Vaccine Development Centre Offers Advantages for VIDO and for Canada

The Director of Research with the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization says an in-house Vaccine Development Centre offers a number of advantages for both VIDO and Canada

The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization’s new pilot scale vaccine manufacturing facility will provide vaccines for veterinary use and human use, including live attenuated and killed vaccines, subunit-based and viral vector-based vaccines and some of the newer technologies such as RNA and DNA based vaccines.

Dr. Andrew van Kessel, the Director of Research at VIDO, says a vaccine manufacturing facility has been in VIDO’s sights for many years and having in-house manufacturing offers advantages for both VIDO and the country.

“We very much look forward to serving the livestock industry going forward and the Vaccine Development Centre is very much a part of that vision” 

“VIDO has very much adopted a one health strategy in terms of infectious disease. We recognize that human health and animal health and environmental health are all interconnected and we are working across those platforms.

“I think the Vaccine Development Centre is one of those tools that VIDO now has, that Canada now has that will significantly support the livestock industry. Really the opportunity to have this facility is based on our ability to work both in humans and in animals.

“We now have a facility where we can bring animal vaccines to commercialization and we can address some of those infectious disease challenges in Canada that might not previously have been addressed because of the deficiencies in the Canadian market place.

“We very much look forward to serving the livestock industry going forward and the Vaccine Development Centre is very much a part of that vision.”

Dr. van Kessel suggests in-house manufacturing can form some of the discovery work VIDO is doing  and allow many of the principles necessary to move a product from the lab scale to the manufacturing scale to be considered early in the process and help move more quickly from discovery to development and eventually commercialization.

 

Farmscape is produced on behalf of North America’s pork producers