Pilot Scale Vaccine Manufacturing Facility Expected to Speed up Vaccine Development

A new pilot scale vaccine manufacturing facility in Saskatoon will speed up the development of new vaccines for both animals and humans.The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan, has completed the construction and commissioning of its new on-site pilot scale vaccine manufacturing facility.

VIDO Director and CEO Dr. Volker Gerdts says access to in-house vaccine manufacturing will speed up the development of new vaccines.

Clip-Dr. Volker Gerdts-Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization:

If you want to develop vaccines or therapeutics in a timely way, in a rapid response to a new disease, you have to have inhouse capacity.You can't rely on other organizations to manufacture the different components that go into a vaccine.We unfortunately experienced that during COVID when we didn't have access to such a facility.

We had to outsource all of the manufacturing and that always takes longer.Having access to inhouse manufacturing capacity allows you to take your prototype candidate that you developed in the lab and that you then demonstrated proof of concept in animal trials, it allows you to take this prototype directly into manufacturing without wasting any time.

That's really the critical factor here.Having access to inhouse manufacturing will enable us to make vaccines much faster.How will that affect VIDO in the future?

It will allow us to now manufacture these candidates that we are now developing in our research laboratories, that we're testing in animal models, to then manufacture in house and get to the next phase of clinical testing.For animals we can even commercially manufacture vaccines all the way up to market penetration.

Dr. Gerdts notes time matters in responding to any disease and the goal of the G-8 countries is to have, within 100 days of a pandemic threat being detected, a vaccine candidate that can go into clinical testing.