Scientists, clinicians are preparing for future pandemic threats

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On Monday, the federal government will allocate nearly $574 million to researchers across the country for projects aimed at improving Canada's preparedness for public health emergencies, including the next pandemic.

One of the 19 projects is a national network of existing emergency departments and primary care clinics called Preparedness, which tests patients for any new viruses or pathogens that may develop.

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“As a public health professional and medical practitioner, I would expect another respiratory pandemic in the future. The challenge is we don't know when it's going to happen or what it's going to be,” said Dr. Andrew Pinto, Project Ready leader and family physician at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

“We have to look at it as a protective shield to help us identify things early. Much earlier than during COVID,” Pinto said in an interview.

Researchers in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador have signed on to the project, which they say they hope will expand to include all provinces and territories.

The Prepared Network, which received $18.9 million in federal funding, will also bring biotech companies that make rapid tests, drugs, therapeutics and vaccines, Pinto said, so they can act quickly if a new virus or other pathogen is detected early. anxiety.

“(We) want to minimize the impact on people … early detection and, you know, early isolation and increase how quickly people can get diagnoses and vaccines. “All this will reduce the impact on the society,” he said.

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Participating hospitals and primary care clinics will ask patients presenting with respiratory symptoms to allow swabs to be sent to labs to determine if they have a known illness, such as the flu, COVID, or persistent strains of RSV. if they have an unknown, possibly new, viral or bacterial infection.

Swab samples will only be used for the project if the patients give consent, Pinto noted.

Another part of the planned project is to use artificial intelligence to regularly scan electronic health data to identify patterns that could be an early signal of a new virus, he said.

Researchers from many countries share their findings to improve the ability to find pathogens that appear in different parts of the world.

Another project announced Monday is a new biomanufacturing center at the Ottawa Hospital.

Researchers there will continue their ongoing biotherapeutic work in gene therapy and cell therapy to treat cancer and other life-threatening diseases and, if necessary, develop vaccines, said Dr. Duncan Stewart, CEO and scientific director of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.

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“Now that the technology has advanced, RNA vaccines have really been very successful for COVID, which is really the future of many infectious diseases,” Stewart said in an interview.

“The same technology, the same manufacturing process that we implement for RNA therapy can be used for RNA vaccines. So it allows (us) to use the same facility very quickly to produce a related but different product for pandemic purposes,” he said.

The Ottawa hospital received $59 million in funding announced Monday, both to build a new biomanufacturing center and to operate similar facilities.

Additional federal funds will go to biotech partners, including McMaster University in Hamilton, Dalhousie University in Halifax and the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Organization in Saskatoon.

“Such a cooperative set of bioproduction facilities will actually be more powerful than isolated facilities in one area,” Stewart said.

Funding was awarded to 14 research institutions that applied for project funding through the Canadian Biomedical Research Foundation and the Biosciences Research Infrastructure Fund, Soraya Martínez Ferrada, minister in charge of Canada's Economic Development Agency in Quebec, said at a news conference in Montreal.

Martínez Ferrada spoke on behalf of Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Health Minister Marc Holland.

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