The Director of Research with the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization says having access to in-house pilot scale vaccine manufacturing will help speed up and streamline the development of new vaccines.
The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization completed the construction of its new 30-million-dollar pilot scale vaccine manufacturing facility in June and is now into the commissioning phase.
Dr. Andrew van Kessel, the Director of Research at VIDO, says the construction of a vaccine manufacturing facility has been in VIDO’s sights for many years recognizing the gap between the discovery of efficacious viable vaccines and the need to move them toward commercialization.
Having an in-house vaccine manufacturing facility has a number of advantages for both the country and for VIDO. We are adding capacity for process development so that we can move technology farther down the technology readiness level and increase the opportunity for commercialization and there for have real world impact. That’s something that has been missing in Canada and a gap that we’re filling. For VIDO itself, having an in-house manufacturing facility actually can form some of the discovery work that we’re doing.
As we consider new product ideas, as we try to develop those ideas and demonstrate that they’re efficacious in terms of protecting against disease, we do that in an environment where we have an on-sight manufacturing facility and many of the principles that are necessary to move a product from the lab scale to the manufacturing scale can be considered early in that process and therefore help us to move much more quickly from a discovery project to a development project and eventually toward commercialization.
~ Dr. Andrew van Kessel, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization
Dr. van Kessel says on site manufacturing will allow scientists to take product ideas further so that their value is demonstrated in the market place, enhancing the potential to take them to manufacture and distribution.
