Canada missed chance: vaccine developers

OTTAWA • Canada could have done more to boost homegrown COVID-19 vaccines last spring but the federal government and its agencies were too slow and risk-adverse when it came to funding, a parliamentary committee heard Monday.

John Lewis, CEO of Entos Pharmaceuticals, said his Alberta company has a vaccine candidate in development but never received the kind of early, up-front funding that the U.S. and U.K. governments put into their own vaccine production.

“Canada was pretty slow to make the initial decisions for domestic vaccine development in manufacturing, despite having internationally recognized expertise in vaccine development,” Lewis told the House of Commons health committee.

Lewis said Canada “took a careful, risk-averse and committee-based decision approach that lead to a relatively modest amount of scattered funding for companies in Canada to develop domestic vaccine.”

“This put the financial risk of vaccine development — and our country’s national security — on them, which I think was a mistake,” Lewis told MPS.

Lewis said he estimates it costs in the range of $350 million to $600 million to bring a vaccine from initial discovery to the end of phase three trials. The National Research Council, by comparison, gave his company about $5 million to get to phase one trials.

“This really put the major part of the burden of development on the companies themselves,” he said. “I think if we’d received up-front funding at the beginning... we’d be well into phase three and toward licensure by now.”

Lewis acknowledged that “hindsight is 20/20” when it comes to which vaccines should have been funded early. “But I think it’s extremely clear that if you look at the success around the globe, decisive and upfront funding of multiple vaccine candidates all the way through to the end was key to both their success and their speed,” he said.

The committee also heard from Gary Kobinger, director of Laval University’s Infectious Disease Research Centre, who agreed that the federal government has been far too slow in supporting domestic vaccine development. Kobinger, who has been part of Canadian teams that developed vaccines for Ebola and Zika, said his non-profit struggled to get federal funding for its own potential COVID-19 vaccine, receiving just $1 million to do a preclinical study.

“If you look at what’s happened in the United States and Great Britain, really huge amounts of investment there,” Kobinger said, speaking in French. “But here, a million dollars, that’s not going to get you very far.”

Kobinger said it’s partly his own fault that his vaccine candidate didn’t get more funding, as he was a member of the federal vaccine task force. He resigned from the task force in September due to concerns over its lack of transparency and protections against conflicts of interest.

The health committee also heard on Monday from witnesses who defended and explained the government’s approach, including Mitch Davies, president of the National Research Council, and Alan Bernstein, a member of the federal vaccine task force and president of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Bernstein told MPS the task force was focused on how to identify safe and effective vaccines and secure a reliable supply for Canada.

“In doing so, we were also tasked to look at both domestic and international candidates, and to look at the state of biomedical bio-manufacturing capacity in the country,” Bernstein said. “As you will recall, there was no vaccine last summer, nor was it clear whether there would ever be a vaccine. I want to stress that: most vaccine journeys actually end in failure. So we were really trying to cover our bases with vaccines that we recommended to government.”

He said they looked at 24 Canadian proposals, and three were recommended for “significant government funding” through the Strategic Innovation Fund: vaccines by Medicago, Precision Nanosystems, and Variation Biotechnologies. (Medicago received the most funding, with $173 million announced last October.)

“The other domestic candidates, some showed promise, but for a variety of reasons the vaccine task force felt that they were at too early a stage for significant investment at the time we looked at them,” Bernstein said.

The committee also heard from Health Canada’s Chief Medical Advisor Supriya Sharma, who said there’s still no firm timeline for the Astrazeneca vaccine to be approved in Canada, but the process remains in the final stage. She said they’ve reviewed all the data but are still putting questions to the company and waiting for responses.