VIDO funded $24M to help develop 'holy grail' coronavirus vaccine
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The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) at the University of Saskatchewan has been awarded a $24 million grant to help develop a vaccine to protect against wide-ranging strains of coronaviruses.
VIDO's funding flows from Norwegian-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) into its ongoing development of its pan-sarbecovirus vaccine.
Dr. Nicole Lurie, Executive Director of Emergency Preparedness at CEPI, said the vaccine is designed by combining fragments of several different coronaviruses into a single vaccine.
VIDO's goal is to develop a vaccine that would improve a person's resistance to SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as future coronaviruses, limiting how much resources are spent on new vaccines to match different strains of the virus.
Lurie referred to it as a sort of "holy grail."
"By acting now, we can try to get ahead of coronavirus and their variants before they evolve to get ahead of us. Our goal is to be sure that the world is never again hit by a coronavirus pandemic," said Lurie.
Dr. Volker Gerdts, the director and CEO of VIDO said it's possible to use different tools — artificial intelligence, bioinformatics — to predict what the next virus pathogen will look like and prepare vaccines to combat them.
"It's all about predicting what is coming in the future and being ready for it," said Gerdts.
"As we just learned during the pandemic, Canada was not quite ready for it this time. So let's make sure that next time we're better prepared."
VIDO's vaccine is also anticipated to be thermostable, meaning it won't need to be in a temperature-controlled environment when it's transported or stored.
That opens it up to use in low- and middle-income countries and in regions with less resources to allow for better access to vaccines.
"We saw what the COVID pandemic did to our economy, did to our families, did to our small businesses and you know, we want to be prepared," said Terry Duguid, the federal Minister Responsible for Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan).
PrairiesCan also provided VIDO with $30 million to expand, including a new animal housing facility and the ability to upgrade to the highest level of containment to work with any form of human or animal pathogen.
VIDO also received funding from CEPI in 2021 for an earlier project on a variant-proof COVID-19 vaccine.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness was founded by the Indian and Norwegian governments, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome and the World Economic Forum. It's supported by several pharmaceutical companies including Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer.
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