Dr. Volker Gerdts, the director and CEO of VIDO said a new in-house pilot scale vaccine manufacturing facility will likely make vaccines by the fourth quarter of this year. 
The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan, is developing this new facility.  
With construction almost finished the commissioning should be complete by late summer or early fall allowing vaccine manufacturing in the fourth quarter of this year. 
Dr. Gerdts said having a locally-owned facility will speed up the process whereas before contract manufacturers handled the VIDO vaccine technologies.  
“We need pilot scale facilities to take technologies from the lab into the clinical phase.” 
Canada does not have a lot of pilot-scale facilities so this facility will help not only VIDO but everyone in the country to use this facility and get their products quickly manufactured and tested in the clinical phase. It will significantly cut down time in the development of these vaccines. 
“Especially small biotech’s who often don’t have the financial resources to build their facilities will use this facility and VIDO will manufacture and help with the testing. It’s something that the country needs.” 
Many countries around the world are building pilot scale and commercial manufacturing facilities.  
“We all know that during pandemics you need to have enough for sufficient domestic capacity to make vaccines so that you don’t find yourself in a situation again like Canada did where we had to import all vaccines for Canadians essentially.” 
Canada lacked research and pilot-scale manufacturing capacity. Adding this at VIDO, the country will be better prepared for future emerging diseases, whether those are animal or human diseases. 
Dr. Gerdts said VIDO is developing vaccines for humans and animals essentially all relevant technologies discussed broadly as part of COVID. 
“We started work on RNA vaccines also protein subunit vaccines. Our COVID vaccine, for example, is one of those but VIDO was the first organization in the world to make a protein subunit vaccine for animals.” 
VIDO is working on viral vectors as the AstraZeneca for COVID is one of those and on viral vectors for African Swine Fever. So VIDO is working on all relevant vaccine technologies, making the in-house manufacturing facility an asset to manufacturing human and animal vaccines. This makes the facility one of maybe a dozen in the world with the ability to do this manufacturing.  
Dr. Gerdts said that by adding this new manufacturing capacity at VIDO, the country would be better prepared for future emerging diseases, whether animal or human. •
— By Harry Siemens