Financial Post - June 11, 1960
Connaught Medical Re- search Laboratories, University of Toronto, is ready to make large-scale trials of a new kind of polio vaccine which is given by mouth and may overcome some of the Salk vaccine limitations.
"Salk vaccine has been a great success," Dr. J. K. W. Ferguson, director of the laboratories says in his annual report. "Nevertheless it does have two inherent limitations."
- Salk acts too slowly to influence appreciably an epidemic which is in progress.
- It does not stop the spread of the infection in its non-paralytic form from one carrier to another.
Work was started at Connaught in April 1959, in a new building built for the purpose, on the development of attenuated live virus vaccines.
The oral vaccine has been produced and tested with encouraging results on animals.
The vaccine is now ready for large-scale trials on people but public health authorities in Canada are reluctant to co-operate.
The Salk vaccine works sufficiently well and authorities are not anxious to introduce something new. Some concern is also caused by the use of live virus, even though attenuated, i.e., reduced in strength to a safe level.
Dr. Ferguson said the trials may be conducted in Latin America or Europe, or in other countries where Salk vaccine is not widely used. Negotiations are being conducted.
Besides its potentially greater effect, the oral vaccine can be produced more easily.
The virus for both vaccines is produced in the kidneys of monkeys.
ods of producing polio viruses in monkey kidneys in large quantities.
Paying tribute to this achievement, Dr. Hart E. Van Riper, medical director of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, New York, said:
"I think it only fair to say that if the Connaught group had not so quickly worked out the techniques for large-scale production of virus, we could not possibly have had at hand today a practical vaccine for the prevention of paralytic poliomyelitis."
Canadians also contributed significantly to techniques of producing vaccine safely, free of contamination by other viruses commonly found in monkey tissue.
Practically all the polio virus fluids used in the 1954 field trial in the U. S. were actually produced at Connaught Laboratories and converted into vaccines at U.S. laboratories.
In January of 1959 Connaught released a new combined vaccine for polio, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, the result of four years of experiments.
More than 750,000 doses have been distributed in Canada.
work has been extended by gifts and grants from many sources for specific jobs.
Connaught itself now makes a number of grants to other Canadian research and educational institutions.
Similar work is carried out in Montreal by a highly regarded, somewhat smaller organization, the Institute of Microbiology.
One of the institute's more notable contributions is in the pioneering and production of B.C.G. vaccine for immunization against tuberculosis, under the direction of Dr. Armand Frappier.
Some of the other fields in which Connaught is active:
- Methods to overcome occasional development of resistance to insulin in treatment of diabetes.
- Rabies vaccine and other projects in the veterinary field.
- Techniques for microanalysis of blood, obviating the of necessity withdrawing large samples of blood from children in testing efficiency of vaccines.
- Development and production of vaccines for Asian and other forms of influenza.
The laboratories produce and sell to physicians, hospitals, druggists and departments of health or other official public health organizations a wide variety of vaccines and other medical products, including diphtheria toxin, heparin, flu vaccine, insulin, penicillin and vaccines for measles, scarlet fever, smallpox and many others.