When the first COVID vaccines appeared at the end of 2020, they didn’t just shift the course of the pandemic. They also changed how scientists think about creating vaccines in general. A years-long development marathon had been turned into a months-long sprint thanks to advances in mRNA technology. Less appreciated was the fact that the work leading to mRNA vaccines stretched back 40 years — and that most researchers had viewed it as a dud.Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Karikó, now a senior executive at BioNTech, was not among them. In the late 1970s, she began working on mRNA, a molecule used by the body to make proteins. By manipulating the mRNA code, cells can be made to produce different proteins, such as antibodies against infectious diseases. Though Karikó was convinced of mRNA’s potential — first as a treatment for genetic diseases and later in vaccines — most other scientists considered it impractical for medical use, as it was fragile and tended to degrade quickly in experiments. Funding dried up and Karikó was left to keep the candle of research largely by herself throughout the 1990s. mRNA’s rescue from scientific purgatory came around a decade ago in the form of tiny blobs of fat. Pieter Cullis, a biochemistry professor at the University of British Columbia, helped devise lipid nanoparticles that could surround drug molecules. This protective casing proved an effective delivery mechanism for getting mRNA into the body in one piece. This technology formed the basis of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has now been administered more than 58 million times in Canada alone. At MaRS Impact Health, a recent conference on medical innovation, Karikó and Cullis discussed how the COVID shot was developed, where this technology goes next — and why funders should be careful before writing off lines of inquiry as fruitless. They were joined on stage by Janet Rossant, president of the Gairdner Foundation. Here’s what they had to say. Janet Rossant: Kati, you were the person who was convinced that mRNA could become a therapeutic. How did you start?Katalin Karikó: It was not overnight; it was decades of hard work. In ’78, I started my graduate course getting my PhD and then I moved to an RNA laboratory. We were trying to develop an antiviral compound, which was a short RNA. And then I moved to the United States in 1989-90 and I started to write grants about mRNA therapeutic applications.Rossant: But you didn’t have an easy task, right? Grants were hard to get, and you had to fight to make people believe that this was going to work. Karikó: Yes, because everybody was focusing on DNA. It is permanent and everybody considered RNA just had problems. Only a very small amount of protein could be produced because RNA is so quickly degraded, and everybody thought it would not be enough to treat any disease. In addition, we learned from work we did with Drew Weissman (a professor at the University of Pennsylvania), RNA was extremely inflammatory in human immune cells. So in the ’90s, many left the field because they couldn’t get funding, or they had run into other problems.I was lucky to have always at least one person who felt sorry for me or who believed in RNA and provided at least the salary so I could keep going. Constantly the RNA got better. The RNA improved in a way that more protein could be produced from it. Rossant: Then things start to come together with the lipids and the RNA. Let’s go back to the beginnings of Pieter’s story then. At what point did you start seeing what you’re doing as fundamental research that could have applications? Pieter Cullis: In the mid-’80s, I was trying to keep a very good team that I had together at UBC. We started a company to deliver cancer drugs more accurately to where they’re needed in the body. Then of course you run into the realities of companies — the CEO came to me and said, “Look, putting these old cancer drugs into liposomes is all very well, but I can’t raise money on that. I need to be doing gene therapy,” which was coming into vogue by the mid-’90s. This meant we had to encapsulate DNA or RNA into these lipid nanoparticles. That was a huge problem because you needed a lipid with a positive charge to associate with the negative charge on the RNA or DNA. But those molecules are really toxic — so we couldn’t use the available positively charged lipids.Well, as luck would have it, we’d synthesized a lipid as part of our studies that was positively charged at low pH, whereas at neutral pH it wasn’t. And so, we could encapsulate the nucleic acid at low pH, and then bring the pH up. So, we now had a system that