OTTAWA — Ottawa has backed Entos Pharmaceuticals’ plans for an Edmonton research and production facility with $62 million from the Strategic Innovation Fund, in the government’s latest bid to boost Canada’s biomanufacturing capacity.

The $198.5-million plant is the centrepiece of Edmonton-based Entos’s scale-up plans, as it moves to begin commercial production of its novel medicines and vaccines. The company’s platform is used to develop medicines for genetic disorders, with a unique method of delivering RNA, DNA and gene-editing therapies to human cells. In simple terms, the drug “delivers instructions to have the patient basically generate their own cure,” said CEO John Lewis.

The 103,000-square-foot facility in south Edmonton will also house a new research and development centre, and Lewis hopes to have the company’s lead product approved by Health Canada by 2029. It’s a treatment for congenital lipodystrophy, a rare disease that causes babies to lose almost all of their body fat at birth or soon after.

The facility should be up and running in time to start producing that medication as soon as the therapy is approved, Lewis said. 

The same infrastructure can be repurposed in an emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic, which is another reason why Ottawa is keen to fund it. “This facility will be part of a network of facilities throughout Canada,” Lewis said in an interview with The Logic, adding that it will make bulk vaccines that will be shipped to other places to be packaged in vials. “I believe our capacity will be able to make about 10 million vaccines a year,” he said.

That kind of domestic capacity was sorely missing when the pandemic struck, leaving the government scrambling for shots made abroad. The innovation minister at the time, François-Philippe Champagne, set about rebuilding the country’s ability to make its own vaccines and medicines with bold promises about getting new plants up and running quickly. 

Champagne heralded plans for the Edmonton facility just before he was shuffled into a new role as finance minister, saying it “will better equip Canada in responding to future health emergencies.” 

The government granted another $60 million from the Strategic Innovation Fund on Tuesday to help finance the $220-million expansion of a Delpharm facility that makes essential medicines in Boucherville, Que. That company plans to double its production capacity at the plant by adding 28,000 square feet and installing new equipment, according to the government’s press release.

Ottawa has put roughly $2.3 billion toward 41 biomanufacturing and life-sciences projects since the pandemic started, but the success of those enterprises has been patchy. The $130-million, publicly owned Biologics Manufacturing Centre in Montreal was supposed to start churning out COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2020, but hadn’t produced a single shot as of October 2024. 

Ottawa also gave Quebec City-based Medicago more than $300 million to develop a homegrown COVID-19 vaccine and build a production plant to manufacture them. The company ran into production difficulties, though, and a tobacco firm’s minority stake in it ran afoul of World Health Organization policies. The facility closed in 2023 when Medicago’s buyer, Mitsubishi Chemical Group, decided to dissolve the company. 

Other projects might soon pay off, though. The government signed an agreement with Moderna in 2021 to build a manufacturing facility in Laval, Que., which is set to start producing mRNA vaccines this year.

Like the pandemic, the threat of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff plans have thrown the importance of shoring up domestic drug production into relief, Lewis said, calling it a “wake-up call” for Canadians. The upside, he said, could be a lot more capability in the innovative medicine sector. 

For example, Entos’s new Edmonton facility will be adaptable to make drugs developed outside of Canada domestically. “We have a number of partners around the world, including Eli Lilly, that are developing innovative medicines for brain diseases, for instance, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” Lewis said. “In Canada we have all the raw materials to make innovative new drugs. We have academics, we have fantastic clinical trials.

“What we need are the companies who bring those drugs to market to be able to manufacture them in Canada. So that’s our goal.”