Yes. Unfortunately—and this is what I had spoken to previously—we didn't have capacity. I'm glad to hear that we have invested in having our own GMP manufacturing capacity. Hopefully, they'll get the expertise that's needed to make the type of vaccines that we feel would benefit Canadians.
We have the whole type of vaccines. A live attenuated vaccine is best, actually, for children, because it exercises the immune system really well. It's a version of the bug that has been attenuated so it's not as infectious. It sort of handicaps the bug in you and launches an appropriate type of immune response to it. Examples of that are the smallpox vaccine and the measles vaccine. Those are really effective. You don't need to go down this multiple dose issue.
Then you have the whole inactivated vaccines. You basically take the bug, you kill it in some way, and then you add hopefully an adjuvant. To me, the type of adjuvant that you have—I think this is not really recognized as well—is really important for the type of immunity you launch. We've been using alum. It's not really an adjuvant but part of the ingredients for its adjuvant. But anyway, that's going down a long path.
Next are the component vaccines. You take pieces of a bug, add an adjuvant, and use that to stimulate an immune response against these immunogenic types.
The new nucleic acid delivery platforms are ones we'd never really used previously, so there was a learning curve for them. Essentially, these types deliver genetic material. The ones we're using now encode the original spike protein of the Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2.
Now, as with any new knowledge, I'm not really sure what the adjuvant for the mRNA is. I know that they say it has its own adjuvant, but it doesn't really trigger the type of immune response you would typically have to a virus or how it's presented to the immune system, because you can't really target it to specialized cells. You're assuming its uptake is around the muscle and is being presented there, so that might contribute to the variable durability of it.