But animal safety tests of the vaccine may have to be done outside Canada because the country's only two suitable laboratories can't handle the job.

"If we wanted to test a SARS vaccine right now in primates we couldn't do it," says Dr. Lorne Babiuk, a leading researcher who heads the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.

The animal testing must be done before clinical trials of the vaccine can start in humans under a crash program launched in April with a $2.6 million grant from the B.C. government.

Any delay in the animal tests would back up approval and manufacturing of the vaccine, now tentatively forecast for the end of next year or early 2005.

So far 33 Ontarians have died in the current SARS epidemic, 361 have fallen ill and more than 15,000 have been forced into quarantine. A SARS vaccine would be particularly useful for health-care workers, like the 60 nurses and 20 doctors infected in Ontario.

The only two facilities in the country suitable for testing a SARS vaccine in large animals like pigs and primates are federal labs in Winnipeg and Ottawa.

But the Winnipeg lab is "fully booked" and the primate colony in Ottawa has been largely dispersed.

"We may have to go offshore. We're looking at China," Babiuk said.

The looming crisis in testing vaccines and drugs prompted a request in May for federal funding to build a $61 million animal testing facility in Saskatoon from researchers in Canada, South Korea, the U.K. and U.S. If approved next February by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the new lab would not be ready for another four years.

"The country needs one of these because SARS is only the tip of the iceberg. New infectious diseases have been emerging at the rate of one every year," said Babiuk.

Babiuk is co-leader of the effort to get a SARS vaccine into animal safety trails along with Dr. Robert Brunham, head of the Centre for Disease Control at the University of British Columbia. He made his initial comments about the SARS virus at a conference here earlier this week and provided further details in a telephone interview from Ottawa yesterday.

Canada has a head start in producing a SARS vaccine for two reasons:

Research led by Babiuk at the University of Saskatchewan has produced a vaccine against a related coronavirus that strikes cattle.

Scientists at the B.C. Cancer Agency were the first in the world to determine the genetic blueprint of the coronavirus implicated in SARS.

"We can grow the SARS virus easily, so we can inactivate part of it and produce a conventional vaccine, like for polio or smallpox," Babiuk said.

He said Canadian researchers were also making good progress on a second SARS vaccine, a variety produced by gene splicing. But regulatory approval would take longer because genetic modification was involved.

The SARS crash program is overseen by Brett Finlay, a biotechnology researcher at the University of British Columbia.