Saskatchewan is seeing new work in the development of vaccines as the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) has received a subsidy to develop a new vaccine.
Based out of the University of Saskatchewan, VIDO works on making and improving vaccines with one new project looking to create a pan-sarbecovirus vaccine.
Trina Racine, the director of vaccine development at VIDO, talks about the work they're doing with that grant.
"Recently, we at VIDO have been awarded a new research grant worth up to $24 million from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, (CEPI) which aims to support our role in advancing global health and disease prevention. But mainly, the focus of it really is the development of a new vaccine, which is a pan-sarbecovirus vaccine."
"That means the goal of this vaccine is to cover not just, say, SARS Cov-2, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, but a number of different coronaviruses that belong to this subgenus of viruses."
In making the vaccine for human use VIDO will look to use their new manufacturing facility and bring that vaccine into phase one of human clinical testing.
Racine says that so far it's been a good bit of work for her team.
"It's been going well. So we at VIDO were actually the recipients of some initial seed funding from CEPI back in 2021 to kind of start this idea of developing a pan-sarbecovirus vaccine and based on those results and the progress we've made, CEPI has now wanted to move forward with the continuation of that development of this vaccine and like I said, to bring it into human clinical testing with the hopes of bring it even further down the road one day."
This vaccine will have a wider use case than the COVID-19 vaccine that people may be familiar with, as Racine is hopeful it's helping out Canada soon.
"Traditionally, we've always developed vaccines against a specific virus, something that's already circulating in the human population. But what we're trying to do now is trying to sort of semi-predict the future as to what could be circulating in the human population, next year or the year after that and by having that prediction in mind when we're developing the vaccine, we're trying to then hopefully develop a what we'd call a 'broadly protective immune response' in the people who receive this vaccine so that they can be protected not just against viruses that are currently circulating, but ones that we think would be circulating in the future."
Racine says the vaccine won't be ready for use anytime soon with work around testing and manufacturing still to be done.
"It'll be a couple of years yet before we're in the clinic. We're really hoping to be in the clinic by the end of 2026, maybe early 2027 because we have a little bit more development work to do and we have to figure out how to manufacture the vaccine at a scale that could be more commercially viable as well as manufactured with the appropriate conditions so that the material is is safe to use in humans."
The team as a whole is excited for the future with Racine looking forward to the work ahead of them.
"This is a really exciting day for us. Of course, we've been working on this project for a couple of years already and having the support of CEPI who's the world's largest funder for vaccine development, to have their support in this project has been really great. We have some good hopes for the future that we're going to bring this technology forward and hopefully prevent significant illnesses, prevent hospitalizations, lost time at work, prevent disruptions in the supply chain. All because we can protect people with this vaccine."