Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond to the comments by the hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith regarding COVID-19. Let me be clear. The health and safety of Canadians is our government's top priority. The government is focused on, and is implementing, every possible solution to deliver safe and effective vaccines and treatments to all Canadians.
It has taken rapid action to deploy policy and program instruments to support vaccine development and manufacturing capabilities in Canada. We have established and mobilized extraordinary partnerships with industry, academia and research institutions to fight COVID-19, the most significant global health challenge in recent history.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the government's efforts have focused on a comprehensive made in Canada approach to harness world-renowned Canadian ingenuity and innovation to address this crisis. The government has made investments that are accelerating the development of vaccines and therapeutics in Canada and are strengthening our national biomanufacturing capabilities.
A signature investment is the $175.6 million provided to Vancouver-based AbCellera to advance its therapy discovery platform and to establish a good manufacturing practice facility right here in Canada. This Canadian company's technology is helping advance a world leading monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19 in partnership with U.S.-based Eli Lilly.
The government's investments also include up to $173 million for Quebec City-based Medicago, which is pioneering a virus-like particle vaccine created on the company's unique plant-based technology platform. The government's contributions provide funding to Medicago so it can develop its vaccine candidate through all phases of clinical trials and so it can expand its manufacturing capacity to establish a new, large-scale good manufacturing processing facility right here in Canada.
Another innovative vaccine investment is up to $18.2 million in contributions to Precision NanoSystems Inc., a Vancouver-based company. Precision NanoSystems is working on a novel messenger RNA vaccine candidate and has created lipid nanoparticle technology that provides Canada with a distinct technological advance in the global arena. The government's investments in these projects are growing Canada's capabilities in the most sophisticated vaccine and therapeutics technology and helping solidify world-leading clusters across the country. Among others, I would like to reference messenger RNA vaccines and associated technologies as key examples.
However, the development of vaccines is complicated. It depends on supply chains and requires biomanufacturing assets to serve as a safety net in case of unforeseen disruptions to the global production network. For this reason, the government is taking concrete steps to strengthen domestic biomanufacturing capacity. We are doing so not only to reinforce Canada's ability to deliver vaccines and therapeutics for Canadians in the near term, as part of our fight against COVID-19, but also to develop our country's capacity for the future.
A major investment in this area is the expansion of the new Biologics Manufacturing Centre at the National Research Council of Canada's Royalmount site in Montreal which, I might add, is well under way. Once operational, this facility will have—