The City of Saskatoon’s Governance and Priorities Committee has unanimously voted in favour of $250,000 in funding for a future Canadian Centre of Pandemic Research at VIDO’s facility on the USask campus. The support is contingent on being passed during budget deliberations and support as well from the provincial and federal governments.

The Associate Director of business development at VIDO, Dr. Paul Hodgson, says the project is an expansion that would include a Level 4 containment lab, which means being able to work with the most serious human and animal diseases. VIDO is also ramping up to include a pilot-scale manufacturing facility which could produce up to 40-million vaccines a year.

He suggests that having this pandemic research centre would highlight VIDO as a leader in the world in this area and it would would not only raise the profile of the city and the university, but also the province and the country. Hodgson says VIDO’s COVID-19 vaccine is now in the human trials phase, but if they already had a manufacturing facility, they could have been six months ahead of where they are now, meaning vaccines could have already been distributed.

Mayor Charlie Clark lauded VIDO for its cutting edge work on vaccines in the agricultural industry and noted that this is extremely relevant because we now see viruses moving from animals to humans.