Inside Canada’s race to get a COVID-19 vaccine: ‘Unlike anything we’ve ever seen before’
Last January, when most of the world was still standing around, maskless and blissfully unaware, Thomas Madden was in his office in Vancouver, reading dispatches out of China with growing horror.
By the first week of February, he was heading to the airport to catch a flight to Germany.
When his plane lifted off the tarmac, Canada had seen its first case of coronavirus, but it would be days before the World Health Organization announced the official name for the disease it caused - COVID-19 - and a month before a pandemic would be declared, as the virus continued its slow creep around the world.
But Madden, who had founded Acuitas Therapeutics a decade earlier, already had vaccines on his mind.
It was very early on. But I think we recognized that the virus was spreading, and given the transmission between continents, I think we felt that it represented a significant risk," Madden recalls, scrolling back through his calendar to double-check the date.
We wanted to initiate work as soon as possible to identify a vaccine, should it be required."
In the days ahead, Canada is set to enter a new stage in its fight against the pandemic. The first shipment of vaccines meant to be injected into Canadian arms is set to leave Belgium and arrive here Monday.
As winter approaches in the world's second largest country, the distribution challenge to come is massive - the prime minister has called it the greatest mobilization effort Canada has seen since the Second World War." But the fact that we're here at all is a testament to the work done over the past year by scientists, researchers and medical experts who are now handing the baton to the military, which will oversee distribution.
The scale of and the speed of the vaccine development for COVID-19 is really unlike anything we've ever seen before," says Erica Moodie, a professor of biostatistics at McGill University in Montreal, who helped build an online vaccine tracker that has been viewed around the world.
The brainchild of Nicole Basta, an associate professor at McGill's department of epidemiology, the site had more than 100,000 views in the past couple of months, Moodie says, with people checking in on vaccine development from as far away as Argentina and Bangladesh.
I mean, I think everyone is devastated by this pandemic, but I think there is a huge sense of purpose," she said. It's scientifically wonderful."
There have been speedbumps. Hopes for one early vaccine contender fell apart when Chinese officials refused to ship samples to Canada for testing. The Conservative has opposition argued that Canada was too far back in the delivery line, though many of those concerns seem to be assuaged - at least, for now - by news of the impending arrival. More will no doubt arise in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Still, those involved say that, politics aside, the scientific collaboration has been unprecedented," and has pushed forward technologies and partnerships that will last long after the pandemic is over.
Madden, a longtime scientist in both industry and academia whose voice still hints at his British roots, got on that plane in February because he wanted to talk with a biotechnology company he had worked with before. Back then, the Germany company BioNTech SE wasn't yet on the world's radar. Most people had long forgotten anything they had learned about messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, in high school biology.
But the company had buzz in rarified scientific circles, where it was known as one of the few global players trying to use mRNA to pioneer a new method of essentially tricking the body into making useful proteins. Scientists have long thought the idea had potential, but so far, no one had been able to unlock it and get something approved for use in humans.
Madden's company had helped with an mRNA vaccine for rabies made by another partner that had seen promising early results, and he was optimistic they could build on that work for COVID-19.
One of the challenges with working with mRNA is how fragile it is. Even inside your own body, the tiny wisps of material, which pick up instructions from your DNA and give them to your cells to make proteins, don't last long.
His is a very specific area of expertise - Madden is a leader in making what's called lipid nanoparticles, which are like little protective jackets for the mRNA. They're incredibly tiny - less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair, Madden says - but they protect the even smaller strands of mRNA when they're being injected, and carry them into the cell, where they do the work for which they were designed.
Once he landed in Germany, Madden met with BioNTech, and it was decided that his particles would be used to carry their mRNA technology. BioNTech, in turn, had a partnership with drug giant Pfizer Inc.
Back in Vancouver, Madden realized he needed to start pivoting his team of 29 people toward this new vaccine. Things began to move faster. He notes he'd flown to Germany largely worry-free and, within weeks of his return, his company had instituted a travel ban.
As spring turned into summer, the company helped BioNTech test different versions of a potential vaccine and alerted their partners, which make some of the components of their nanoparticles, that they were ramping up. The clock was ticking.
The first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech candidate went into a volunteer in Germany on April 23, just over a week after the WHO marked 100 days since it had received its first reports of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause."
At the time, this was just one of the hundreds of vaccine candidates being developed around the world. It was a bit like gambling. Anticipation was high, but no one knew which - if any - was going to be successful.
