Good morning.
Thank you so much, Madam Chair, and thank you to the committee for inviting us today.
I'm really honoured to be with you today as the co-chair of Canada's vaccine task force. I think I speak for my colleague, Mark Lievonen, who is here, and all task force members in saying how privileged we all feel that we are able to serve in this way during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I'll speak briefly about our vaccine work and then turn to Mark, who will talk about the biomanufacturing component of our work.
The task force was formed in June 2020 to advise the government on the best strategy to secure safe and effective vaccines for Canadians to mitigate this pandemic. In order to do so, we looked broadly at three aspects of our work: domestic vaccine candidates, international vaccine candidates and biomanufacturing opportunities.
Who are we? We are 11 experts in broad fields. All but one of us are Canadians; we have one international member. We come from fields like clinical medicine, immunology, vaccinology, biomanufacturing and commercialization. We're all volunteers, and we are working in a format where we are looking for the most recent evidence that's available at the time when we're trying to provide advice to the Government of Canada. That evidence includes literature review, meeting with companies and meeting with external experts. We've met with 12 external experts at this point. Six of those are international and six are Canadian. We've also met with task forces from other countries to learn from them as well.
We've been guided by a number of key principles, and probably the most important one is science. The recommendations we make are based on the best available information at the time. Another principle is transparency. We know that the public is interested in our work, and our members have proactively engaged with media on about 135 interviews as of yesterday, I think. We've also participated in outreach events and met with scientific community members across the country: people in academic settings, NGOs and so on.
We held our very first meeting on June 16, and the tenor of the room was one of extreme urgency. We have since met about 39 times. Despite this commitment to transparency, of course we are dealing with confidential business information, so the secretariat put in place a rigorous protocol to declare, manage and record potential conflicts of interest. This process means that we do end up recusing ourselves from providing advice on projects where there's a conflict or an appearance of one, and this has happened about 30 times so far. All of our potential conflicts are registered on the public access NRC website.
Back in the early spring/summer, we recommended a portfolio of candidates, a portfolio because we were recognizing that there was a risk that any of these potential candidates might not make it into clinical trials and ultimately to regulatory authorization. Ultimately, the government has announced seven advance purchase agreements with promising candidates, and two of these are now being rolled out in programs across our provinces and territories.
We did recommend purchasing more vaccines than we might potentially need, knowing that some of these might fail and wanting to have safe and effective vaccines for Canadians. We knew that the option for donation of excess vaccines was always available if the vaccines were authorized.
We reviewed, with regard to Canadian proposals, 24 Canadian options through the strategic innovation fund. The most promising back in the spring/early summer were Medicago, Variation Biotechnologies, VBI, and Precision NanoSystems, PNI. Other domestic candidates were funded through the National Research Council and the industrial research assistance program. Those include Providence Therapeutics, IMV, Entos, Symvivo, Biodextris and Glycovax. These will play an important role in developing Canadian candidates in the more medium term.
I think I will pass over at this point to Mark to discuss the biomanufacturing.
Thank you.