Host:
Hello, this is Greg Pilsworth, and I’m the co-producer of 10,000 ways.
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Volker Gerdts:
I’m a builder. I like building things. We’re building right now Canada’s Centre for Pandemic Research here. I think we’re building one of the most advanced research organizations in the whole world with a focus on new diseases.
Host:
Our podcast tells the life stories of curious Canadian researchers, leading-edge science and the joys of discovery.
Gerdts:
We’re doing novel research. We’re breaking boundaries. We’re recognized globally.
Host:
In this episode, listen to find out why this researcher says vaccines help protect what he calls “the herd,” which is sort of fitting, as it was studies in prairie cattle which brought him to Canada.
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Gerdts:
My name is Volker Gerdts. I’m the director and CEO of VIDO, which stands for the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, at the University of Saskatchewan.
Host:
The seed of a career is occasionally planted by a teacher. Teachers, if given the opportunity, have the potential to change lives, as was the case with Volker Gerdts. Here’s Volker’s recollection of his high school teacher, Mr. Berliner.
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Gerdts:
It was a very talented teacher, a biology teacher at the time — his name was Berliner like Berlin and then an er at the end — who got me interested in molecular biology. He was the one who was like a very young, talented, energetic, passionate teacher, who really wanted to teach us novel things, and so there were certain assignments, projects, that students had to do, and so my assignment at the time was actually cloning. It was a time when a lot of key discoveries were made. I was really, really intrigued by all of that.
But as a young high school student, I didn’t really know what would be the best path, and so I remember at the time I was told that veterinary medicine gives you a very solid foundation that qualifies you to go into science.
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Host:
Volker has come a long way since having his curiosity sparked by a high school teacher. He is now a globally recognized infectious disease specialist. Canada is fortunate to have such an informed researcher in our science ranks. This was never more apparent as it was in early 2020 when COVID started to spread across the nation.
Volker was well positioned to apply his many years of expertise when answering fundamental health questions from Canada’s very anxious farming community.
Gerdts:
I’m the director of an organization that does research on new diseases, understanding their impact. When a new disease emerges, there are questions that need to be answered right away. What does it do? What kind of symptoms does it induce? How is it being transmitted? Where are we getting it from?
All of these early questions. And during COVID, I would have, daily, people calling me here in the province of Saskatchewan; farmers who said, “I have COVID. Can I go and see my pigs now? Can I go and see my cattle now?” Like all these questions that need to be answered early when there is a new disease, determining, “What is this disease? What does it do? How is it being transmitted?” VIDO is one of the few organizations in the world that was able to complete a study, in dairy cows, and be able to understand what the disease looks like, which part of which organs are affected, you know, all of these critical things.
Host:
Volker started out as a vet, and if you’re a pet owner, it might be easy to have the perception that veterinary medicine and human medicine are completely separate disciplines with little or no crossover. Enroll in one of Canada’s five veterinary schools, and you might learn otherwise.
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Gerdts:
As soon as you start veterinary medicine, you have to learn so many different species at once. You learn the anatomy or the physiology of birds, of fish, of snakes, of pigs, of cattle, of dogs, of cats.
You learn how every organ works. How a kidney has to function, how a liver has to function and so on, and how it’s all interconnected.
Humans are just another mammalian species, and our physiology is not very different than that of pigs or other species, and so you know, it was almost in addition to it that you would just learn about diseases that are affecting humans while studying veterinary medicine.
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Host:
Canada has an incredibly rich research ecosystem that attracts researchers from all around the world. Volker Gerdts would be become one such researcher. While in Germany, Volker was working on DNA vaccines. Traditional vaccines use weakened or killed versions of the germ to trigger an immune response.
DNA vaccines use a gene particle from the disease to generate proteins, which then trigger the production of antibodies.
Volker’s DNA vaccine research initially focused on animals.
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Gerdts:
So, I was working at a federal research institute in Germany, the leading research institute for animal diseases, and I was working on a new vaccine technology.
We were doing groundbreaking research. Really, we were the first in the world to apply a DNA vaccine to pigs and tested in pigs, and so, as it was a really new technology, I was looking around at which other organizations in the world are working on DNA vaccines for animals, and so VIDO was really the institute and here in Canada, in Saskatoon, who had at the time published the first paper using a DNA vaccine in cattle, and so they were as leading, as groundbreaking, as we were. That’s when I decided that might be a good place to go for a post doc.
I came to VIDO, this was ’98. I came to VIDO for two years then returned to Germany in 2000. Started to build my group over there, but then I got called again by the director at the time from VIDO, and he was trying to get me back, and obviously, he was successful, so I came back to VIDO in 2002 and have been here since then.
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Host:
Since 2002, Volker has been studying pathogens, which are defined as bacteria, viruses, protozoans or ... or what we more commonly refer to as germs.
High consequence pathogens are life threatening agents and infections that can have a deadly impact on a global scale.
We have very recently seen with COVID that pathogens respect neither borders nor seas, which begs the very practical question, “Can they be contained?”
