Nice to see my old man get his props..Also looks like SIAM is really coming around. I haven't been to the site in some months.
Tomorrow's health care today
By: Martin Cash | Winnipeg Free Press
In March, the $150-million, 80,000- square-foot Siemens Institute for Advanced Medicine will open, creating the next important building block in the ongoing efforts to build Winnipeg's medical and life sciences infrastructure.
The research mandate for the William Avenue centre in the heart of the Health Science Centre campus will focus on neuroscience, surgery of the future, advanced imaging and surgery-simulation research.
It will be equipped with the city's first cyclotron, the country's first Artiste linear accelerator and eventually, the city's first mobile magnetic resonance imaging system that allows surgeons to take images before, during and after surgery (developed in Winnipeg by IMRIS Inc.).
Like the 100,000-square-foot, eight-storey John Buhler Research Centre just a few blocks away, which opened seven years ago and is still filling in, SIAM will not be fully occupied when it is commissioned.
But it will open with an impressive suite of technological capabilities designed to allow the integration of leading-edge medical research with the busy surgical activities of the hospital. It will also provide the environment that will attract a "star" team of investigators that, in theory, will attract others, who will attract others, and so on.
The development of knowledge-based industries in Manitoba has always been partly premised on the assumption that location and bricks and mortar are not essential for industries like information and communication technology, biotech and medical research to develop.
But there is a bit of a catch-22 to that scenario, in that no growth in the field can occur unless the human-resource component exists. And mid-career leading-edge scientists will not make Winnipeg their home base without the right facilities and technology at their disposal.
"What we are doing is raising the bar in scientific excellence," said Harry Schulz, chief innovation officer for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority whose office has been responsible for the development of SIAM. "Smart people like to work with other smart people."
SIAM is being built beside the recently completed $135-million, 268,000-square-foot Ann Thomas Building on William Avenue for a good reason.
When circumstances require use of the very latest surgical techniques, patients can be wheeled from the new surgical suites in the Ann Thomas Building right into the research suites that will be built on the second floor of SIAM.
"There is excellent science going on in Winnipeg, but not excellent integration with the bedside," Schulz said. "People try hard at that, but it is difficult to forge. SIAM is being built to integrate with the operating rooms to achieve a more direct relationship with clinical care."
There are some who believe Winnipeg may get more traction in the medical device business rather than the drug business, and not just because of the failure of Medicure's $100-million heart drug earlier this year.
Even so, when it comes to that kind of commercialization of research, there is still plenty more focus required.
"There have been billions of dollars spent on research, yet you walk into a hospital medical supply room and you will see almost nothing that had been developed in Canada," Schulz said. "Somehow we are failing in getting things from the lab bench into day-to-day regular impact. At SIAM we are going to try to be more targeted at linking the two worlds."
Not only will patients be able to be wheeled in and out in a convenient way from the daily surgical schedule into a cutting-edge research centre, but visiting scientists and family and loved ones of patients at HSC will also have access to a four-star hotel in which to stay right next door.
In spring, Winnipeg's Canad Inns will start building the country's first hospital campus hotel next to SIAM, an obvious example of the commercial spinoffs the concentration of such high-level research can have for the community. (There are estimates that the National Microbiology Lab, around the corner on Arlington Street, already generates thousands of room nights per year.)
Leo Ledohowski, CEO of Canad Inns, said he is convinced the $30-million-plus, 17-storey, 200-room hotel will be economically viable, despite concerns some have about the success of a hotel at a hospital.
"We think it makes good sense," Ledohowski said. "It fits in with our destination concept. This is a fairly large market and we firmly believe it is a good, sound business decision. It is a big project for us."
The addition of SIAM and a Canad Inns hotel to existing facilities at the John Buhler Research Centre underlines how the Health Sciences Centre is becoming the core of a bio-medical research powerhouse that is now materializing, beyond nice words uttered by over-heated politicians or puffed up civic boosters.
Dr. Brian Postl, CEO of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, said an enhanced research infrastructure is necessary to recruit top-notch physicians.
"What it does is attract other highly trained researchers and technicians and outside money as well," Postl said. "Eventually the community can see it (the city's research institutions) with the same degree of pride as it does the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, the MTS Centre, the new football stadium. It is evidence that Winnipeg can get bigger and advance the needs of the community."
Brian Kelcey, executive director of the Life Sciences Association of Manitoba, agrees.
"These kinds of facilities are very effective at spinning off tech for private sector development," he said. "In Winnipeg we punch above our weight in that regard with the NRC's Institute for Biodiagnostics, the success of the technology transfer office at the University of Manitoba and Canada's only Level 4 lab."
It may be harder to develop a $200-million research institute and hotel over the course of several years than it is to attract a 350,000-square-foot Swedish home furnishing store. And while the impact may be more subtle, it is arguably more powerful.
"Let's start with the National Microbiology Lab," said Terry Duguid, CEO of the International Centre for Infectious Disease and the primary advocate of Bio-Med City, a proposed aggregation of the city's public and private bio-medical research operations.
