OTTAWA — The federal government will pump more than $190 million into the expansion of a Mississauga medical facility to boost Canada’s capacity to make specialized vaccines in the coming years, the Star has learned.
The money is meant to cover roughly half the cost of a $400million project to expand facilities owned by Resilience Biotechnologies, which makes a range of drugs under contract for other companies.
The Mississauga facilities should be able to crank out up to 640 million doses of mRNA vaccines per year after the expansion is finished in 2024, said a government source who shared the information on the condition they aren’t named.
Those vaccines are the same type made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna for COVID-19, which Canada has had to purchase from other countries because of a lack of domestic manufacturing capacity when the pandemic hit.
The hope is that the expanded Resilience Biotechnologies facilities can fill that gap by offering major pharmaceutical the scale to mass-produce vaccines, the government source said.
Such companies would be able to contract the facilities to make enough of their products to sell to Canadian and international markets, the source said.
“It’s all about flexible and rapid manufacturing,” the source said.
A spokesperson for Resilience Biotechnologies did not respond to an interview request on Friday.
Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Franois-Philippe Champagne is scheduled to announce the spending Monday, which comes from the $2.2 billion earmarked in this year’s federal budget to support Canada’s bio-manufacturing sector.
The federal government has blamed a lack of domestic capacity to mass-produce vaccines for why Canada has relied on foreign suppliers for its entire arsenal of COVID-19 shots so far.
Champagne and Procurement Minister Anita Anand have said that none of Canada’s COVID vaccine suppliers were willing to license their shots for manufacture in this country because of a lack of capacity to mass produce them.
That situation came under intense scrutiny earlier this year, after some shipments of Moderna shots from Europe were delayed and Canada fell behind dozens of peer countries in the global vaccination race. That included the United States and United Kingdom, where domestically produced vaccines have lifted inoculation campaigns beyond what Canada has so far been able to attain, even as shipments of Moderna and Pfizer shots increase this month.
The federal government expects 4.5 million doses of those to arrive this week, the biggest weekly shipment since vaccines were first approved last December, Anand said Friday.
Given the lack of manufacturing capacity in Canada, the cochairs of the government’s vaccine task force have said inking contracts with foreign suppliers was likely the fastest way to supply COVID shots to this country.