When the pandemic slowed much of the world down, a team of scientists at McMaster University moved quickly, leveraging prior research on tuberculosis vaccines to develop new inhaled COVID-19 vaccine candidates. 

Today, a phase two clinical trial for the AeroVax inhaled COVID-19 vaccine is nearing completion with development costs at roughly $10 million — a mere sliver of the $50 million  to $100 million cost of typical vaccine development. 

The desire to increase the speed and lower the cost of development of promising new health innovations was a shared ambition of many researchers at McMaster and heralded a culture shift that was the impetus behind the creation of NexusHealth, says Matthew Miller, executive director of the new health innovation accelerator. 

“Our ability to do all of this in-house, to design it, test it in our high-containment lab, manufacture it in Canada’s first ever academically housed manufacturing lab, and then do the clinical trials with our own clinicians, meant we moved through the phase one clinical trial for only about $2 million, instead of $20 million or more,” said Matthew MIller, a professor in McMaster’s Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences. 

The goal of NexusHealth is to bridge the gap between discovery and impact, consolidating expertise in a seamless ecosystem that includes researchers and trainees, health professionals, industry and government leaders and entrepreneurs — moving breakthroughs from labs to patients faster and at lower cost. 

“The university was never built to facilitate the translation of discoveries into real-world solutions,” Miller says. McMaster’s culture of collaboration meant researchers were already excellent at working together, but innovation was limited by factors outside the university. 

“The problematic silos that preclude us from having real-world impact are not inside the academy anymore. They are sectoral silos,” says Miller.  

Good ideas would be published, celebrated, and then fall off a cliff — too far from the market to be rescued, too expensive and time-consuming for any single partner to carry forward.

The world’s first Bioinnovation Building

McMaster is also planning construction of a new Bioinnovation Building that will house the infrastructure critical to the NexusHealth mission. The building will be the world’s first facility to accelerate every step of the health innovation process, says Miller.  

Designed as an interdisciplinary hub for research, development and training, it will feature everything needed to produce and test new health solutions, from discovery through to commercialization. Scientists, engineers and physicians will work shoulder-to-shoulder alongside experts from industry, government, public health and small startups, while students gain hands-on, real-world training in biotech, clinical research and health entrepreneurship.  

Each floor will be home for one part of the innovation pipeline: fundamental science and discovery, specialized manufacturing, and clinical trials and testing. This first-of-its-kind set-up will allow for researchers from across disciplines — cancer, infectious disease, mental health, and beyond — to turn their ideas into tangible health products.  

The proximity the building provides will spur entrepreneurship and economic growth, accelerate Canadian intellectual property development and promote academic entrepreneurship, says Miller, who also directs the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research and co-directs the Canadian Pandemic Preparedness Hub.  

The Canadian government has already provided $75 million in funding for the building’s construction and operations, and philanthropic and cross-campus partners have also pledged support. 

“The building is going to consolidate all of the unique research infrastructure and expertise that’s required to go beyond the published paper,” Miller says. “It’s going to bring everyone together, in one space. It will be one-stop shopping.”

His ambition runs further still. “In the same way McMaster is known for problem-based learning and evidence-based medicine, if people look at this model and say, ‘we have to replicate this,’ and then this scales globally, that would be the ultimate sign of success.” 

Engineers, health scientists, chemists and physicians working together

Leyla Soleymani, lead of engineering innovation at NexusHealth and recipient of a prestigious two-year Killam Fellowship, says NexusHealth and the Bioinnovation Building will foster the interactions that are critical to moving quickly. Engineers can capitalize on the knowledge of health scientists, chemists, physicians and vice versa.  

Soleymani, a professor in the Faculty of Engineering, is a Canada Research Chair in miniaturized biomedical devices and an expert in next-generation biosensors and personalized health technologies for early disease detection. She and her colleagues are working to identify an array of markers that need to be continuously monitored and could be measured using wearable devices, including a protein biomarker used to diagnose heart attacks that currently requires a hospital blood test. 

“One day we were talking about inflammatory markers and whether we can detect these things under the skin,” Soleymani says. Working with collaborators in Health Sciences, she says the answer very quickly becomes “Yes, we can get this data — these markers exist.”

“It’s the ability to work together and really complement each other that is exciting.” Without collaboration, she notes, it could take years to reach the same point. “You need the collaboration if you’re going to have an accelerated pathway to commercialization and technology transfer.”  

Soleymani is looking forward to the opportunities the new building offers: “To be around health scientists, other engineers, clinicians and early-stage companies and interact — not necessarily in a structured way but to collide early and often throughout the research process – that is key. And that’s what I’m most excited about, to be part of that environment.”