Carleton University’s Jeffrey Smith, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, is part of a team that’s been awarded a three-year Collaborative Health Research Project (CHRP) grant of almost $800,000. CHRP is a joint initiative between Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) and NaturalSciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) to fund health-based innovative science.
The team’s project involves developing small molecule viral sensitizers to boost vaccine manufacturing. Virus-based vaccines are society's most successful pharmaceuticals for the prevention of deadly human diseases. One characteristic common to all vaccines is that they must be engineered or selected to ensure an acceptable safety profile in humans. Vaccines are designed to block cellular innate immune responses to create an extremely safe product; however, this also impairs the growth of the virus in cell lines used for industrial manufacturing, slowing delivery.
“Historically, vaccine programs have had a dramatic effect on global population health,” said Smith. “Recently there has been a push from the World Health Organization to move away from egg-based vaccine manufacturing and towards cell culture-based production. This is possible in theory, however it is economically impractical. Our research will develop new ways to boost cell culture-based vaccine manufacturing to make it affordable and usher in an era of improved vaccine quality.”
CHRP grants support focused, interdisciplinary, collaborative research projects involving any field of the natural sciences, engineering and health sciences. Proposed research projects should be innovative, with a strong focus on knowledge translation, and lead to health benefits for Canadians, more effective health services and/or economic development in health-related areas. All applicant teams are required to engage and collaborate with a knowledge and technology-user organization that could benefit from the research results. Funding for CHRP projects can be for up to three years for defined projectswith clear milestones and decision points.