VIDO-InterVac hopes to have a new facility for manufacturing the vaccines it develops constructed, approved and operating within the next two to three years.
With a history of more than 40 years, VIDO-InterVac is one of the global leaders in developing vaccines to protect both animals and humans from disease.
VIDO-InterVac Director Dr. Volker Gerdts says, with funding from the province of Saskatchewan and Western Economic Diversification, a manufacturing facility will be added that will allow vaccines developed in house to be manufactured in house so they then can be used as animal vaccines and, hopefully in the future, for human applications or for human disease.
Dr. Volker Gerdts-VIDO-InterVac:
This is what is called pilot scale so it's going to be limited in size at the moment to 200 litres for fermentation.
That will be enough for animals, probably for specific groups of animals.
It will be hundreds of thousand of doses of the vaccine and, for human development, it would allow us to create enough to go into clinical trials, so test our vaccine candidates in human clinical trials.
You need to have what is called GMP material for that, so very clean and free of any contamination material.
Then you can enter into clinical trials.
There is a real shortage at the moment.
Canada had quite a few manufacturing facilities but many of them were purchased by global companies who then moved them somewhere else so right now there is a real shortage in the country to manufacture these vaccines for these clinical trials but also to be prepared for the next emerging disease.
Any capacity in the country that we can have and that can be used for this purpose will help us in protecting Canadians and their livestock for the next emerging threat.
Dr. Gerdts says the hope is to have the new facility approved and on stream within the next two to three years.
By-Bruce Cochrane.
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