Biotech sector to get boost from expanded biotherapeutics centre at TOH’s new Civic campus

May 7, 2024

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Medical researchers are hoping a world-class manufacturing facility at The Ottawa Hospital’s new Civic campus will help spawn homegrown biotech startups that develop groundbreaking treatments for cancer and other diseases. The federal government announced Monday it is giving The Ottawa Hospital a total of $59 million in grants to boost its capacity to create and manufacture vaccines and other biotherapeutics. About $47 million will go toward building and operating a biotherapeutics manufacturing hub at the new Civic campus that is slated to open in 2028. Dr. John Bell, a senior scientist with the cancer therapeutics program at TOH, said he and his fellow researchers are hoping the new facility, which will contain about 10 suites suitable for developing treatments, can be up and running within the next couple of years. Bell said the new site will allow TOH to ramp up the work it’s been doing for the past 15 years at its current Biotherapeutics Manufacturing Centre, which specializes in developing treatments that use cells, genes, viruses and other biological materials to fight cancer, autoimmune diseases, heart disease and other conditions. “It’s going to be a huge asset,” said Bell. “What it does is it really bridges the gap between the discoveries we’re making at the (Ottawa Hospital Research Institute) and the ability to test them in people to make sure they’re actually doing what we want them to do.” Among the pioneering research conducted at TOH was the first Car-T therapy in Canada, which uses a patient's own immune cells to attack cancer. Bell said researchers at the hospital are also working on creating mNRA-based cancer-treating vaccines that can be “personalized” for each individual patient. “With the new revolution in sequencing of genetic information, we can now create tailored manufactured vaccines for individual people,” he explained. “I think that's going to be one of the major thrusts of the facility.” While Ottawa has already had some success as a biotechnology hub, Bell said the new state-of-the-art space should help accelerate the sector's growth. The current Biotherapeutics Manufacturing Centre, which has about 40 full-time staff based at The Ottawa Hospital’s General campus, consistently operates at full capacity. Private-sector clients now have to wait months to access the facility, but Bell said many more opportunities will open up at the new Civic campus for researchers who wish to tap into Ottawa’s world-class talent and technology to develop treatments with commercial potential. That could help hatch a new generation of startups in the capital to complement local success stories such as Virica Biotech. Virica Biotech uses TOH’s manufacturing facility to test its technology that optimizes viral vectors, which deliver new genes that are designed to repair defective genes responsible for diseases such as cancer, muscular dystrophy and hereditary blindness. The company, which employs more than 30 people, recently moved into a new research space at Carleton University. Bell said he expects Ottawa’s biotech ecosystem to blossom once the resources are in place to allow researchers to manufacture innovative medical treatments in larger quantities. “It’s one thing to have it in a test tube, but you have to really show that it can actually scale to large bioreactors,” he said. “Once you start manufacturing a product on location, companies are loath to move. We’d like to see these companies get anchored here in Ottawa and in Canada and prevent them from moving to the States. With the manufacturing capacity here, it’ll hopefully anchor the companies here.” A larger facility with the latest in cutting-edge technology will also draw more up-and-coming biotech talent to the region, he added. “A lot of these training programs for manufacturers are done on the web now, and you really can’t get the feel for it unless you’re doing it hands-on,” Bell said. “It’s going to be a huge boost.” TOH’s current manufacturing centre has been self-sustaining for years thanks to contracts with private-sector clients, he said. Treatments produced at the General campus are used around the world, and Bell said made-in-Ottawa biotherapeutics are poised to become even more prevalent. “We’re just going to build on that capacity,” he said.