Connaught Medical Research Laboratories are carrying out one of the most important jobs in Canadian medicine: Production and testing of the Salk polio vaccine.
Now the laboratories are to have facilities which will enable them to carry out this job with even greater efficiency. The official opening of a $1,000,000, addition to the Dufferin division will consolidate production at one location.
At present, the vaccine production and testing processes are split between three laboratory divisions: The University of To- ronto building on College St., the Spadina Ave. division, and the Dufferin division, Dufferin and Steele's Ave.
The new building will mean that all these processes can be carried out at the Dufferin farm's location, except packing and shipping, which will be continued at the Spadina division.
The new building will save the time and money involved in transporting materials back and, forth between the three divisions: it will be of value administratively because processes will be centralized, and it will allow the laboratories to give back to the University School of Hygiene the office and lab space they have borrowed.
Production and testing of the vaccine, which is designed to protect school children against the crippling effects of paralytic polio, is a complicated process.
It begins with the 1,600 monkeys a month which come to the Dufferin farms by chartered aircraft from India. The monkeys are treated first with antibiotics to remove infections and parasites, and then they are tested for tuberculosis, and those with the disease are destroyed.
After these tests, the monkeys are brought, a few hundred at a time, to the College St. Division, where they are anaesthetized and their kidneys removed.
The kidneys are then taken to the Spadina Division and minced by hand and incubated into the special culture fluid developed by Dr. Raymond Parker of Toronto which allows the kidney tissue to multiply after removal from the monkey, thus permitting a large production of vaccine from a relatively few kidneys.
Live polio virus is added to the suspension of minced kidney tissue and is allowed to grow and then is harvested. Tests now take place to determine the strength of the virus, to ascertain whether any wild viruses are alive which may have come with the monkeys, and for bacterial contamination and toxicity.
Three different types of polio virus are grown like this separately and the virus fluids are transported in big bottles to the Dufferin Division, where they are filtered and inactivated.
The inactivator is formaldehyde and after it is added, the fluid becomes vaccine. But the Inactivation process is a delicate one: The idea is to reduce the fluid's strength just enough, but not too much. The vaccine must be strong enough to react against polio infection, but not strong enough to infect by itself.
During and after inactivation, more tests are carried out for safety's sake. Then the three types of vaccine are pooled to make a trivalent vaccine which will protect against three strains of polio infection. The trivalent vaccine is put into ampules -- and is handled no further.
But the testing goes on. After pooling and ampuling of the three vaccines, a sample from each batch goes through another complete set of tests conducted by injecting it into monkeys and tissue culture. Potency tests, to determine its strength, also are carried out here
Further samples are sent to Ottawa, where the federal hygiene laboratory carries out the same tests. So rigorous and thorough is this testing process that if any one test is failed by the pooled vaccine sample, the batch from which that sample came is thrown out.
The whole process, from beginning to end, takes about seven months.
The saving in time, expense, and administrative problems by consolidating the various processes is obvious. Refinements in equipment have also been introduced to the new Dufferin plant.
The new building, 215 feet long and 102 feet wide, contains an animal section completely separated from other sections by a solid wall with access provided outside, a special air conditioning system to prevent contamination of cultures and fluids and to sterilize exhaust as it leaves the building.
It is one story high, with the air conditioning room on the roof and contains about 100 rooms with removable partitions, so that layout can be altered to meet varying conditions.
It was hoped the building. would be occupied by March 1, but builders finished late, and a number of changes were ordered during the construction.
Some production teams will move in this month, but the building will not be completely in operation until August because some production groups are in the middle of processes which cannot be interrupted by a move.