Health committee  I am speculating. It's really hard to convince large.... Pharmaceutical companies, on average, would have the greatest capacity and resources to roll out anything super fast. They have their feet on the ground. They can do clinical trials. They have manufacturing capacity, etc. However, with the vaccine world, pandemics come and go, as we saw previously with the SARS issue.

Health committee  Yes, it is—100%. There is a desire to push this through now to regulations. What we'll also see is a push to regulate the use of these platforms for other drugs, because once you have a [Technical difficulty—Editor] for one, then it's easier to enter any other type of indication.

Health committee  Historically, given that it's the only one that has succeeded in wiping out infectious diseases, I would say yes, but it takes longer to develop these live attenuated vaccines. I was looking at the types of vaccines being developed on the spreadsheet of the World Health Organization.

Health committee  I'll take the easier question first. For the live attenuated vaccines, they engage and train all parts of the immune system so it acts as one. That includes training the innate immune system, which also has that type of memory that's contained at the epigenetic level, and mobilizing the awareness of the adaptive immune system to respond appropriately to a given type of pathogen.

Health committee  The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an important opportunity to identify and rectify our deficiencies in having a cogent plan to deal with emerging infectious threats that takes into account not only the short immunological health of Canadians but also the long-term health. This is a nice segue from what Dr.

Health committee  What we don't know is what we don't know. For me, one of the biggest black holes is that we have no clear biodistribution or in-situ expression data for these gene delivery vectors, meaning we don't know where these go and where they're being expressed. As an immunologist, it's still unclear to me how these expressed proteins are presented to the immune system.

Health committee  Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the honourable members of the committee for the opportunity to speak this morning. I'd like to start off by just saying that the thoughts I'm presenting are really my own as a translational immunologist, and not necessarily those that are shared by my affiliated organizations.