OTTAWA — Medicago’s failed attempt to get World Health Organization approval for its plant-based COVID-19 vaccine has it working on finding an owner the WHO won’t find objectionable, even as it struggles to produce doses for Canada’s government.

The Quebec City-based pharmaceutical company has withdrawn its application to the WHO for an endorsement of its Covifenz vaccine that could help it be sold globally, Medicago spokesperson Tanvir Janmohamed told The Logic by email. The company is partly owned by a tobacco giant, and the WHO won’t co-operate with the industry.

“The company’s shareholders are working on finding a mutually agreeable solution to ensure Medicago’s future and global reach of its vaccine,” she wrote.

At the same time, the company is dealing with manufacturing problems that have prevented it from delivering vaccine doses to the Canadian government, which has approved Covifenz for use here, Janmohamed wrote.

In October 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the federal government would give Medicago up to $173 million to support Covifenz development and help the company build a new factory.

Medicago has been working on its vaccine platform—originating in research at Laval University and Agriculture Canada—for more than 20 years, using a species of Nicotiana plants to produce particles that mimic viruses well enough to trigger human immune responses. 

Nicotiana benthamiana is popular for virus research because it’s highly susceptible to viral infections. As the “Nicotiana” name suggests, it’s part of the genus of plants that are used for commercial tobacco, though cigarette companies favour other species.

Philip Morris International claims about one-third ownership of Medicago, which it bought into in 2008; the company’s majority owner is Japan’s Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, which cooperated with Philip Morris to take Medicago private in 2013.

The tobacco company’s slogan now is “Delivering a smoke-free future,” and it touts its work on smokeless nicotine products as a healthier alternative to cigarettes like its Marlboros, but the World Health Organization isn’t buying.

“The tobacco industry should not be a partner in any initiative linked to setting or implementing public health policies, given that its interests are in direct conflict with the goals of public health,” reads one of the harsher turns of phrase in guidelines made under the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

Last March, the WHO said it wouldn’t consider Medicago’s vaccine. That means Covifenz can’t be part of the COVAX vaccine-sharing program; other countries’ regulators could approve it for their residents, but without WHO support, that’s a tougher process.

Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, whose department delivered the $173-million subsidy through the Strategic Innovation Fund, told The Logic in an interview that he’s working on Medicago’s ownership problem.

Champagne said he met Medicago’s new CEO Toshifumi Tada in Japan once this fall and will see him again when Champagne returns for an artificial-intelligence meeting in November.

“We’re in solution mode,” Champagne said.

Plant-based vaccines are a promising technology, and investing in Medicago’s alongside other vaccine types, including from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, was a good decision, he added. “We’ll have a position now in all families of vaccines.”

Whether Medicago is permitted to sell Covifenz internationally will only matter if the company can produce the vaccine in large amounts.

Covifenz was part of the federal “portfolio” approach to buying COVID-19 vaccines. Medicago joined six other suppliers with Canadian contracts. Those included Moderna and Pfizer, whose mRNA-based shots ended up being the workhorses of the national immunization campaign; and Sanofi and GSK, whose joint effort still hasn’t produced an approved vaccine.

At the same time as Trudeau announced the Medicago subsidy in 2020, he said Canada would buy up to 76 million doses of Covifenz if Health Canada eventually approved it, enough to give every Canadian two shots.

Covifenz got Health Canada’s sign-off last February, for people between 18 and 64.

That was a year after other vaccines started arriving in Canada in quantity. Also, Covifenz isn’t as good as others that beat it to market: Trials showed it was 71 per cent effective in protecting 18- to 64-year-olds against COVID-19, versus 94.1 per cent for Moderna’s vaccine and 95 per cent for the one Pfizer developed with BioNTech.

Nevertheless, Medicago said at the time that it wanted to fill the federal order as soon as possible.

“Medicago has not yet been able to deliver Covifenz doses to the government of Canada due to challenges associated with transitioning to large-scale production,”Janmohamed told The Logic, without describing the challenges in detail.

The company has made “significant progress” but couldn’t meet its production targets, she added.

Besides the COVID-19 vaccine, Medicago has other products in its pipeline, including the influenza vaccines it was working on before the pandemic and shots against rotavirus and norovirus, which cause diarrhea and vomiting.

Public Services and Procurement Canada did not say by deadline whether the Covifenz contract requires the government to pay for all 76 million doses or whether some are optional. Health Canada did not say what it would do with any doses Medicago might deliver.