Preparing for the next pandemic

Despite being home to some of the best medical research talent in the world, Canada was caught flat-footed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. UBC, for example, made outsized research contributions to the development of a vaccine and effective treatments, yet a lack of production facilities meant that Canadians had to depend on supplies from abroad.

As a result, the federal government has committed to strengthening Canada’s biomanufacturing and life sciences sector. It has established five research hubs across the county, including Canada’s Immuno-Engineering and Biomanufacturing Hub (CIEBH), which is led by UBC.

“The Hub represents a coalition of many partners across the country,” says Dr. Michelle Wong, executive director of CIEBH and senior director of Research for the Faculty of Medicine. “It includes academia, industry, health authorities, not-for-profits, and research agencies, all geared toward speeding up research, development, and production. All these entities have a lens of biomanufacturing, but CIEBH’s focus is on immuno-engineering: how we can use our own immune systems to prevent, treat, and cure priority pathogens and other health threats.”

The primary goal of CIEBH is to establish a drug development strategy that can respond to future pandemics in fewer than 100 days. To that end, the Hub will focus on building infrastructure to support homegrown vaccines and therapeutics. It will also develop cutting-edge treatments for a range of human diseases.

In May, the federal government announced $574 million in funding, $140 million of which is supporting four major CIEBH projects (see below) – including the creation of a new Advanced Therapeutics Manufacturing Facility on UBC’s Vancouver campus.

Another important part of the strategy is to encourage a more pervasive culture of entrepreneurism among academics in order to speed up the translation of research into treatments. UBC already has a long history of R&D when it comes to biotech and immuno-engineering. More than 20 years ago, QLT and Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, both spun off from UBC research, opened up the biotech industry in the province – only to succumb to a malaise that often affects Canadian startups: lack of local investment and the siren song of bigger and better opportunities in the US. Canada has a history of producing groundbreaking therapies – insulin, for example – only to have their commercialization left to American companies.

However, much has gone on in British Columbia since the QLT years. Most significant is the work by UBC professor and alum Pieter Cullis, who developed a method to deliver nanoparticle materials to human cells, which was essential to the effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine that has been credited with saving an estimated 6 million lives in 2021 alone. His spin-off company, Acuitas Therapeutics, commercialized the findings and put UBC and British Columbia on the biotech map again. Another standout is AbCellera, which was founded by UBC professor and alum Carl Hansen, whose work helped produce an antibody therapy for COVID-19 patients.

In fact, Vancouver has become Canada’s fastest growing biotech centre, with nearly 20,000 people employed in the sector. The synergy that’s happening among institutions, private companies, university spin-offs, and entrepreneurs has produced an atmosphere of cooperation that promises to expand the sector even further. “There is global interest in headquartering in Vancouver,” says Wong. “We are like San Francisco and Boston were at the beginning of the biotech revolution.” A major part of CIEBH’s role is to support this momentum.

Still, there are challenges to building a dominant industry in Canada. Attracting entrepreneurs and their investment dollars is an ongoing obstacle, as is the shortage of adequate laboratory space and (until the new campus facility is completed) the ability to locally manufacture pharmaceutical products quickly and in enough quantity for testing.

The bright spot is that these challenges are being actively taken on by companies – CIEBH partners – already up and running. AbCellera is constructing laboratory and manufacturing facilities in the Mount Pleasant area, while Cullis’s Acuitas Therapeutics has built a large facility on UBC’s Vancouver campus, funded by revenues from its COVID-19 developments.

Other companies, like Xenon Pharmaceuticals, Zymeworks, Aspect Biosystems (which prints synthetic tissue for human implants), Alpha-9 Oncology, and several device producers including StemCell Technologies (which manufactures tools for drug development), are thriving. They are attracting management talent and entrepreneurial dollars, building facilities, and are determined to keep the sector alive and well in Canada.

These companies, and several others in BC, can claim UBC as their parent; all began with discoveries made by UBC researchers. In fact, UBC discoveries have formed the basis of more than 260 spin-off companies.

By acting as a coordinating agency, CIEBH is creating a national network of researchers and entrepreneurs that can pool information, address gaps in the development of specific drugs, and build management, manufacturing, and commercial aspects of the production process.

“The goal of the Hub is to bring the technology and the people from academia, the private sector, and government together to mobilize a combined effort and create a common agenda to achieve our goals,” says Wong. “We can be the leaders in immuno-engineering globally. We need to keep attracting the talent, and the investment, for the next generation.”

$140 million in government funding will support these four CIEBH projects:

• The creation of a new Advanced Therapeutics Manufacturing Facility on UBC’s Vancouver Campus. Equipped with state-of-the-art bioreactors and quality control labs, the 25,000-square-foot facility will enable academic researchers and biotech startups to develop innovative cell- and gene-based therapies and bring them into early-stage clinical trials for Canadians. The project is led by UBC professors and alumni Megan Levings and Robert Holt, who is also a professor at SFU.
• AVENGER, an end-to-end drug development platform for RNA vaccines, based at UBC. The AVENGER team will create a library of vaccine formulations that can be custom-designed and rapidly deployed against pandemic pathogens and other diseases. The project is led by renowned UBC scientist Dr. Pieter Cullis, who developed the drug delivery technology that underpins COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, as well as UBC professor Anna Blakney.
• PROGENITER, a development pipeline for antibody therapies, based at UBC. The PROGENITER team will leverage advanced cryo-electron microscopy and AI-enabled drug discovery to build a suite of ready-to-deploy antibody treatments for pathogens with high pandemic potential, such as H5N1 influenza (bird flu). The project is led by UBC professor Sriram Subramaniam.
• The Bridge Research Consortium (formerly Social Sciences and Humanities Consortium), based at SFU, brings together an interdisciplinary research team to better understand public perspectives around biomanufacturing and immune-based therapies, while developing strategies to build public trust and promote equitable access to new medicines. The project is led by SFU professor Kelley Lee and Université Laval adjunct professor Ève Dubé.