Dr. Megan Levings in one of the research labs at B.C. Children's Research Institute in Vancouver, B.C. on December 6, 2022.Jackie Dives/The Globe and Mail
Vancouver’s thriving life sciences sector is getting a boost with federal funding for several projects that will help local medical researchers spin out their discoveries into startups.
Ottawa is providing $140-million to four projects in B.C. for what it calls “Canada’s Immuno-Engineering and Biomanufacturing Hub.” It’s part of a new $574-million commitment to 19 projects at five research hubs across Canada through a biomanufacturing and life sciences strategy launched during the pandemic.
The B.C. projects include a drug development platform for mRNA vaccines co-led by University of British Columbia professor Pieter Cullis, who discovered the lipid nanoparticle technology that successfully delivered Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to billions of people. A team based at Simon Fraser University will study public opinions on biomanufacturing and immunity therapies and develop strategies to build public trust in new medicines, including vaccines.
UBC professor Sriram Subramaniam, meanwhile, will lead a project in partnership with local drug developers and pharmaceutical giant GSK, using cryo-electron microscopy and AI-enabled drug discovery to build a bank of antibody treatments for pathogens with pandemic-causing potential. “The total focus is on product that can be manufactured at scale to go into humans,” Dr. Subramaniam said.
But the centrepiece is a $41.7-million award to help build a 25,300-square-foot advanced therapeutics manufacturing facility at UBC with clean rooms to support the production of cells and mRNA molecules. B.C. Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation Minister Brenda Bailey said in an interview that her province would also “very likely” fund the project. “We are aggressively pursuing growth of this ecosystem, and there are a number of different pieces that need to roll out,” she said. “This has been a missing piece, so we are delighted to see it coming into place.”
Officially, the federally funded projects are supposed to help mount rapid responses to future pandemic threats.
But the manufacturing facility, which is projected to open by 2030, serves another purpose for UBC, the largest recipient of health and medical research funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and historically the country’s most fertile source of life sciences spinoff companies. It provides a critical piece of infrastructure to help medical researchers advance their discoveries from the lab to the marketplace and will be the first facility of its kind in Western Canada. (The federal government is funding a similar facility at the University of Ottawa).
“We didn’t have the capacity to manufacture clinical-grade material for delivery to patients for pilot-grade clinical trials to test whether these things really worked,” said UBC’s dean of medicine, Dermot Kelleher. “Traditionally, we do great science and it ends up going somewhere else. We wanted to make that great science stick here.”
Megan Levings, a childhood disease researcher who is leading the project for UBC, said the facility would allow researchers with experimental therapies to do more developing, data-gathering, process building and initial human clinical trials in-house.
That will make their intellectual property “much more valuable before it spins off,” she said. “It’s going to bring translational medicine to a whole new level at the university. The dream is that five to six years from now we will have a fully operational facility so that future technology coming down the pipeline will stay longer in the academic context.”
Under the leadership of Dr. Kelleher, the medical school has stepped up efforts in recent years to encourage its researchers to commercialize their breakthroughs. That includes creating the Academy of Translational Medicine and recruiting star University of Toronto academic Peter Zandstra to lead the commercially minded School of Biomedical Engineering.
But the absence of an on-campus manufacturing facility “was pretty embarrassing” for a leading medical school and bemoaned for years by local researchers who realized that the considerable cost to build it was a hurdle, Dr. Levings said.
The launch of Dr. Zandstra’s school and initial efforts to raise donor funds made the idea “a more tangible possibility, but we still didn’t know where we would apply for so much money,” she said. She began writing grant applications, and after the federal government launched its heavily funded plan to boost biomanufacturing capacity domestically, she realized the school “had the opportunity to leverage this new funding” for broader applications.
While the manufacturing facility’s prime focus during pandemics will be to advance treatments, “this facility goes way beyond pandemic preparedness,” she said. “A key part of our proposal was the concept of bringing in technologies and helping create drugs that are relevant when there is no pandemic,” for ailments such as cancer and autoimmune disorders.