Rusting robots: Scientists fear end of COVID-19 funding will set Canada back

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They work long hours at a pace many times faster than human hands could manage. Since early in the pandemic, their work has helped researchers and officials understand the impact of COVID-19 on Canadians by monitoring antibodies in blood.

But soon the multi-million dollar robots, dubbed Alex, Maggie and Sam by their human lab-mates, could be left to rust.

Federal pandemic funding that supports the cutting-edge facility in the basement of the University of Ottawa’s medical school is set to end next spring. There is currently enough work to continue for about another year.

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After that, the future of the uOttawa High Throughput Facility is in doubt and, with it, Alex, Maggie and Sam.

The facility emerged during the pandemic to serve a dire need across Canada for a lab that could support large-scale research projects at a rapid pace.

“It started with a grad student with a pipette but the needs kept increasing until that student couldn’t handle it,” said uOttawa immunologist Dr. Marc-André Langlois, who heads the facility.

The lab requested federal funding, which helped purchase the robots and allowed it to meet growing demands from researchers involved with pandemic research. That included the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force and  CoVaRR-NET, a network of researchers from across the country whose mandate was to address the threat of SARS-CoV-2 variants. In all, the lab received about $5 million in pandemic funding for the robots, including ongoing maintenance and highly-trained lab staff.

It was part of an outpouring of government funding and increased scientific focus that helped build innovative programs and infrastructure — including wastewater surveillance and a national biobank — during the pandemic. Researchers fear many of those gains will be lost as pandemic funding ends.

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The primary role of the high throughput facility was to support large-scale studies measuring antibodies in blood as a result of SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 vaccines. The robots are designed to pipette blood samples, put them into plates, and add substances required for testing – at a high volume.

The robotic automation allowed the lab to work quickly, performing close to two million assays (tests) that were used in peer-reviewed publications, Statistics Canada surveys and other COVID-19 related studies. The work helped support research and allowed officials, including Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam, to better understand the extent of the immune response to COVID-19 as new variants emerged.

That work is winding down at a time when there are new warnings that Canada must be prepared for future pandemics and other health emergencies by maintaining a strong surveillance system.

That is precisely what the uOttawa facility is set up to do, said Langlois, and it is needed to understand future threats from a Canadian context.

“We are already set up. We are good at this and the initial investment has been made. We are ready to go to support surveillance efforts. Why should we be shut down and rebuild when there is a crisis?” said Langlois, who also serves as executive director of C0VaRR-NET. “Canada needs to stop looking abroad. We have to look inside and focus on the Canadian situation.”

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Langlois said he fears the loss of dedicated funding could potentially cause the expensive robots to rust. “For any mechanical component that is not working on a regular basis, what happens is parts rust and others degrade over time. That is why it is critical to support these investments.”

More worrisome, he says, is the loss of highly skilled lab staff and knowledge.

“It is tremendously wasteful to lose the humans that have been trained during the pandemic and to lose their skill sets. We can always buy another robot, but training is invaluable.”

It not only represents the loss of significant taxpayer investment in equipment and training, he said, but the loss of crucial early warning surveillance for future pandemics and health emergencies.

“It is essential to maintain this capacity to respond to the next pandemic or the next outbreak.”

The high throughput facility is one of the projects created through CoVaRR-NET.  The network wants to build on what it has created and become a pandemic prevention and preparedness network.

But that proposal for a funding extension was turned down after peer review, a spokesperson for CIHR, Canada’s federal funding agency for health research, confirmed.

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The federal government has invested $24 million in the Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network since 2021.

CIHR spokesperson Laurence Beaudoin-Corriveau said the resulting research allowed rapid assessment of the immune response to COVID-19 variants and whether they are resistant to vaccines.

“These findings have increased our understanding of COVID-19 variants and provided decision makers with guidance regarding drug therapy, vaccine effectiveness and other public health strategies,” she said.

