Industry committee  I think that's what the government is doing right now.

Industry committee  Good morning, Madam Chair. Good morning, members of the committee. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address you this morning. My name is Volker Gerdts. I'm the director and CEO of VIDO, the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization here at the University of Saskatc

Health committee  Some of this work is ongoing already. There is work, studies, going on with some individuals who have had an infection and recovered from the infection. What we are learning from them is how long immunity lasts, what effective mechanisms play a role in protection and how those ca

Health committee  There are a lot of questions that need to be addressed. Obviously, we want to make sure that the vaccine is available to the people who need it the most, but as you alluded to in your question, I think it's very important that we make sure that the clinicians are involved in this

Health committee  We are doing research now here at VIDO-InterVac where the goal is to have vaccines ready for the next pathogen, the next disease, when we don't even know what that pathogen looks like. Our goal is to develop these technologies, these vaccines that essentially would cover groups o

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

Health committee  As you mentioned, there are various organizations, including CEPI, an international organization, and the WHO. There are global access strategies that are currently being established, and as part of a publicly funded research institute, we think it is very important for us that w

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  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  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