The Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University in London, Ont., has received $16 million in federal funding to expand COVID-19 research.
Donated through the government’s Biosciences Research Infrastructure Fund (BRIF), the funding the school received will go towards the expansion of its “state-of-the-art biocontainment level 3 facility, otherwise known as the Imaging Pathogens for Knowledge Translation (ImPaKT),” which is located within the new Pathogen Research Centre (PRC).
The news follows Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s announcement on Wednesday highlighting the need for post-secondary and research institutions to upgrade biocontainment facilities in preparing for possible future pandemics.
“We’re very excited about it (the grant), because this basically doubles our size of our current facility,” said Eric Arts, executive director of the ImPaKT Facility and professor of microbiology and immunology at Schulich Medicine and Dentistry. “It expands our abilities to work more with that interface between industry and academics and universities.
“This allows us to partner with them and provide even faster testing and more responsive development of interventions and vaccines for the next pandemic.”
BRIF was established in 2021 under the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) funding program.
“The COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated the importance of cutting-edge research in infectious diseases,” said Roseann O’Reilly Runte, president and CEO of CFI. “Ensuring labs meet standards and are well equipped to combat new challenges in biosciences will contribute to a healthy future for Canadians.”
The minister announced an investment of more than $127 million through the CFI to support a total of eight biocontainment facilities across the country, including the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western.
The new expansion at the school through the grant will also include a drug manufacturing facility, “allowing both research and industry partners to produce pharmaceutical-grade drugs” at the university, according to Western communications.
“The funding will also facilitate the development of a vaccine bank, which will include ready-to-use, pre-formulated vaccines for rapid delivery to prevent the spread of all future epidemics and pandemics,” said Arts.
Arts, who is also a Canada Research Chair in HIV pathogenesis and viral control, said ImPaKT, launched in March 2020, was among the first biocontainment facilities in Canada to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said the team worked quickly in offering their expertise in pathogen research as well as through public policy efforts such as the wastewater surveillance program.
Additionally, the facility provided supporting research into areas such as virus spread, partnering with the industry to test vaccines, therapeutics and antimicrobial materials — small molecules, macromolecules, polymers, ceramics, metals or composites capable of inhibiting or killing the microbes on their surface or within their surroundings, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry.
“Western has a long history of leadership in health research, including in virology, infectious diseases and the development of vaccines and other therapeutics,” Bryan Neff, acting vice-president of research, said in a media release. “During the pandemic, we have seen many of these efforts coalesce at the ImPaKT Facility, which will now be able to facilitate new lines of inquiry and support our research community’s efforts to have a greater impact.”
In regards to the funding received from BRIF, Arts said the school is already looking into the best ways to expand previous research methods.
“We, for example, are working with companies that want to give us a slice of an airline cabin and then through the use of mannequins and other systems, we can look at the actual ability of the virus to transmit in conditions of different humidities, temperatures, pressures, etc.,” he explained. “But we will exchange that sort of set with another set that involves a bathroom or an operating theatre.
“These are the types of things that no other place in the world can do now.”
He said this BRIF announcement “recognizes that crucial work and attests to the fact that ImPaKT has the potential to develop into something bigger.”
“This is going to be excellent for London because it’ll bring more industry and more jobs,” Arts said. “But it also advances Western and London as being one of the premier sites in the world for this type of research.”
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