was much less toxic, but where we’ve managed to very efficiently encapsulate the nucleic acid.In the 2000s, we started working with a company in Boston called Alnylam to deliver small interfering RNA to the liver. We managed to get a system where we could silence a gene in the liver with a therapeutic index around about 1,000 — in other words, we could give a thousand times higher dose of the medicine before we saw any toxic side effects.And this is where Kati and Drew Weissman came into the picture. They contacted us to say, how about you try and see whether they have properties as vaccines? That worked out brilliantly. Karikó: This is how science works — working on something and you don’t know what it will be useful for. I accidentally learned about existence of this company. The company had no website, and nobody knew about it. The reason I went there? I could have gone to Moderna as well, but BioNTech had a clinical trial of mRNA in 2013. So, I thought, BioNTech has already an RNA in clinical trial, they know how to make RNA. The company, at that point, was less than a hundred people. The scientist group was much smaller than today — now it is 2,000 to 3,000 people. I was delighted because we were making a product that would help somebody. That was very uplifting for me. Rossant: It’s interesting that both of you have taken a discovery and said, “I want to take it all the way through. I want to see it translated into something that helps people.” How important is it really to develop those kinds of commercialization activities so that the discoveries that we make can be translated in Canada? Cullis: We need to double down in Canada to get that mindset in place that it’s a good idea to facilitate those discoveries that are made in universities here being the basis of companies in Canada. Forty per cent of our science, technology, engineering, math graduates go south, taking jobs in the U.S. There are about 5,000 graduates each year, so it means 2,000 are going south. If you say it costs us $200,000 to educate those people in their PhD, and you can do the math — we’re subsidizing the American industry to a remarkable extent. It’s extraordinarily important for us as Canadians to say: This is a real priority, and universities can do much better in encouraging these kinds of endeavours.Facilitating the movement of intellectual property from the university to startup companies, as well as finding ways to fund things in the early stages — which is where most things die — for me, that’s a real driver. It’s also a heck of a lot of fun. If you’re a part of a team that is trying to do something and you’re in a small company, it’s one of the most enjoyable things you can ever do. That sense of “we’re going to do something big together” and everybody pitching in — it can be a very rewarding experience.Rossant: What else can we use mRNA and these delivery systems for in the next few years? It seems that there’s now a lot of interest. Karikó: The news that is coming out is around new vaccine trials that have been initiated, and Moderna has two HIV vaccines. Two different trials are ongoing. And some of the vaccines we already have were not affordable. And so, it makes many other medicines affordable — the shingles vaccine, for example, is 800 euros. You could see (new vaccines for) not just viral diseases, but intracellular bacterial diseases like tuberculosis and also parasites. The big section of pharmaceutical industry growth is antibodies, which are very expensive, because of the protein. But by delivering mRNA coding for the antibody, patients can make the antibody themselves. It is a passive vaccination for infectious disease, as well as for cancer treatment that is already ongoing.Rossant: What about lipid nanoparticles beyond nucleic acids? Obviously, you can put all sorts of things in them as well. Cullis: I think the application to RNA is probably the biggest. We’ve only just touched the surface of this. There’s all the vaccine applications. Then there’s chronic disease, for example, Drew Weissman and some of his associates just published something to treat heart failure. Then, you have all the rare diseases, Tay-Sachs, Fabry. So, if a child is not making a particular protein, you now have the possibility to make the mRNA. Within a very short time — it takes a day to formulate — you have a very focused, personalized therapeutic that is affordable. It’s a revolution in medicine and we’re seeing billions of dollars go into this area. New companies are being set up pretty much every day, and it’s an amazing time. In Canada, we need seize this opportunity. We were caught a little bit with our pants down by the pandemic. Our pharmaceutical industry has been decimated over the years. Now is the chance to correct that. It’s estimated up to half of new medicines in 10 years’ time may be based on these kind of nucleic acid approaches. We need to be a part of that story. This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. David Paterson writes about technology for MaRS. Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, has partnered with MaRS to highlight innovation in Canadian companies. SHARE:Disclaimer

