The investment of $53 million represents a multipronged approach to the response to variants of concern, including establishing a robust mechanism to detect rapidly and further characterize variants of concern.
This represents a partnership of the National Microbiology Laboratory and PHAC, along with the Canadian Public Health Laboratory Network and CanCOGeN, the Canadian COVID-19 Genomics Network. It brings together all that information with CIHR to enable us to understand the spread, identify cases and understand the potential impact of these variants.