VACCINE PARTNERS
Providence Therapeutics founder Brad Stevens, left, and Brad Sorenson, founder of Northern RNA, are working together to develop and produce a made-in-canada COVID-19 vaccine.
A COVID-19 vaccine candidate that entered clinical trials last week proposes not only to be a made-in-canada solution to the pandemic, but a made-in-calgary one.
Providence Therapeutics, a Canadian biotechnology company with offices in Calgary and Toronto, announced Tuesday it has begun Phase I trials of its vaccine. Providence is also working with another Calgary company, Northern RNA, which aims to develop vaccine manufacturing capacity in this city.
Providence Therapeutics was founded as a cancer research company by Calgarian Brad Sorenson, whose young son was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2013. Because all of the company's work was focused on messenger RNA (the same technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines), Providence was able to quickly pivot in 2020 to trying to find a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.
Sorenson said results from Providence's animal trials were promising, and on par with Pfizer and Moderna in terms of effectiveness.
Like those vaccines, the Providence vaccine uses MRNA to send a message to the body's cells to build a harmless piece of the “spike protein” found on the surface of the COVID -19 virus. The body can then build an immune response to the virus.
“We (Providence) are not new to this game; we've been doing this for years. We know how to make very good messenger RNA, and we know how to deliver it very effectively to where it needs to go in the body,” Sorenson said. “We're very confident we're going to have a very good vaccine.”
Last week, Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (Ngen), the industry-led organization behind Canada's Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster, announced it would grant $5 million to Providence and Northern RNA to build out manufacturing capacity for its vaccine.
The companies have already acquired lab facilities in southeast Calgary, and Northern RNA has hired five employees (and is actively seeking to hire three more). Providence is currently in the process of moving 15 of its employees from Toronto to Calgary. Both companies anticipate rapid hiring growth as their vaccine program advances.
Brad Stevens, the founder and CEO of Northern RNA and a former deputy city manager with the City of Calgary, said while Providence will be his company's anchor customer, the goal is for Northern RNA to ultimately provide MRNA ingredients to biotech firms and vaccine producers around the world. In addition to manufacturing the Providence vaccine, Northern RNA will manufacture components and building blocks necessary for vaccine production, including cap analogs and plasmid DNA, two of the ingredients required for the production of messenger RNA.
“Given the success of messenger RNA … I fully anticipate that it will be used in many other applications and therefore our building blocks will be needed throughout the world,” Stevens said.
Outside of the Ngen funding, Providence and Northern RNA are nearly entirely privately financed. Sorenson said he is lobbying the federal government for funding support to expand production capacity quickly and “look inside, not just outside of Canada” for a solution to the pandemic. So far, Canada has invested over $1 billion to secure access to promising vaccine candidates, but nearly all of that money has gone to major U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Astrazeneca.
One exception is a $173-million federal investment into Quebec City-based Medicago, which is trialling a unique plant-based COVID-19 vaccine.
Sorenson said if clinical trials go well, the Providence vaccine could be ready for final Health Canada approval in early 2022. While many Canadians will already have been vaccinated by then, Sorenson said early delays in the vaccine rollout in both this province and across the country are evidence of the need for more vaccine from many additional producers.
“If you want to get life back to normal, you need to vaccinate about six billion people,” Sorenson said. “And we've seen distribution challenges in trying to vaccinate tens of millions of people. We need more capacity.”
Sorenson added that COVID-19 will be with us for the long haul, and will likely continue to mutate and appear as new and varied strains for years to come. He said a domestic vaccine that gives first priority to Canadians will be appealing to many.
“When there is another variant — and there will be another variant — we don't want to be relying on two companies (Pfizer and Moderna) to manage that,” Sorenson said.