Gerdts:
When I came here, probably the most significant expansion that I experienced was the building of the new high containment lab called InterVAC, the International Vaccine Centre.
And so this is now Canada’s largest high containment laboratory, and it’s here in Saskatoon attached to the original VIDO building, and so that allows our researchers now to work with these pathogens that require a high level of containment, and so, you know, there’s four levels to containment, one being the lowest, four being the highest, and this is currently a level three AG, and we call it an “AG” for agriculture.
So, it’s even higher than a regular level three building, and so this whole facility here was built and it’s very, very large. It was built with that premise in mind that, you know, we are able to use large animals for infectious disease research, benefiting both humans as well as animals.
Host:
At the start of the global pandemic, Canadian researchers were at the forefront of vaccine research, along with researchers from the University of Oxford and the Vaccine Research Center in the United States. The magnitude of the disease, however, combined with desperate global demand, brought to light that Canada needed to dramatically boost its domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity.
Fortunately, thanks in part to Volker, we are now better prepared for the next wave of infectious diseases.
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Gerdts:
As we learned from COVID, it’s all part of being better prepared for the next disease. If you look back into which organizations in the world were able to develop vaccines for COVID the quickest, it was the University of Oxford who has the Jenner Institute, an organization very similar to VIDO.
They had all the necessary infrastructure in house or within reach.
And so, they were able to rapidly manufacture prototypes, take them into clinical testing and so on, and so in contrast to us they were able to do it all in house. VIDO at the time, although we were really, really one of the leading organizations in the beginning of the pandemic, we had to then go and contract manufacturing facilities that can test the toxicology and so on. So, we had to outsource all the work that goes into the development of a vaccine, and that slowed us down.
And so, the newest CFI investment is really part of the funding for what we call the Pandemic Centre, which now brings everything into one organization. So, it’s all about being able to immediately respond to a new disease. It’s all about pandemic preparedness.
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Host:
Pandemic preparedness means building on the lessons learned most recently while navigating the murky waters of COVID-19. In some cases this means funding manufacturing facilities to boost the production capacity for domestic vaccines. The intent of these facilities is to provide the infrastructure necessary to diminish the time it takes to get from vaccine discovery to trial to commercialization.
In 2022, the CFI contributed more than $8 million dollars to the construction of one such facility.
Why is this facility important? Volker explains.
Gerdts:
We learned from the pandemic that Canada didn’t have enough research capacity, Canada didn’t have enough manufacturing capacity and Canada didn’t have enough skilled workers who can operate these facilities and do their critical work in these facilities. VIDO experienced that firsthand, but so did everyone else, and so what the investment does right now — it provides us with that capacity.
It provides us with additional research capacity that will ensure that in the future VIDO, and therefore, Canada, can work with any future pathogen.
The addition of the manufacturing facility provides critical manufacturing capacity that we have seen was lacking in Canada. The capacity to take university discoveries, prototype vaccines into clinical testing, and so there is this big valley of death, we called it, for many, many decades before, where, you know, inventions made, or innovations made, in universities didn’t really get into the clinical phase because of the lack of facilities we had, and so we’re building here probably one of the most advanced infrastructures in the whole world, providing Canada with the capacity to respond to future emerging diseases.
Host:
VIDO is now recognized as one of the leading facilities in the world. So much so that in November of 2023, the organization was awarded a $30 million dollar research and manufacturing contract from the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
This optimized manufacturing capacity, along with the ability to respond more rapidly to future outbreaks, is very important to Volker, particularly when he reflects on both the past and the future.
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Gerdts:
I think we just experienced firsthand the impact an infectious disease can have on all of our lives, not only the young or the old, all of us. Our kids couldn’t go to school. Our kids couldn’t play hockey. You know, we put ourselves where we couldn’t see our grandmothers in senior homes because we weren’t allowed to come in contact, young people were isolating at home, and that was done on a disease that has mortality rates or a case fatality rate of less than one percent. If the next disease has a case fatality rate of 30 percent, or if it was an influenza virus of 50 percent, then you would have a global pandemic where people not only are suffering from isolation, but they also would be dying.
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Host:
VIDO is most certainly going to be a key player in Canada’s response to any future infectious diseases. The research that VIDO conducts will help save lives and save money. In business, ROI means return on investment, and return on investment can be translated as the ratio of net benefits to costs. The Gates Foundation, using a cost-of-illness approach, found that every dollar invested in vaccination programs results in a savings to health care of at least $16.
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Gerdts:
Now, if you talk about the return of investment, I think there have been a number of studies done by the Gates Foundation that looked at the return of investment in research, in vaccine research.
So, research on the development of vaccines, and so they had a study done, over quite a while actually, looking at childhood vaccines for low- and middle-income countries, and so there it was determined that for every dollar spent in vaccine research, the return of investment for the health systems was about $16 in low and middle income countries, and then in high developed countries or high income countries like Canada, in the range of $45 for every dollar spent.
We need to be able to battle these infectious diseases. Our former director would always say, if you think research is expensive, try disease, and I think this pandemic just made the case.