An American baby gear company is voluntarily recalling 87,000 baby rockers and swings from Canadian retailers after a baby became caught in one of the product’s straps and asphyxiated.4moms is recalling 77,700 of its MamaRoo Baby Swings and 10,000 of its RockaRoo Baby Rockers due to a strangulation hazard.There have been two incidents in which babies became entangled in a strap that is affixed to the MamaRoo product.One 10-month-old died from asphyxiation while another suffered bruising to his neck, according to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), where two million swings and 220,000 rockers are being recalled.There were no reported incidents involving the RockaRoo, though the same safety concern applies.Product sold at stores in Quebec, Ontario, B.C., AlbertaIn Canada, the products were sold at retailers buybuy BABY, Amazon, and specialty stores in Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta, according to the company’s store locator.The recalled models for the baby swings are 4M-005, 1026 and 1037. The recalled baby rocker model is 4M-012.CBC News has reached out to 4moms for a statement.Health Canada issued the recall jointly with 4Moms and the CPSCon Monday, directing Canadian consumers to contact the company and have a free baby strap fastener sent to them. “When the swing or rocker is not in use, its restraint straps can dangle below the seat and non-occupant crawling infants can become entangled in the straps, posing a strangulation hazard,” the agency statement said. “This issue does not present a hazard to infants placed in the seat of either product.””Additionally, consumers with crawling infants should place the products where children cannot access them when not in use.”The products are imported by Brands in Motion, a company based in Mississauga, Ont.

Chloe D’Agostini was at a co-working café while living abroad when someone walked in, sat down beside her, and discretely stole her wallet from her bag. The 30-year-old from Toronto said she didn’t notice her wallet was missing until 20 minutes later when she was packing up her bag to meet a friend for lunch. Footage from the café’s security camera later confirmed the theft. Within a matter of 30 minutes, thousands of dollars were racked up on different credit cards.D’Agostini then received a phone call from someone claiming to be from Apple stating they had noticed suspicious activity with her Apple ID and asked if she could download software so they could help. After a few minutes, D’Agostini thought the call was suspicious and hung up. Later she called Apple, who explained they don’t call without a booked appointment. While theft and fraud happen everywhere, the challenge of experiencing it while travelling is that you might spend more time on the phone than soaking up rays at the beach, and you can’t pop round to your bank branch to sort it out in person. In other instances, you might get stuck dealing with an online travel scam before you even get to take off. In TransUnion’s latest fraud report published in May, data shows that travel and industry saw a 59.9 per cent grow in digital fraud attempts for transactions coming from Canada and 13.3 per cent globally.The increase in digital travel fraud can be attributed to the economy moving toward pre-pandemic levels, specifically in the travel industry.“Canadians started to get more comfortable with the idea of travelling again and fraudsters caught on and directed their attention towards the activity spike in this sector,” said Ted Trush, director of Solutions Consulting at TransUnion Canada.Examples of digital fraud in this sector include consumers who are travelling and have their credit cards stolen for the purpose of making fraudulent charges. Digital travel fraud also affects consumers directly on web or mobile, such as through encounters with fake travel agents or hotel websites. “Essentially fraudsters move to where the money is. As an example, mobile app traffic has been increasing steadily over the last decade so fraudsters tend to focus their attention there. When chip-and-pin was introduced on credit cards, fraudsters moved to online transactions because it was less protected,” said Trush. He advises Canadians who are travelling ensure they only provide banking information to legitimate businesses and websites.Trush also recommends consumers read review sites for other customer comments or complaints, as well as research pricing for flights or accommodations and watch for anomalies such as extreme discounts.