Leveraging collaboration between all partners to improve Canada’s pandemic preparedness

MONTREAL—It is widely recognized that when the COVID-19 pandemic reached Canada in early 2020, academia, industry, not-for-profits, and governmental agencies alike were not prepared to react in a collaborative and synergistic manner to respond to this emerging health crisis. Since then, the Canadian government has taken concrete steps, including initiatives such as CanCoGen and CoVaRR-Net to demonstrate what could be achieved collaboratively in an incredibly short period. The launch of a two-stage call to increase preparedness to face the next pandemic or emerging health threat, the Canada Biomedical Research Fund (CBRF) will also be, by all accounts, the first of its kind. It aims to support research and training projects stemming from the tricouncil (CIHR, NSERC, and SHHRC) while also integrating an infrastructure component through the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, thus offering an unprecedented and long-awaited coordination between funding agencies to support projects and their required infrastructure in a holistic manner in collaboration with industry. The first stage of the CBRF call, while still under review, will create and fund three to five bio-innovation and bio-manufacturing research hubs across Canada. These hubs will be responsible for adopting and implementing an innovative and agile approach to preparedness. Hubs will encourage actors from academia, industry, not-for-profits, and government to work collaboratively rather than competitively to prepare the ecosystem’s response, develop its capacity, and implement a fully integrated and optimized response chain. This begins by the early detection and sequencing of emerging pathogens and other health threats to quickly provide preventative (e.g., vaccines) or therapeutic (e.g., antivirals) solutions. Through the hub’s coordination, available ecosystem expertise and infrastructure will help propel innovations through all phases of clinical trials. This, in turn, will accelerate the translation of promising research into commercially viable products and processes and support biomanufacturing in Canada. These interactions will allow all Canadians to benefit from and adopt our collective innovations in an informed way. Over the course of the summer months and across Canada, five hub proposals have taken shape. One of these is the Eastern Canada Preparedness Hub (ECaPH) which exemplifies the need to better equip Canada through a radically new lens. Co-led by three major universities (the University of Montreal with McGill and Laval universities) and in alignment with the CBRF’s strategic objectives, the ECaPH aims to support a wide range of research, infrastructure and training projects in a coordinated fashion to align and ensure consistency across federal investments to maximize ecosystem impacts. It brings together 11 universities from Quebec and the Atlantic provinces (including Dalhousie, Polytéchnique Montreal, and Sherbrooke) as well as nearly 50 partners from industry, not-for-profit and government agencies. The ECaPH benefits from a traditionally strong bio-innovation and bio-manufacturing sector, which is being revitalized notably with companies such as Medicago which has developed the only COVID-19 vaccine approved by Health Canada, Moderna’s intention to build its new production facilities and Biovectra’s exponential growth in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. The impressive expertise represented in the proposal is complemented by an undeniable and world-leading position in AI and its next generation approaches to accelerate and optimize all aspects of preparedness, including detection, discovery, and manufacturing. The human and economic tolls associated with the COVDI-19 pandemic will be long remembered. The COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated the limits of the “business-as-usual” model. The ecosystem cannot sit idle. To achieve better preparedness, all stakeholders must collaborate to strengthen and develop a nimble ecosystem ready to face new challenges. The ECaPH is an invitation to move away from a reactive to a coordinated, collaborative, complementary model in preparation for future pandemics. It builds on an existing tradition of collaboration in research bringing together multiple stakeholders as illustrated by the successes of initiatives such as the Réseau québécois COVID, the Biobanque de la COVID-19, the Nova Scotia COVID-19 Health Research Coalition and Médicament Québec among others. Pandemic preparedness cannot simply be reduced to the sum of the ecosystem’s various strengths. It needs to evolve towards a culture of collaboration honed over time to facilitate an optimal and coordinated response to future pandemics and emerging health threats. COVID-19 taught the ecosystem to work together through crisis. We now have the opportunity to take it to the next level. Canada will be better prepared if its main academic and industrial actors work together. Yves Joanette is deputy vice-principal and Arianne Trudeau is senior adviser at the Research, Discovery, Creation, and Innovation Vice-Rectorate at the Université de Montréal. The Hill Times

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Leveraging collaboration between all partners to improve Canada’s pandemic preparedness

Pandemic preparedness cannot simply be reduced to the sum of the ecosystem’s various strengths.

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