Good evening, Madam Chair and committee members.
Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak to you tonight. I'm speaking to you from Treaty 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis.
As you mentioned, my name is Volker Gerdts. I'm the director of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, also known as VIDO.
VIDO is a research institute at the University of Saskatchewan here in Saskatoon and one of Canada's largest research infrastructures focused on infectious disease research. We currently operate Canada's largest high-containment laboratory, which is one of the world's largest and most advanced facilities. We have about 170 researchers at the moment, from more than 28 different countries. We're 50% female and have 40% representing visible minorities.
I had an opportunity to address another committee last year. During the pandemic, VIDO was in the news. You might have heard about the work that was going on here. As one of the few such organizations in Canada, we moved a lot of our research onto the pandemic. We were the first in the country to isolate the virus, to develop an animal model and to have a vaccine in clinical testing. We have worked with almost 100 companies over the last almost two years now, testing their technologies, their prototypes, their vaccines and their therapeutics in our models here.
VIDO has really become one of Canada's go-to places for COVID-19 research. It has significantly contributed to the advances that are leading us eventually out of this pandemic.
We have our own vaccine, which is a protein subunit vaccine. You may have seen the news today. Novavax technology is now approved in Canada. VIDO and others are working on technologies like that.
Our own vaccine is moving forward. We have two targets right now. One is to make this vaccine available to Canadians as a booster vaccine to already-authorized vaccines, which we all assume we'll probably need in the future to be able to continue to address COVID.
More importantly, we are also working with African countries—with Uganda and Senegal—on making this technology available to low- and middle-income countries to make sure that those countries and those people around the world who currently don't have access to vaccines will have access to our vaccine. It is a technology that is ideal for use in remote areas such as Africa and remote Saskatchewan, or Canada's north, for that matter.
As a side note here, CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is the world's largest organization focused on emerging diseases, recently invested $6 million into VIDO's platforms, with the goal of developing these platforms for new COVID variants of concern as they emerge.
It's important to mention that over the last many years now, VIDO has received funding from the federal, provincial and municipal governments. Most important, probably, is the funding for the high-containment laboratory—the InterVac facility. InterVac is one of Canada's 10 major science infrastructures. Currently, we are funded through the MSI program provided through the CFI. It includes funding for our in-house manufacturing facility, which is now almost complete. It also includes funding for the vaccine.
Most recently, in budget 2021, VIDO received funding for what we call the “pandemic centre” and our vision to become Canada's centre for pandemic research. The vision really is to be one of the key research organizations in Canada, to focus on these emerging diseases, and to be able to rapidly respond to any new disease, whether it's a human disease or an animal disease.
Part of that is our in-house manufacturing facility, which will enable us to rapidly develop clinical trial batches that can then go into clinical development. It includes the construction of a new animal facility, which will enable us to house a wide range of exotic species. It is also to upgrade part of our existing containment facility to the highest level—to containment level 4—to enable us to respond to any threat in the future.
This is supported by the federal government, but it's important to note that it's also supported by the provincial government, the City of Saskatoon and many donors that have now provided millions of dollars in support of moving forward with this vision to build Canada's centre for pandemic research in the future.
From my perspective, in terms of what we can learn from the pandemic and where we want to go as a country in the future, it's great to see that Canada is currently developing a life science strategy and a biomanufacturing plan. The vision is to roll this out and make sure that Canada as a country in the future is able to domestically produce vaccine and does not have to depend on other countries for both the research and the manufacturing. It's great to see this vision coming forward.
The four things I'd like to point out before I finish—