In the event of a pandemic, Canada needs to be able to churn out enough vaccines and therapeutics to keep the country safe, the CBC reports.
That's why Lawrence Goodridge, a professor of food sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario, has been awarded more than $1 million from Canada's Biomedical Research Fund to help build up the country's biomanufacturing sector, which uses living cells and organisms to create products such as medicines and foods.
"As we deal with the increasing emergence of infectious diseases, it's imperative that we enhance our preparedness for future health crises," Goodridge says in a press release.
The project, called INSPIRE, aims to " equip Canada with tools and knowledge needed to mitigate risks and bolster our capacity to respond effectively to future pandemics," Goodridge says.
Under the three-year project, researchers will work with the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety, the University of Windsor, and more than 30 other academic and industry partners to build up Canada's wastewater surveillance system and develop technologies that make it easier and faster to find diseases in the water, according to the press release.
A customized collection of grant news from foundations and the federal government from around the Web.
Vertical farms are designed in a way to avoid the pressing issues about growing food crops in drought-and-disease-prone fields miles away from the population centers in which they will be consumed.