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Company founder Donald Gerson and his son Jonas travelled to Ottawa in early June to meet with NRC president Iain Stewart after receiving notice the NRC would not give the company more time to come up with the rent arrears.

Gerson had already secured grant funding from the Gates Foundation after meeting the Microsoft founder personally in 2013. But he said the NRC refused to review the documents prepared to demonstrate that a grant of around $30 million was expected from the foundation by the end of the summer.

At the meeting in Ottawa, Gerson said Stewart laughed at his suggestion that PnuVax and the NRC could continue to work together if a positive conclusion could be reached.

“That’s exactly what happened,” said Gerson.

PnuVax is working towards clinical trials of the new drug and Health Canada approval, after which the vaccine can be commercialized. The NRC supplied one of the chemicals and would have been in line to receive royalty payments. “But he didn’t want to listen,” said Gerson.

Jonas Gerson said the company needed help from the government, not barriers.

Photo by Errol McGihon / Postmedia

Donald Gerson founded PnuVax in 2008 to develop a dollar-a-dose pneumonia vaccine for children worldwide. He had helped develop and manufacture the first childhood pneumonia vaccine in 2000 at Wyeth, an American pharmaceutical company later purchased by Pfizer.

In 2010, PnuVax offered to buy an abandoned Montreal bio-tech facility that sits on federally-owned land. For ten years the NRC had leased the land for to a Dutch company for $1 a year, but that business closed in 2005. The government agency refused to offer the same terms to PnuVax, the Canadian startup.