"The argument then (when it was first being discussed) is just as valid now. Locate major research facilities next to major clinical facilities like the HSC and University of Manitoba medical school and you would get synergies and eventually it would generate both public health and economic development benefits."
With the National Microbiology Lab, it has definitely worked.
"When the place opened in 1997 you could shoot a cannon through it. There were 50 or 60 people working there," Duguid said. "Now it is literally bursting at the seams."
The Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health, which includes the National Microbiology Lab, is the only facility with Level 4 containment laboratories for human and animal health in one facility. It has an annual budget of $50 million and a staff of 500 people.
Adam Topp, the newly appointed chief operating officer of the Health Sciences Centre, may not be steeped in the efforts and community collaborations to develop life science and medical research capacity (let alone collective hand-wringing about the trials and tribulations over the past 15 years), but he is firmly committed to the process.
"One of my mandates in coming here was to develop research enterprises at the hospital," he said. "It is a big piece of my objective here."
But it is not a simple process. Researchers need to apply for financial assistance from various research funding bodies, but must also secure staff positions at a university or teaching hospital.
"If we want to be significant hospital in the country, we have to have the infrastructure to attract those people," said Topp.
But there needs to be a significant research facility for that to happen.
"There is a great deal of benefit for the hospital (in having such research facilities)," he said. "The real potential economic development comes from the ideas, the concepts, etc. they can produce that can then attract venture capital, bio-medical companies and biotech firms who take the research and make it commercial."
To help fund such undertakings, the HSC has entered into a profit-sharing arrangement with Canad Inns. As well, the profits generated (after financing costs) from the $40-million, 1,300-stall parkade that is just being completed at HSC will also be used to help finance some of the research facility costs.
Topp said the HSC could have asked a third party company to build and run the parkade, but the hospital decided to be the developer specifically so it could redeploy the profits into research.
That's the kind of entrepreneurial decision-making that institutions like the HSC are not necessarily all that well-versed in.
But to keep growing the research infrastructure and to develop the full potential of SIAM, that's exactly the kinds of calculated risk-taking that is going to have to continue to happen.
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Who pays for the Siemens Institute for Advanced Medicine
$25 million -- that's the cost for the shell of the building.
$10.5 million was raised from the private sector by the Health Sciences Centre Foundation in a campaign chaired by retired trucking magnate Hubert Kleysen, whose family made a substantial contribution.
$9.5 million from the federal department of Western Economic Diversification (WED).
$3.5 million from Siemens Canada Ltd. for naming rights. (Siemens will also become a significant technology partner at the centre. Siemens will be the exclusive equipment supplier for SIAM, which will be able to pay the lowest price possible for everything it buys from the German multinational technology company.)
$25 million -- estimated cost to develop the Operating Rooms of the Future on the second floor of SIAM over the next five years.
$12.5 million -- the HSC Foundation had committed to raise that much over five years to outfit the Operating Rooms of the Future, including the cost of the IMRIS MRI.
$13.5 million -- WED will make a third contribution toward the future development of the second-floor R&D operating rooms and will also contribute to the costs of recruiting the first team of investigators.
$7.5 million -- from the province, toward the $10.5-million cost of the Siemens Artiste suite.
$3.5 million -- from WED, toward the cost of the cyclotron.
$5 million -- cost to develop retail space on the centre's first floor to be borne by the WRHA (which then hopes to make it back from rental income).
$30 million -- estimated annual revenue from research grants etc., once the centre gets ramped up.
$2-3 million -- estimated annual operating costs.
Technology at SIAM
The first phase of construction has included a bunker to house the province's first cyclotron, the technology that produces radio isotopes used to scan patients in the PET (positron emission tomography) process. SIAM will get its own high-resolution PET scanner (there is already one at the John Buhler Research Centre) and, combined with the cyclotron, will represent a combined total of approximately $10 million worth of equipment. The isotopes used in PET scans have very short half-lives. Currently, Winnipeg health centres must airlift isotopes in from Edmonton, which only allows patients to use the current PET scanner for half the day. In addition to a reliable supply of isotopes, the Winnipeg cyclotron can produce novel isotopes used for special research.
SIAM will have a Siemens Artiste, a leading-edge non-invasive surgical technology that only has a handful of other installations around the world. The $10.5-million Artiste combines a linear accelerator with imaging technology to deliver high-precision radiotherapy for cancer patients. Artiste is an integrated imaging and workflow solution, where the patient lies on a robotic bed that moves in concert with the patient's internal organs, allowing high-precision doses of radiotherapy, constantly adjusted, reducing damage to healthy surrounding tissue.
SIAM will have the city's second gamma knife, the preferred treatment for brain tumours that are inoperable by standard methods.
An intra-operative MRI is already on order for SIAM's second floor. It will be the first one installed for use in Winnipeg, although the technology was developed here and is built by a Winnipeg company, IMRIS Inc. It will cost more than $5 million.
SIAM will be one of only six centres in North America with this combination of advanced technology -- the PET scanner, linear accelerator, cyclotron and intra-operative MRI -- providing diagnostic and treatment options currently unavailable in Canada.
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