“Consumers are also encouraged to be attentive when it comes to emails that seem out of place, as phishing attacks continue to be reported most often when it comes to fraudsters gaining private and personal information,” he said.Caval Olson-Lepage, advisory team lead, wealth at Affinity Credit Union, said that whenever you receive an email or text message, you should be asking yourself: “Am I expecting this? And, is this coming from a legitimate source?”“I’d be very wary of clicking on links in an email. I would rather search the legitimate website and search for that information and then click through it on a link,” she said.Apple wouldn’t comment on D’Agostini’s specific case, but the company’s website includes a warning about unexpected messages or requests for personal information: “It’s safer to presume it’s a scam and contact that company directly if you need to.”Olson-Lepage also cautions against using public Wi-Fi for financial transactions, which might happen more when someone’s travelling compared to when they’re at home or work. She recommends setting up a virtual private network (VPN) before travelling to hide your online activity. Another option is to purchase an international data plan from your provider so you can avoid using Wi-Fi.If you think you’ve been a victim of fraud or your information has been compromised, Olson-Lepage said to contact your financial institutions immediately.Trush added that TransUnion offers customers the ability to add a potential or confirmed fraud warning to their credit file. “This warns creditors to take additional steps to verify your identify before deciding to extend credit and provides the creditor with a contact phone number,” he said. While D’Agostini was able to have her credit cards expedited, a new RBC debit card had to be shipped through regular mail. It took three months for the card to arrive, and D’Agostini said there was no tracking. “Stuff like this is stressful when you’re under pressure and you need to access money,” D’Agostini said. She said getting the bank on the phone was also frustrating because of extensive hold times.A spokesperson for RBC said that once a new card is requested, RBC processes the request and the card is send out via Canada Post. The processing time is typically completed by the following business day, but delivery ultimately depends on Canada Post.D’Agostini was not held responsible for any of the fraudulent charges. Her advice to others is to avoid carrying multiple credit cards in your wallet at a time so all your accounts aren’t locked up if your wallet goes missing. This report by The Canadian Press was first published August 15, 2022.SHARE:JOIN THE CONVERSATION Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)Sign InRegisterConversations are opinions of our readers and are subject to the

Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. is one step closer to receiving the regulatory go-ahead for its acquisition of Kansas City Southern (KCS).The Calgary-based railway said Tuesday its purchase of KCS has received the required clearance from the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment.However, the deal — which would create the only single-line railroad linking the United States, Mexico and Canada — still requires approval by the U.S. Surface Transportation Board (STB), which is currently reviewing the transaction.CP said it expects a decision from the STB early next year.Last year, Canadian National Railway Co. dropped its rival takeover bid for KCS after the Surface Transportation Board rejected its request for a voting trust.CP then agreed to buy KCS in an agreement valued at $31 billion US, including the assumption of $3.8 billion US of debt.CP’s deal closed in December, but the shares of KCS were placed into a voting trust that allows the U.S. railway to operate independently while the STB completes its review.Mexican regulators have already given their approval to the deal.CP has said its acquisition of KCS will enable significant growth for its rail customers, and allow for 60,000 truckloads annually to be shifted off public highways.Following the completion of the transaction, CP expects the deal to generate $1 billion in annualized synergies within the first three years.

