BY GRAHAM HICKS, EDMONTON SUN

In the debate over practical-versus-fundamental research at our universities, over job-focused rather than general post-secondary education, it is possible to have our cake and eat it too.


Last week saw the opening of the University of Alberta’s Medical Isotope and Cyclotron Facility, on the site of the old Balmoral Curling Club. The snazzy new dark-glass building can be seen from Belgravia Drive, on the edge of the university’s South Campus.


This facility is practical to the extreme and represents a continuum of theoretical to practical research, creating a solution to a most pressing medical technology challenge.


A new high-tech, knowledge-based, wealth-creating, Edmonton-based medical industry is being born. It’ll employ the highly educated, pay well, and export our knowledge around the world.


Here’s the context: Medical isotopes are injected into patients, then tracked. Somehow, they tell the docs where the problem lies, how big it is and so on.


Medical isotopes are big business. Some 60 million “doses” a year are used world-wide. Until 2009, the Chalk River nuclear facility in Ontario pumped out a type of isotope that supplied 30% of the world’s medical isotope supply, including all Canada.


Then, that year, the 50-year-old facility had an emergency shutdown. No more isotopes. The medical world, the entire medical world, was in deep do-do.


Chalk River came back online, the crisis passed, but the writing was on the wall.


Ancient, dangerous due to age, Chalk River’s nuclear reactor will be decommissioned in 2016. To build a new, isotope-producing nuclear reactor won’t happen due to huge costs and environmental risk.


In 2009, governments and medical authorities knew they had only seven years, to find a new, fully operational source of medical isotopes.


Enter our University of Alberta heroes.


Dr. Sandy McEwan is the head of the Department of Oncology, oncology being the study of cancer. He’s also a cancer-imaging expert.


Well before the Chalk River crisis, Dr. McEwan and his team had been experimenting – fundamental research if you will – with alternative medical isotopes using the U of A’s research-sized mini-cyclotron.


To make a long and interesting story short, the university, government and funding authorities gave Dr. McEwan’s research top priority.


The new U of A isotope works as well as the old one, it’s as safe. The ramp-up has gone well, from a lab, to a new state-of-the-art “commercial” cyclotron, to the new building. The team is confident the patentable process will, by 2015, produce the 500 isotope doses Alberta needs every day.


Where are other commercial opportunities? That’s what TEC Edmonton, the U of A’s primary technology-commercialization organization, is looking into on the facility’s behalf – probably through a university “spin-out” company.


There’s the product itself – the AHS and other customers will purchase the new isotopes.


This U of A-invented process, once patented, can be sold or licensed. A potential global market of 500 new facilities is out there, all based on the U of A prototype.


There’s consulting fees: The U of A, or whatever spin-off company is created, will have “first-to-market” expertise. Other medical authorities will hire our experts to show them how it’s done.


There’s a potential “solutions” company to sell, build, install and maintain cyclotron isotope facilities, much like EPCOR does with water treatment systems.


Finally, there’s the future: This facility has the capacity to create the next generation of isotopes. “Positron Emission Tomography”, the experts say, will make today’s medical images look like a black and white TV compared to HD.


At least four other promising technologies will soon emerge from the U of A’s research pipeline: Dr. Richard Fedorak’s colon-cancer diagnosis via urine samples; Dr. Michael Houghton’s vaccine for Hepatitis C; Dr. David Bressler’s energy-from-biomass process and Dr. Randy Weselake’s adaptation of crops to climatic extremes.


Again, doesn’t this recurring process - fundamental to practical research, concept to commercialization and the creation of new regional wealth - make the “be-more-relevant” debate rather irrelevant?


Factoids:

The University of Alberta Medical Isotope and Cyclotron Facility
Cost: $28 million
Goal: To produce 500 isotope doses for medical imaging per day by 2015
Initial employment: 50
Potential: To be the prototype for some 500 similar isotope facilities the world over


Graham Hicks
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graham.hicks@hicksbiz.com
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