The federal government started assembling a group of experts, with backgrounds in research, medicine and industry, to do the work of trying to figure out which vaccine candidates to bet on. Canada's Vaccine Task Force met for the first time in June, the same month Canada hit 100,000 cases and more than 8,000 deaths, with Ontario and Quebec the hardest hit.
I think, to a person, everyone was so committed to the well-being of Canadians that they would basically commit every hour, and work into the night and work weekends and everyone did that willingly," said Dr. Joanne Langley, the CIHR-GSK chair in pediatric vaccinology at Dalhousie University, who was tapped to co-lead the group.
I think everybody is, you know, hoping to make a difference," said Mark Lievonen, the other co-chair and a former president of Sanofi Pasteur Ltd., the Canadian vaccine division of drug giant Sanofi.
Because of social distancing measures, the team faced the same problem as co-workers the world over. They were unable to meet in person, though Lievonen points out they were at least spared long stretches of time living out of hotels. I think we all got pretty comfortable with how Zoom works," he jokes, speaking, via Zoom, from Stouffville, Ont.
In the task force's early days, the job ahead of them was mind-boggling," he said.
The worldwide demand will exceed the supply," explained Lievonen of their thinking. And frankly, Canada is a small country, we're going to have to earn our way to that negotiating table."
The task force's job was to make recommendations to the government about which horses to back, and a big part of that involved interviewing vaccine-makers, who were then still in the early stages of their work.
Companies had to be the total package - cutting-edge science, a viable manufacturing plan and the management team able to pull it off.
While Canada's distribution plan is in its infancy, and there's still much to be seen, for now, the task force's picks are looking solid, which Lievonen credits to the expertise around the table.
When we met with the companies bilaterally on their various vaccines and the science and so on, I think those discussions were very engaging and our task force members are very capable people and could ask some very probing, relevant questions," he said.
Canada's first advance purchase agreement was signed on July 24 with a company called Moderna, which was founded based on work done by Toronto-born cell biologist Derrick Rossi.
A week later, officials inked one with Pfizer and BioNTech, which at the time had just begun its final phase of human testing, the mRNA in each dose protected by the protective jackets, or lipid nanoparticles, that Madden had created in Vancouver.
In early September, Procurement Minister Anita Anand told the Star that Canada's aggressively negotiated" delivery schedule could see vaccine arrive as soon as early 2021 - a prediction officials are now set to beat.
Elected to represent Oakville just last year, Anand, a lawyer who taught at the University of Toronto before becoming an MP, has been thrust into the spotlight as the person spearheading the acquisition of both PPE and vaccines.
The magnitude of the undertaking is extremely high, but it is one that we are facing head on," she said in September.
Her team has faced criticism over the lack of transparency about the deals being signed. It wasn't clear until recently when vaccines would begin arriving, and the total price tag remains murky.
Anand, however, has said the competitive and intense" nature of negotiations has demanded secrecy, and has long stressed the goal of making sure Canadians have access to a safe vaccine as soon as possible.
Do not underestimate the sophistication and heft that Canada brings to the table."
Canada now has a total of seven advance purchase agreements - including one homegrown candidate from Quebec-based Medicago - in addition to joining the global vaccine-sharing initiative known as COVAX.
As multiple vaccine candidates got closer to approval, planning began this fall for the eventual distribution challenge.
The federal government has tapped Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, who is a former NATO commander, to lead the effort, and dry runs are already underway.
Never in modern memory have we seen such an unprecedented level of collaboration and co-operation. It really makes me proud to be Canadian and proud to serve," he told reporters this week.
In an email from a spokesperson, Minister Anand reiterated there is still a long road to travel to get the vaccines that have been procured where they need to go.
This remains a hyper competitive global market with risks at play, ranging from supply chain issues to manufacturing, production and transportation. We are on top of it. Our job is not complete until every Canadian who chooses to be vaccinated, can be vaccinated," the statement reads.
Still, this week, a major victory.
On Monday morning, a short email from Health Canada pinged into the email box of members of the task force scattered around the country - the Pfizer vaccine had been approved in Canada.
It's exciting. It's kind of like watching a child grow, you know, like Oh, they sat up on their own!" Langley says. But they're not done yet. From here, Task Force members will continue to keep tabs on results and monitor the vaccine portfolio going forward.
At the time, Madden was at home in Vancouver, eating Cheerios and sipping coffee when his wife came in to show him a press release on her phone with the same news.
That was the first I'd heard of it," he said, adding that he was delighted and also proud."
I mean, as a Canadian company, and as Canadians, we were particularly proud to get the approval from Health Canada."
Alex Boyd is a Calgary-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_n_boyd