Good morning. My name is Nigel Lockyer. I'm the director of TRIUMF.
TRIUMF is Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics. It was founded 40 years ago by three British Columbia universities and the University of Alberta. Today, it is 11 full-member universities and four associate universities, so it's represented by 15 universities across Canada, stretching from Nova Scotia all the way to Victoria.
Every five years, TRIUMF undergoes what's called an international peer review. This year's review was chaired by Dr. Rolf Heuer, the director general of CERN, which is the largest laboratory in the world. Members on the committee included directors from Asia, the United States, and Europe. The head of the European Science Foundation was on that committee, as was the CEO of the B.C. Cancer Agency and Canadian businessmen.
The report is complete. They gave us an A-plus, you might say, on our track record, and fully endorsed our plan for the next five years.
TRIUMF also initiated by itself an economic impact study. It shows that in the last 10 years there was $1 billion of economic activity associated with TRIUMF. Our next five-year plan proposes to double that, so that would be $1 billion of activity in five years.
TRIUMF is a little unusual in the sense that it's not only a world-class science facility but has demonstrated its ability to work with the private sector. Our major collaborator is MDS Nordion at the moment.
I don't have time to describe our whole program, nor do you want to learn about physics or nuclear physics, I assume, so I'll just talk briefly about the fastest growing part of the plan: nuclear medicine.
TRIUMF is engaged in nuclear medicine from soup to nuts. We design the accelerators, the cyclotrons that are used to make medical isotopes. Those cyclotrons are found around the world. They're found in Sloan-Kettering in New York and they're found in Korea. They're manufactured in Canada. That is a growing field and it's a growing business.
In order to use those isotopes, they're usually connected to molecules. The field that connects molecules to isotopes and designs molecules is called radiochemistry. We have a radiochemistry team that's growing. It collaborates with MDS Nordion, UBC, and General Electric, so it's an area where we see the future of the field in nuclear medicine going.
We do imaging. We're involved in the science associated with that, both clinical and science research, in British Columbia and across Canada.
The one area that I'll draw attention to that has been in the news a lot lately is the medical isotope crisis in Canada and around the world. TRIUMF has proposed a short-term, medium-term, and long-term solution.
The short-term solution, in collaboration with B.C. Cancer, Sherbrooke, Western Ontario, and Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, is to use the existing cyclotrons that are in the major medical centres. By changing the target from what you normally use to generate isotopes, you're able to make technetium-99 in sufficient quantities for those local medical centres. So that we see as something that can take place over the next two years—and it has been proposed to NSERC. That just relies on our know-how.
The medium-term solution is part of our five-year plan. It actually was part of it before the crisis came about. We are proposing to build a high-power, very small electron accelerator, which would fit probably across this table, that would allow us to produce molybdenum-99 in quantities sufficient for all Canadians.
It's not an expensive investment on the scale of reactors, so I believe the Government of Canada has a choice between reactors and accelerators. The solution we've proposed does not use highly enriched uranium; it uses natural uranium, where all reactors now will have to switch away from the way they're doing things.
Our long-term vision is that nuclear medicine, being a growing field that allows you to decipher cancer, whether a tumour that's growing or dying or whether there are estrogen receptors on it, and so on, is something that's going to take place. We propose an espresso-maker cyclotron, something small that fits on your desk and gives single-patient doses of medical isotopes, and which could be put in every hospital in the world. That's the end goal of nuclear medicine. It's really going to be everywhere.
I think the opportunities are fantastic, and we're very pleased to offer to you our proposal that we brought with us.