Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and committee members.
My name is Volker Gerdts. I'm the director of VIDO, which stands for the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, a research institute here at the University of Saskatchewan. We're on Treaty No. 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis.
We operate one of Canada's and the world's largest high-containment research institutes for infectious diseases and vaccine development. We have about 170 researchers from more than 28 countries. More than 50% of them are female, and 40% of our research staff represent visible minorities.
VIDO is funded through an MSI grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation. That means 60% of our operating funding for parts of our facility—for parts, not for the whole—comes from CFI.
VIDO has been leading Canada's response to COVID. We were the first in the country to isolate the virus and then distribute it to all diagnostic labs in the country. We were the first in Canada to have an animal model established and the first university with a vaccine in clinical trials. It is now in trials in Africa, in Uganda, and is also entering a trial here in Canada for booster studies, using our vaccine as a boost to already authorized vaccines. During the last two years, we worked with almost 100 companies from all around the world to find and test their solutions, whether vaccines, therapeutics or antivirals for this disease.
The organization overall receives support, as I mentioned, from CFI, but also from the Government of Saskatchewan. During the pandemic in particular, we received funding from ISED for our vaccine research but also to develop a manufacturing facility here, in-house. This is, of course, what we are talking about today.
VIDO is currently building an in-house manufacturing facility that will enable us to manufacture both human and animal vaccines. What's very unique about our facility is that it's connected into our containment. It's one of a handful in the whole world that will be able to make vaccines for those pathogens that require higher levels of containment, often referred to as “high consequence” pathogens.
Construction of the facility is almost complete. It will be commissioned by the fall of this year. We're anticipating that we'll be able to start production in Q4 of 2022.
This facility can produce a variety of technologies, including the RNA vaccines. It can also make biovector vaccines, live vaccines, some mammalian cell-based vaccines and subunit vaccines. VIDO's vaccine is a subunit protein vaccine. We envision that, in principle, depending on which technology, our facility can make as many as 40 million doses a year. However, it is a pilot-scale manufacturing facility, which is really driven to quickly drive innovation from the discovery stage and get it quickly into clinical trials.
VIDO is part of and a pillar in Canada's life sciences and biomanufacturing strategy. We are happy to support the strategy as outlined in there. That includes, for example, the training mission. We have a number of graduate students who are being trained not only in the discovery science but now also in manufacturing and the operation of the facility. We think it is critical, as we look forward and prepare for the future, to have the skills, as we just heard from Mr. Technow, and the skilled workers to operate these facilities.
As a side note, during the pandemic we had to recruit over 30 researchers who were able to work in high containment with a virus. It takes usually six months from recruiting a person to getting them to be comfortable working with a potentially lethal virus in the lab.
Lastly, VIDO received funding in last year's budget—not yesterday's budget but the one last year—to take on the role as Canada's centre for pandemic research. As part of that, we have received funding from the Government of Canada, the Government of Saskatchewan, the City of Saskatoon and many private and corporate donors to expand our capacity. We're upgrading our containment space to the highest level, to containment level four, thereby doubling Canada's capacity for high containment. We're building a new animal facility, which will enable us to work all year round with those species from which we see these diseases emerge. As I mentioned, we're also about to open our manufacturing facility.
All of that will allow us to bring the world's best researchers to Canada and attract companies to Canada that will use this infrastructure in the future to make sure that Canada will never find itself in a situation like we did two years ago.
Thank you.