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Host:
The COVID pandemic generated a multitude of challenges, with the financial costs being only one of many. For example, early in the pandemic it became apparent that Canada didn’t have enough ventilators. This scarcity attracted the attention of Queen’s professor Art McDonald. During non-pandemic times, Nobel Prize recipient Art McDonald is working on complex physics problems. During COVID, however, Art and his colleagues made a dramatic change in direction. They were looking to develop a new type of ventilator, constructed with off-the-shelf parts sourced from established supply chains.
While Volker’s fundamental changes in direction were not based on a national health crisis, they were no less significant, at a personal level.
Gerdts:
You know, my research direction changed a lot, and so that was part of, also, the recognition that the initial project that I wanted to do didn’t work, and so as a scientist, that’s when we then pivot and look outside and see how we can, you know, overcome that challenge, and so I was doing research on the immune response in the intestine. And so, we created a new surgical model to be able to directly go into the intestine and follow the immune cells in the intestine. We did some very sophisticated stuff at the time, and we made some very interesting observations which really challenged the field at the time and led to lots of very interesting discussions with other researchers around the world.
By me going into the area that I really hadn’t worked on before, and you know, and made some really surprising discoveries, that really challenged some of the existing dogma at the time.
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Host:
Research is all about exploration in the search of new facts or information, and Volker says that challenges and perceived failures continue to be an integral part of what it means to be a researcher.
Gerdts:
It’s always challenging. There is no question about it, but we are doing research, and, you know, if our research doesn’t fail, if we don’t hit the wall at one point, we haven’t really tried it hard enough in my mind. So, you know, what people call failure is not really failure, but it’s a process of research like you test new hypotheses.
And sometimes, it may be that that hypothesis is not holding out and so you got to pivot, you’ve got to do something else, and so the advice really for young people is take it as the normal process. Look for opportunities of how you can combine the research that you have done so far with a new direction. I think it’s good to sometimes be a bit more willing to take a risk and not think too much about the future and how it affects you.
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Host:
Volker has taken risks, and his successes manifest themselves in a variety of forms.
For example, he’s been the primary investigator for over 90 grant applications.
He’s been instrumental in generating over 100 million dollars in funding. The accolades are numerous but none of these accomplishments touch the pride he feels
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for his team of researchers and students.
Gerdts:
I think I have built a high-performance team here at VIDO. I think, despite all of these scientific discoveries and so on, what I’m most proud of is the team that we have here, that we have that I have been fortunate to lead for a few years. We have a … I think we have one of the most outstanding high-performance teams in the country.
I think it’s very motivating for all of us to work with young people, especially if you see how they, you know, develop their passion, how they, how they really follow their interests, how they grow into researchers themselves, how they become independent, how they actually don’t need you anymore, how they, how they grow up, and it’s been absolutely exciting to work with young students.
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Host:
In the 1970s, elementary-school-aged students used to be routinely vaccinated for diphtheria, poliomyelitis and tetanus.
All of these diseases were effectively treated with vaccines. Vaccines continued to save lives during COVID, but in spite of their success, vaccines are still subject to misunderstanding. Volker explains how vaccination is essential for both the individual and, what he calls, “the herd.”
Gerdts:
There’s always two considerations that we all need to think about. A: ourselves. Are we part of a certain risk group? So, if we are old or young or have any underlying diseases or conditions that would make us more susceptible, absolutely. Get vaccinated. So, that’s reason one to get vaccinated. But then the second reason for all of us to get vaccinated is that we play a role in the herd, right, and the population, and so by us getting vaccinated, even if we don’t really fall into one of the critical groups or populations, we are contributing to the safety of them. So, the cancer survivor, the person who just went through radiation treatment, the person who has a compromised immune system for whatever reason … those are the ones that are more susceptible to the disease and by us getting vaccinated, we’re building a wall around them.
Host:
Volker can’t do it all on his own. He needs a team to help construct these walls against disease. Students and scientists from around the world, much like Volker, continue to be drawn to the prairies and to VIDO, the globally endorsed science organization. Volker’s passion inspires others, but at the core what is it that inspires Volker?
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Gerdts:
I’m a builder. I like building things. We’re building right now Canada’s Centre for Pandemic Research here with CFI investment, as I described before, I think we’re building one of the most advanced research organizations in the whole world with a focus on new diseases. We are recruiting some of the most outstanding scientists. We’re bringing in outstanding students from all around the world.
We are doing novel research. We’re breaking boundaries. To me, this is such an exciting thing to see how this centre is growing, how VIDO’s reputation is growing, how we are becoming an organization that is recognized globally. I love building. I love, I love seeing how the people here help to make VIDO, this Canada Centre for Pandemic Research, this global institute that is playing at the international level.
I just am very, very excited about all of them. I have no difficulties getting out of bed in the morning. I love it!
Host:
10,000 ways is produced in the studios of the Canada Foundation for Innovation. If you’re curious to learn more about the CFI, then please visit Innovation.ca. My name is Greg Pilsworth and thank you very much for listening. Bye bye.
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