On May 12, 2020, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the University of Saskatchewan’s (USask) Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization-International Vaccine Centre (VIDO-InterVac) today announced a collaboration to work together to accelerate the development and production of a candidate COVID-19 antigen in mammalian cells.

The antigen against COVID-19 has been produced at laboratory scale, and animal studies at VIDO-InterVac are ongoing to determine the effectiveness of the laboratory-scale antigen. The NRC will now explore the use of its proprietary HEK293 mammalian cells to develop a robust and efficient process to scale up production of the vaccine antigen for future pre-clinical and clinical studies.