosol and so on. Maybe you could, right? So, you know, we're always thinking of ways of approaching things. It's a long way to go, but it tells you where we work. I work with the guys in the Tasmanian Devil projects. And we talk about how would you vaccinate wild animals? I think the koala is close to the hardest animal there would be to vaccinate. Devils are actually easier. They use baits and they can get them to come in and even wild devils, they can do sorts of things. But anyway, tells you, I guess, that we are pretty much doing projects that are, I'm not scared of any technology, right? I'll find somebody that'll talk to me about it and we'll just do it. It can be a bit expensive. I can tell you, drone works not cheap.

David (57:06)

As military people have found out in Ukraine and Russia and elsewhere as even though individual ones can be cheap, doing it all together can be expensive.

David (57:13)

there's a couple of things out of that that I wanted to ask. Firstly, at the moment we're talking catching the koala and delivering an injection. Is there any scope for delivering it, say with ⁓ dart gun or something like that? Mostly with darts?

Peter (57:24)

with darts, yeah. There certainly is a potential there. A few different groups around Australia capture koalas by different means, because it's highly ethical, highly visible in some points, and it's a bit contentious, right? ⁓ The groups we work with don't do it by darts. They do it in a very controlled way, and they go out, they use long flags, and they flag the koala down the tree. And there lots of rules that the koala bleats or urinates. have to call it, you know, if they spent two hours getting to that point, they start to call it off. It's, know, it's fair enough. But there are other groups that do find the koala and do dart them from the ground. And they will have tarpaulins or whatever. So when the koala becomes sedated and literally falls out of the tree, they catch it. Clearly some people would be upset with that. So yes, it is possible to think of darting.

But people think of lot of interesting things. Even the collars that go around their necks, they put into them a weak point so that if the koala got caught on a branch and whatever, it would break rather than hanging them. But the same thing with a dart. If you shoot a dart into a koala, you're never going to get the dart back. There's a lot of things to think through there. But yeah, absolutely all possible. ⁓ And so that's where my headspace is.

David (58:49)

I'm just imagining the drones then carrying them and delivering the vaccine through the drone, similar to the way that they attacking crown of thorns with autonomous drones that squirt the toxin into them. I'd love to see that development come. Wouldn't that be a little bit of an eye opener, both for the koalas and for us. You mentioned talking to researchers with

David (59:14)

how much collaboration do you have with other people delivering other sorts of vaccines around the world. You mentioned Canada with bison, Tasmanian Devils. What about others?

Peter (59:25)

Yeah, anywhere. My next trip will be we've got two major collaborations in France, partly because Ceva Wildlife, Ceva make lots of products out there. They turn out to $400 billion a year. There's money and stuff, right? They have a wildlife research aspect now. So they're interested and they're involved in ⁓ animals and doing the right thing from a wildlife point of view. So, yeah, we do talk to people anywhere we can. And part of my approach, of course, is to go on the road from time to time and give presentations. ⁓ In many ways, we're a little bit out in front. And it's a bit interesting, this thing we've done in the last three years, trying to take a research vaccine all the way through.

I could have found an international partner, but I decided to go with an Australian boutique vaccine producer for two reasons. And I think it was the right reasons. But there's times I'd shake my head. The first reason was, you I could have partnered up with somebody else and that would be interested in the Koala vaccine. It was also interested in a sheep vaccine. And they made it pretty clear that, you know, I had to redirect 80 % of my efforts into the sheep vaccine so that the koala one could be on the side. And there would have been a time where these companies would have just invested money, but they've all got shareholders that see where the money's going. know, as sad as that is, that's the way the world. So we stuck with a smaller boutique partner in Australia based in Sydney. And because they'd done smaller vaccines that were in porpoises, in dolphins and so on that were, you unique, the trouble is they got no money, right? And they're doing it pretty much as a greenwashing or whatever sort of approach. So yeah, guess that's so from that.

David (1:01:26)

Let's call it a passion project. "I just really care about koalas."

Peter (1:01:30)

Yeah, we've got a meeting next Tuesday. We'll see how passionate it is. want $175,000 upfront. So we've worked with them over a period. They've been good. And we pay them to make small batches of the vaccine. So it's in sort of almost that quality assurance level, but never, we've got to get one more step yet. And they've been good, but we pay them to make it. don't do it for nothing. And in the next phase, yeah, in the next phase where we try and go through a serious potential rollout, if you like.

David (1:01:52)

That is the way of the world.

Peter (1:01:59)

They want $175,000 upfront to start their bit and then we've to do our bit. So you know, it's before you know it and with people as well to monitor this and so on, it's a million dollar project.

David (1:02:14)

And then the vaccines themselves are effectively bought by wildlife hospitals, by park rangers. Who is it that effectively then pays for the vaccine?

Peter (1:02:20)

Your listeners. So at the moment, the model I've had so far is been that it's free. So in all the trials we've done, it's been free because we've needed, in fact, one of the places says, we can do that, but the in-kind cost of our veterinarians to help you on the project is 10 times the cost of your vaccine costs. And I guess it is, Especially when they go, we've got facilities and we have to maintain the facilities and we'll cost that out.

We should have a different, please take a different approach. ⁓ So we've always, I've always made it that it's a free vaccine. We can put a cost on the vaccine, but is it a cost of making it now or is it a cost as involved in everything that goes around it? ⁓ So even if you just did some form of cost for making it now, it's, you know, it's a hundred dollars plus to make the vaccine. So if people pay me a hundred dollars, that's not going to help me much at all. Right? Because that amount of money is not even going to give me a research fellow to monitor the requests and the follow-up. You know, we've got to do a little trial. Every batch of vaccine has to be trialled in some quals before it can be stamped off and used. So the cost is different. You know, if you're a pharmaceutical company and it was a cancer vaccine, I could have a different model. So at the moment, in the next 12 months or whatever, it is still a plan not to charge the end users. It is a charge.

