Good morning, Madam Chair.
Good morning, members of the committee. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address you this morning.
My name is Volker Gerdts. I'm the director and CEO of VIDO, the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization here at the University of Saskatchewan.
For those of you who may not be familiar with us, we are a research centre here at the university, and during this response to the pandemic we really have become one of Canada's go-to places for COVID-19 research. We were the first in the country to isolate the virus, the first in the country to establish an animal model that has been used to test vaccines and antivirals and so on, and since the beginning of last year, we have worked with more than 80 companies, half of them Canadian, on identifying vaccine therapeutics and antivirals.
We also have our own vaccine in the making. We were also able to design this vaccine and have it in the lab, produced and ready for immunization, within four weeks. We were one of the first in the world to have this vaccine in animals, and over the last year, similar to what you just heard, we also completed the necessary animal trials to get approval from Health Canada. Our vaccine is now also in phase one trials.
Our vaccine is a protein subunit vaccine, which is a well-known technology that has been in humans for many years. It offers many advantages in that it's more stable, easier to store and easier to transport. The adjuvant we're mixing with it gives a very broad immune response, which is great for these variants.
What we are also doing here at VIDO right now is building a manufacturing facility. This manufacturing facility is currently under way. It's a 10,000-square foot facility. It's called a pilot-scale manufacturing facility, and it will enable us to produce both human and animal vaccines here at VIDO-InterVac. It is also unique in that it is tied into the biocontainment facility that we operate here at VIDO, Canada's largest high-containment laboratory, and thus, will enable us to work on vaccines for emerging diseases as they emerge.
Construction is currently under way. By October this facility will be completed, and then there will be a phase of GMP certification, commissioning of the facility and so on. By next year our facility will be ready to produce vaccines here in Canada.
We also have put forward a proposal to the federal government with support from the provincial government as well as, hopefully, from private donors and the municipal government, for VIDO really to become Canada's centre for pandemic research. We have currently the largest infrastructure for high containment research right here in Saskatoon, which is based on previous investments by governments. That includes Canada's largest high-containment laboratory, the International Vaccine Centre.
We are now building an in-house GMP manufacturing facility. What we think is needed to really become one of those centres that can help the country in better preparing for the next emerging disease is having an animal facility that allows us to work with a wide range of animals including bats, insects, ticks, reptiles and so on. That's a proposal we put forward, but if we as a country want to be self-reliant and self-sufficient in terms of domestic manufacturing and research capacity, we think it is necessary to have these national centres that are specifically focused on emerging diseases.
Thank you.