The CIHR is assessing Canada’s current health research infrastructure and its capacity to respond to health emergencies, Beaudoin-Corriveau added. “This includes an assessment of research investments in networks and platforms during COVID-19, including its investment in research infrastructure such as CoVaRR-NET. The goal of this assessment is to use lessons learned to strengthen Canada’s readiness posture for the next health emergency.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Angela Crawley, a cellular immunologist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, helped build a national biobank during the pandemic with the help of CoVaRR-NET funding. Its future — and the future of samples in freezers in Ottawa and across the country — is also in doubt.

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Crawley says the national biobank is like a library system for bio specimens collected across the country which could quickly be available to researchers nationwide. It was initially set up to serve researchers who were part of CoVARR-NET, she said, but it also filled a gap. The lack of a national biobank that could be quickly searched with a built-in consent system initially slowed Canadian researchers down, she said.

“These are all tools that Canada did not have and it really set us back months and months,” she said. “This work revolutionized the way we share through bio-banking and understand our own peoples’ health. This pandemic has allowed us to improve the Canadian researchotoh environment.”

But that could soon end.

Crawley likens the biobank to a central library with many branches across the country.

“Imagine if you didn’t have a library in Canada and suddenly being told ‘Here is a library’. And we are going to close it down.

“There doesn’t seem to be a plan in place to go forward to allow these investments or structures to continue to enrich research space and serve Canadians.”

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Like Langlois, Crawley said she is concerned about the fates of the highly-trained staff who have helped build and support the national biobank.

She is scrambling for funding to allow the project to continue. Without it, staff members will lose their jobs and samples might have to be destroyed because there is no money to continue to pay rent in the freezers needed to preserve them.

“If we can’t pay rent, we need to dispose of them, which is a real shame.”

Crawley said some researchers who quickly pivoted to support COVID research and build new programs are frustrated and burned out.

“I try to be positive,” she said. “I don’t pretend to understand why funders have to make the decisions that they make.”

But she fears the end of an innovative national biobank to give researchers quick access to blood and other samples will leave Canadian researchers trying to catch up when the next major health emergency arises.

The concerns come as a highly anticipated report on the pandemic is warning that Canada needs to begin work now to be prepared for future pandemics. Ongoing surveillance is key to that, wrote Sir Mark Walport, chief executive of UK Research and Innovation, who chaired the Expert Panel for the Review of the Federal Approach to Pandemic Science Advice and Research Coordination.

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“The key message of this report is that Canada needs to take further action now if it is to be adequately prepared for future health emergencies,” Walport wrote in the report released earlier this month.

“Now is the time to build on the unprecedented collaboration and actions taken during the COVID-19 pandemic and to act on the important lessons learned from this crisis and previous outbreaks of infectious diseases.”

Among emerging threats is the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (H5N1), which has been detected in at least 300 dairy cattle herds in the U.S. and several dozen humans. The spread of the virus which has pandemic potential is being closely monitored around the world.

While Canada does monitor for emerging pathogens, Langlois argues that more surveillance is needed, especially on the academic side to understand what might be coming.

Wastewater surveillance is another area that was essentially built in Canada during the pandemic, much of the early work done at uOttawa by Rob Delatolla’s lab. Some of that work was originally funded by CoVaRR-Net. Recently, the Ontario government ended funding for its extensive wastewater testing program. Ottawa is one of the few centres where wastewater surveillance, for COVID-19, RSV, influenza and other pathogens, is continuing — for now.

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Langlois says it is understandable that research funding will ebb and flow, but he and others argue that some level of base funding should continue to help maintain pandemic readiness and hold on to infrastructure built during the pandemic.

“I believe it would be a worthy and justified investment to maintain some capacity in our academic institutions.” That is especially true with spreading H5N1 on the horizon, he said.

He compares the high throughput facility to a fire station.

“You might not have forest fires for months, but you need to keep firemen trained and you need to keep equipment maintained.”

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