Health committee  Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much to the committee for giving us the opportunity to address the committee this afternoon. My name is Volker Gerdts. I'm the CEO and director of VIDO-InterVac. I'm joined by Dr. Paul Hodgson, who is our director of busines

Health committee  I just want to echo that I think it's very hard to exactly predict right now when this vaccine will be available. As you can imagine, we have people here who are working essentially around the clock to get this done as quickly as possible. I think what we might see, though—and th

Health committee  Maybe I can take that question. As part of these expert group meetings that the World Health Organization is organizing weekly—and we're part of that—many of the vaccine manufacturers are actually presenting their data. They're sharing their data publicly. There is willingness t

Health committee  From my perspective, while intellectual property is certainly important for the commercial manufacturers in making sure their technologies are protected, and while these expert groups with the WHO are confidential in nature, I would also say that in a situation like this, intelle

Health committee  I think you're correct. There are a lot of questions that we simply don't know the answer to at the moment. There are a lot of scientific questions that need to be addressed, such as whether you're susceptible to reinfection or not, if pre-exposure makes you less responsive to va

Health committee  That's unfortunately still going to take a little while. I can tell you that some of the animal studies to look at reinfection are under way. You infect some animals, then you wait for a little while, let them develop immunity, and you reinfect them. In humans, this is something

Health committee  Those negotiations are still under way. I don't know if there is anything at the moment in the contract, but, as I stated publicly, we're making it a high priority to ensure that our vaccine is available to Canadians. Maybe I'll let Paul Hodgson, our director for business develo

Health committee  I believe that's correct.

Health committee  There are probably thousands per week. I think the estimate is between 6,000 and 7,000 if we use some of our rooms that are currently being used for our research. This is where we might be getting into a little bit of trouble. If we were to use the whole facility just for this pu

Health committee  How many specifically do we need? I think we need to find a few that really work. At the moment, I think the most promising candidates are showing partial efficacy. They are somewhat helpful in this, but we haven't, as of yet, really found a molecule that completely clears infect

Health committee  Again, they would be developed by commercial partners who have facilities to manufacture them. They follow the same regulations as vaccine manufacturing. They have to be produced in very specific facilities, GMP facilities, that are specifically designed for this purpose, and the

Health committee  We have lots of collaborations with the Public Health Agency. That also includes testing of compounds that might act as antivirals.

Health committee  Are you referring to testing antibodies in people getting infected or the role of antibodies, or are you talking about antibodies as therapeutics?

Health committee  Therapeutics is certainly an approach that is very promising. In fact, we're starting our study in ferrets next week to look at some prominent therapeutics there. There is great promise for therapeutics to act similarly like antivirals. I think there is real value in proceeding w

Health committee  What we have seen already is that certain countries will try to get access to technologies. You are probably aware that the American President tried to get access to a vaccine out of Germany, a technology that looks very promising. The WHO doesn't really have the authority to reg