OTTAWA – Canada’s inflation rate fell from its near 40-year high of 8.1 per cent in June to 7.6 per cent in July, Statistics Canada said Tuesday.The easing was largely attributable to gas prices, which have dropped in recent weeks, but similar relief has not extended to food costs.The latest consumer price index data showed food prices at grocery stores rose at the fastest pace since August 1981, with prices up by 9.9 per cent on a year-over-year basis compared with 9.4 per cent the previous month.Here’s a look at how much some prices have gone up between July 2021 and July 2022 at the grocery store:- Fats and oils (for example, olive oil): 28.6 per cent- Pasta products: 20.0 per cent- Butter: 17.3 per cent- Oranges: 16.9 per cent- Eggs: 15.8 per cent- Bread, rolls and buns: 15.4 per cent- Canned and other prepared vegetables: 15.4 per cent- Condiments, spices and vinegars: 14.4 per cent- Lettuce: 14.2 per cent- Coffee and tea: 13.8 per cent- Tomatoes: 13.3 per centData released by Statistics Canada also showed that some prices, like the cost of child care, declined year-over-year in July.- Child care services: -7.6 per cent- Recreational cannabis: -4.7 per cent- Children’s clothing: -4.4 per cent- Medical cannabis -4.1 per cent- Internet services: -1.1 per cent- Home entertainment equipment, parts and services: -0.9 per centThis report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 16, 2022.SHARE:JOIN THE CONVERSATION Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)Sign InRegisterConversations are opinions of our readers and are subject to the

TORONTO – Canada’s main stock index was up in late-morning trading, helped higher by gains in the base metal, financial and telecommunication sectors, while U.S. stock markets were mixed.The S&P/TSX composite index was up 37.18 points at 20,217.78.In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 160.78 points at 34,073.22. The S&P 500 index was down 0.52 of a point at 4,296.62, while the Nasdaq composite was down 54.16 points at 13,073.89.The Canadian dollar traded for 77.69 cents US compared with 77.47 cents US on Monday.The September crude contract was down US$1.36 at US$88.05 per barrel and the September natural gas contract was up 36 cents at US$9.09 per mmBTU.The December gold contract was down US$6.20 at US$1,791.90 an ounce and the September copper contract was down a penny at US$3.61 a pound.This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 16, 2022.Companies in this story: (TSX:GSPTSE, TSX:CADUSD=X)SHARE:JOIN THE CONVERSATION Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)Sign InRegisterConversations are opinions of our readers and are subject to the

OTTAWA – Canada’s national annual inflation rate was 7.6 per cent in July, Statistics Canada says. The agency also released rates for major cities, but cautioned that figures may have fluctuated widely because they are based on small statistical samples (previous month in brackets):— St. John’s, N.L.: 6.5 per cent (7.5)— Charlottetown-Summerside: 9.9 per cent (11.5)— Halifax: 8.6 per cent (9.1)— Saint John, N.B.: 7.9 per cent (9.0)— Quebec City: 6.7 per cent (7.4)— Montreal: 7.3 per cent (7.6)— Ottawa: 7.4 per cent (7.7)— Toronto: 7.5 per cent (7.4)— Thunder Bay, Ont.: 6.0 per cent (6.6)— Winnipeg: 8.6 per cent (9.4)— Regina: 8.2 per cent (8.1)— Saskatoon: 7.4 per cent (7.6)— Edmonton: 7.6 per cent (8.5)— Calgary: 8.2 per cent (9.6)— Vancouver: 7.7 per cent (7.7)— Victoria: 8.2 per cent (8.4)— Whitehorse: 7.7 per cent (7.7)— Yellowknife: 8.0 per cent (8.3)— Iqaluit: 5.2 per cent (4.3)This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 16, 2022 and was generated automatically.SHARE:JOIN THE CONVERSATION Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)Sign InRegisterConversations are opinions of our readers and are subject to the

OTTAWA – Canada’s national annual inflation rate was 7.6 per cent in July, Statistics Canada says. Here’s what happened in the provinces (previous month in brackets):— Newfoundland and Labrador: 6.9 per cent (8.2)— Prince Edward Island: 9.5 per cent (10.9)— Nova Scotia: 8.7 per cent (9.3)— New Brunswick: 8.0 per cent (9.1)— Quebec: 7.3 per cent (8.0)— Ontario: 7.6 per cent (7.9)— Manitoba: 8.8 per cent (9.4)— Saskatchewan: 8.1 per cent (8.1)— Alberta: 7.4 per cent (8.4)— British Columbia: 8.0 per cent (7.9)This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 16, 2022 and was generated automatically.SHARE:JOIN THE CONVERSATION Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)Sign InRegisterConversations are opinions of our readers and are subject to the