It is a plan to engage the government into taking this on if you like. And so they've been very good. They're very supportive. They've been doing reviews. And I've been trying to back them into a corner where they can't get out. know, there's enough people know about it and people go, well, you know, why aren't you supporting this? Because they are. The government owns the koalas. There's so many rules and regulations. You'd be surprised what sort of six or seven permits have to go into every single trial we do. So that's fair enough.

David (1:04:30)

Because of course you mentioned the idea of money there, you have been involved in a number of patents that have been developed. Unfortunately it doesn't mean that every time a koala is vaccinated you get money in your bank account.

Peter (1:04:41)

Absolutely not. And indeed, the patents that are connected with vaccination for koalas, ⁓ they're okay, they're modest. They're actually designed to protect, to protect, not me, to protect the manufacturer of the vaccine, because they don't want another manufacturer just to go, I can make, I'll get into that as well. Thanks guys for setting that up. Thanks for doing millions of background research to get me there. Thanks for all that. is, you know, let's make another one of these exactly the same as you've made it.

David (1:05:16)

Yeah, and a decade's worth of work, all that sort of thing that's gone into getting to that point.

Peter (1:05:18)

Yeah, that's all.

Yeah, there's no money in it for me or the university at all. In fact, the opposite. We're having to raise the money to pay for it all to give it away free.

David (1:05:29)

We are all fairly grateful and let's hope that your koalas are as well.

Peter (1:05:31)

Yes

David (1:05:32)

what is the next step then? You mentioned you're already working on the next version of the vaccine. What are you hoping to improve?

Peter (1:05:39)

Yeah, so we got three things. We're happy to improve the cost of part of the vaccine so that that adjuvant has got three components in it that come from overseas quite frankly and you get them made at a ridiculously high. I just agreed just last week one of the components has to be remade and sent here and it's $45,000 US just for that one component for a small batch. So we I am trying to partner up now with a bigger company who has an adjuvant that is, you know, we've done a small trial. So to make the, and also other parts of the vaccine, to make it cheaper and simpler to make. It's a little bit complicated in some respects. The quality control is a bit harder. So to make it cheaper. Separately, we're having to do a vaccine approach that does involve a mucosal component to it, but it'll be a two part one. It'll be so that as well.

So there's those trials on and we're forever having to do more field trials to evaluate it because people not surprisingly ask the question, how good is your evidence and data that it protects? And the answer is we've got some pretty good data, it needs to be better. ⁓ But these are complicated. don't know how well you know. Southeast Queensland, pretty well of course. And the M1 duplication road down through Coomera connect. And so that, you know, we're part of that. ⁓ And so as part of that, there are lots of animals that have been captured and their health monitored and so on. That's great. But it is such a complicated grouping of koalas not like your mass experiments are all over the place. So we'll continue to be part of those sort of trials to collect more data. And we certainly get lots of requests to be parts of trials.

I'm stopping short of going, let's just be part of it. You've got 20 koalas you want to vaccinate it on the Gold Coast. Let's do it because it doesn't do anything for me scientifically. It sounds terrible, right? The second part is to negotiate and hopefully make the first real batch of this veterinary approved vaccine now, because that's what's happened in the last six months. It's become APVMA, veterinary approved, ⁓ which does change things. ⁓ And so to make... batches of that under all the requirements that we have to do that with our partner, do the testing. But I need to make a decision as well about what my level of involvement in that will be, right? Because it's a different thing now. It'd suck the life out of you doing that stuff. It doesn't leave you much to be a scientist after you've done that.

David (1:08:24)

It really does require a different approach from a different type of ⁓ person in their working. And that's why we all have different roles in life, trying to help out in all different ways. Look, I am going to finish us up here with one last question, because I know you are a microbiologist. You're dealing particularly with the micro side of things. For a species, the koala, you've worked with them for a while now. Will our great grandchildren see them anywhere other than zoos, given all the threats that they face?

Peter (1:08:29)

Absolutely.

I'm pretty positive. I'm positive for a couple of reasons. I've got two granddaughters and myself. They love doing quality projects and I take them and expose them to stuff and I'm pretty confident that the next generation, because it's not my generation, it's the next generation that really is interested. ⁓ The other thing I'm in favour of is open range zoos. So, know, New Zealand do a little bit of it. So whether it be big areas of land that farmers have got habitat on or so on and you know, and doing a bit of ecotourism so that, they can, because the farmers are doing everything right. I've just been caravanning and I've bloody stay on people's farms because they're trying to make money in any way they can. And so they can have, if we just support them not knocking down their trees and maintaining the koalas over there, maybe with a vaccination program or whatever, and people can come, you know, pay to come to see them in the wild or whatever. So I think that's, you know, we have to be realistic. Some people don't like the fact that humans are trying to manage a wild species.

But hey, I think we've caused some of the issues. So we need to step in, I think, to some degree.

David Curnow (1:09:58)

Given the amount of management that we've done already that's led to where they are a little bit on the positive side is a good thing. Professor Peter Timms, thank you so much for your time today.

Professor Peter Timms (1:10:02)

Yes.

Okay, thanks very much, David.

David (1:10:13)

You can donate yourself to the Koala Research Project and help fund chlamydia vaccinations on the University of Sunshine Coast website www.unisc.edu.au or better still head to our website www.wawapod.com that's www.wawapod.com

You can find links to the donation portal as well as koala fact sheets and a transcript of this episode. You can also check out some of our other episodes or head to our YouTube channel and watch them in glorious Technicolor. I'm David Curnow. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.