The foundations of human knowledge and experience are right here at home

The next pandemic could come from anywhere, anytime, and in any form. The only certainty is that it will come. Canada has an opportunity to be much better prepared than it was when COVID-19 first emerged and spread quickly around the world, with devastating consequences. We don’t need to reach very far back in our memories to recall how we worried first if there would be a vaccine against the virus, and later whether Canada could secure an imported supply, and finally, how long it would take for that supply to reach clinics across the country. When it was finally available, getting an appointment for a shot seemed like winning the lottery. Relying on the goodwill of other countries to share their supplies amidst supply-chain issues compounded the concerns of Canadians who were eager to protect themselves and those close to them. And yet, the foundations of human knowledge and experience had been right here at home the whole time. What we lacked was a way to scale up and align the expertise we already had and to make sure our own leaders in biomanufacturing and life sciences were armed with resources and personnel to create, manufacture and provide diagnostic tests, treatments and vaccines, much faster and at commercial scale. At McMaster University, for example, in the years leading up to the pandemic, researchers had been making steady progress toward an inhaled vaccine against tuberculosis, using adenovirus-based technology discovered at McMaster. We had a small, highly specialized lab for making smaller batches of vaccines for research trials, and we had the in-house expertise and local clinical collaborators to design and analyze such trials. Today, all that work is coming together as we test a promising inhaled COVID vaccine—one that can readily be adapted to protect against a range of respiratory pathogens. That work could have been completed much sooner with more resources and greater connectivity. There are many similar examples across the country, where funding had fallen away over the last 40 years, leaving our most talented researchers struggling to realize the full potential of their work. Recognizing this need, the Government of Canada has created a program to revive this ecosystem and help our own experts—in academia, industry, and government—respond quickly and efficiently to the next pandemic threat, be that from a virus, bacterium, or fungus. In fact, there are smoldering pandemic-scale problems that need attention immediately, including the elusive diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of too many forms of cancer and the perilous vulnerability of everyone to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in which the power of known and developed antibiotics is waning quickly. The federal government has designated five multidisciplinary hubs across Canada, based around universities and including other academic and industrial partners, to get us back up to strength. It has earmarked significant funding to facilitate their work. McMaster University, where I serve as vice-president of research, is partnering with the University of Ottawa to lead the Canadian Pandemic Preparedness Hub, owing to our strengths in infectious diseases and cancer and our history of collaboration. Parallel hubs are being led by the University of Alberta, University of British Columbia, Université de Montréal and University of Toronto. The hubs project will allow Canadian researchers and industry collaborators to be much more nimble and much better co-ordinated not only to prepare all of us for the next infectious disease pandemic, but also to effectively combat cancer and AMR. Sadly, there will never be a shortage of pandemic-like problems to solve, but we are getting a chance to meet and overcome those challenges using our own talent and resources. We need to be able to anticipate, invent, manufacture and supply what Canadians need, as independently as possible and as efficiently as possible. Canada can be a global leader in such critical work and become more of a helpful partner to other countries, rather than a reliant customer of other nations. The goal is that next time, Canada won’t have to be asking for help. We can be a country that helps itself—and others. Karen Mossman, PhD, is a professor in the department of medicine, a former chair of the department of biochemistry and biomedical sciences, and is the current vice-president research at McMaster University, Canada. The Hill Times