Farmscape for December 21, 2022
| Full Interview 10:22 | Listen  |
The launch of a new pilot scale vaccine manufacturing facility in Saskatoon is expected to help researchers speed up their development of new vaccines. The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization’s new Vaccine Development Centre, which is now in the commissioning phase, will be capable of manufacturing a full platform of vaccines for both human and veterinary use, including live attenuated and killed vaccines, subunit-based vaccines, viral vector-based vaccines and newer technologies such as RNA and DNA based vaccines. Dr. Trina Racine, the Director of Vaccine Development with VIDO, expects this new capacity to speed up the ability of scientists at VIDO as well as other academics and small companies to develop new vaccines.
Clip-Dr. Trina Racine-Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization:
In addition to VIDO’s scientists having access to the facility, we will also be available and open to other academics who are discovering and developing their own vaccine products as well as Canadian and international small biopharmaceutical companies. This being our target market, Canadian academics, international academics and small companies is what we believe will help further the development of these products in a much more timely and cost-effective manner. If we can help people identify the processes needed to scale up their vaccine manufacturing more quickly and in a more cost-effective manner, hopefully they can get into clinics for their clinical trials or get into the field with their field testing sooner and won’t have to circle back and go back into their discovery phase of research because we’ll have identified any new potential pitfalls, what have you, as we’re going through this process.
The total cost of the new manufacturing facility, located on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan, was around 30 million dollars with funding coming from the federal and provincial governments, the City of Saskatoon and a number of philanthropists.
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