Industry committee  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.

Science and Research committee  That's a good question. There are a number of elements that are relevant. Number one, as I talked about, is building the infrastructure, building these centres like VIDO, national facilities that are open to the industry but open also to academic researchers, because that's really where the mixing occurs.

Science and Research committee  That was kind of what I was trying to address there. The life science strategy, from what I understand, is really looking at a number of things. It supports research that's happening at the universities and then takes it into clinical development. At the same time, it invests into commercial industry—commercial manufacturers like Sanofi and Biovectra—and the resilience and upsell investments that we have seen recently, to allow commercial manufacturing.

Science and Research committee  We are happy to tell you that the construction of the manufacturing facility is almost complete. It's really just a matter of weeks now. The commissioning has begun, and we hope to have the facility commissioned in the summer to then start work in the fall on the first formulations, vaccine projects and so on.

Science and Research committee  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.

Industry committee  I have two comments. I would also recommend not focusing only on mRNA vaccines. We see a huge amount of vaccine hesitancy right now. Forty per cent of Canadians do not want to get vaccinated right now, and that is because everything, including your strategy, is focusing on a new vaccine, on a new technology—

Industry committee  That's right. We need to have multiple technologies and better education, and we also need to have, which we didn't have, research capacity. You can't just start vaccinating or manufacturing a vaccine without understanding the disease, so we need that research capacity. At the moment, we're relying on other countries.

Industry committee  Yes. We would have been able to make all vaccine technologies with the exception of RNA or DNA vaccines.

Industry committee  More funding at the moment wouldn't really have made much of a difference. We're hoping for an expedited certification and commissioning process. We're working on that right now with the regulators—to recognize that we are in a pandemic and that it's important to do this as quickly as possible without compromising on safety.

Industry committee  Just to clarify, we're a university. We're a public research organization here. It always takes some time to transfer the technology and adapt to a new facility, but as we heard earlier, our facility is using what is called single-use. Essentially what that means, to make it very simple, is that you have very large plastic bags that you put in these stainless steel bioreactors and it allows you to make a certain vaccine product, take the bag out, harvest the vaccine and in the meantime you can put a new bag in for a different kind of vaccine.

Industry committee  We've been working on animal diseases for 45 years and we made a number of coronavirus vaccines that were licensed and commercialized for other species. When SARS-1 came, we were part of the Canadian accelerated vaccine initiative at the time. We were just doing research on MERS before the pandemic hit, so we have a lot of expertise in working on these viruses.

Industry committee  There's the Novavax deal that was signed by the facility in Montreal. They're doing already what you just said.

Industry committee  As soon as our facility is up and running, we can do the same here.

Industry committee  There are a couple of recommendations. Number one, I think we need to invest in clinical trials for those candidates that are going forward right now. That includes our own candidate. We really didn't talk much about it. We're working on a protein vaccine here. We're at the same stage as Providence.

Industry committee  It's because in the long term, that's the wrong strategy. In the long term, you want to build domestic capacity. You want to develop domestic expertise and manufacturing capacity. If you always rely on other countries, or companies from other countries, to sign a licence with you, you will always be in the position of competing with other countries for the same technology.