Canada backing homegrown COVID vaccine
PM announces deal for 76 million doses being developed in Quebec
The portfolio of experimental COVID-19 vaccines Canada is banking on now includes an option being developed and tested here at home.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday announced a deal for as many as 76 million doses of a plant-based vaccine being developed in Quebec City.
The agreement is part of more than $200 million announced for domestic vaccine development and production, as Canada races to lock down a COVID-19 vaccine.
“We’re coming at this from every angle, whether that’s investing in Canadian research or securing the world’s most promising candidate vaccines,” Trudeau told reporters.
Canada had already inked six advance purchase agreements and an international vaccine-sharing deal in the hopes of buying Canadians a spot in line for front-running vaccine candidates around the world, but this is the first time it has backed a candidate being developed here.
All of the vaccine candidates are still in clinical trials, and would have to get Health Canada approval before being deployed, but these contracts guarantee Canada a certain number of doses should any of the candidates prove successful.
The bulk of the investment is $173 million to a Quebec-based biotechnology company called Medicago. It’s one of four companies or research teams that have received the green light from Health Canada to do clinical testing in this country.
The company is currently doing its first round of clinical testing in Quebec. It will likely expand outside of this country to draw on a bigger pool of volunteers as testing continues.
Its vaccine candidate uses living plants to produce particles that mimic the coronavirus in a bid to teach your body how to fight the virus off. Many vaccines use things such as chicken embroyos or bacteria or yeast, but company spokespeople say they’re using plants because they’re versatile and easy to scale up.
“We are proud to contribute a made-in-Canada vaccine to our country’s vaccine supply,” Medicago president and CEO Dr. Bruce Clark said in a statement.
The funding the company is getting will to help it advance its vaccine, but also build a largescale vaccine- and antibody-production facility, Trudeau said.
Medicago wasn’t the only company to benefit from Friday’s news.
Precision NanoSystems in Vancouver isn’t as far along as Medicago — and the federal government isn’t signing up for doses yet — but will receive $18.2 million for its vaccine candidate. Its an RNA vaccine, which is the promising new genetic technology being used by a couple of the leading global vaccines. It’s still in what’s called preclinical, because it’s not quite ready to be tested on humans, but the company hopes to get there by next summer.
The funding the company is getting would help it get as far as Phase 2 testing, according to CEO James Taylor. Like Medicago, it also plans to do some of its testing on Canadian volunteers.
His company has worked with vaccine programs all over the world, Taylor says, but there is still value to Canada having the ability to both develop and manufacture vaccines when it needs to.
“It’s important for us to have that capability, both for this pandemic and for future pandemic response,” he said.
“It’s important for Canada in general to be controlling its destiny.”
An additional $23.2 million will go toward a handful of early-stage vaccine candidates across the country.
Canada is banking on a many eggs, many baskets approach to vaccine development.
“We can’t afford, for the sake of Canadian health and welfare, to bank on one vaccine alone,” federal Procurement Minister Anita Anand said last month.
While the details of the agreements are sparse — Anand has said things such as cost are being kept secret because of the competitiveness of the global market — Canada has already spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of a billion dollars securing access to an eventual vaccine.
The companies with which the federal government has signed contracts include Maryland-based Novavax; Janssen Inc., the pharmaceutical arm of Johnson & Johnson; global drug giant Pfizer; Massachusetts-based Moderna; British biopharma company AstraZeneca, which is working with Oxford University; and Sanofi Pasteur, which has partnered with GlaxoSmithKlein.
Assuming all of these vaccine candidates get approved, Canada now has agreements for a maximum of 358 million vaccine doses.