Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for having us today.
More than 10,000 times this year, a mother in Canada will learn that her child has a birth defect. Those with severe abnormalities often die or remain disabled for life. Fortunately, many of these defects can now be treated successfully. As a pediatric surgeon, I have seen how surgical techniques have evolved and advanced over the past 20 years. However, children's surgery has its own challenges.
Operating on children, with their tiny spaces and highly sensitive organs, presents its own unique set of challenges. These giant machines and tools developed for adults just aren't equipped to work effectively. From my own experience and talking to my colleagues from all across Canada and the world, it has become clear that we're not reaching the limits of what can be done with traditional surgery. And it's increasingly becoming an issue with respect to access to appropriate care.
This is where the CIGITI comes in. CIGITI stands for Centre for Image-Guided Innovation and Therapeutic Intervention. We're a multidisciplinary group of surgeons, engineers, scientists, and software developers from all over Canada, working together to develop and market new medical technologies while creating new knowledge.
CIGITI is based at Sick Kids hospital in downtown Toronto. Today I want to specifically talk about a project that we have focused on for the past three years. It's called Kidsarm. Kidsarm combines minimally invasive surgery with imaging technologies and medical robotics. Think of Kidsarm as pediatric surgery's answer to the space shuttle's Canadarm. It's nimble and can handle the smallest patients to the largest with precision and safety.
The technology gives us clear, real-time images of a child's internal organs. The surgeon needs only to make a small incision and then he or she can quickly navigate to the region of treatment, avoiding blood vessels and critical structures before quickly performing the necessary procedure.
The potential is enormous. Consider a birth defect such as a large tumour called sacrococcygeal teratoma, which grows on the back of a little baby. Although the tumour can be removed after birth, this creates a significant complication and sometimes the tumour itself can threaten the baby's life in the mother's womb, necessitating an urgent surgery while the baby is in the mother's womb. Kidsarm, for instance, and its navigation technology can obviate and make such a procedure into a minimal and scarless technique. This obviously means less trauma and suffering and much better outcomes.
There are also other benefits, particularly to the health care system. Treating abnormalities early on means lower long-term health care costs. Today children with birth defects represent 25% to 30% of all hospitalization costs in Canada, and the number of cases will increase as women wait longer to have children and families.
As well, there are so few opportunities to train in pediatric and fetal surgery. Kidsarm will also help to train the next generation of surgeons so that knowledge isn't lost. In much the same way as flight simulators were and are used to train pilots, we would have technology-trained pediatric surgeons anywhere in Canada with a virtual simulation of the exact child they would be treating.
However, Kidsarm does not only mean advances to medicine. It's also about creating high-value, knowledge-based jobs commercializing these new technologies. CIGITI has already developed two potential technologies for pediatric medicine and brought them to the market. They are technologies that will save at least $250,000, for instance, at Sick Kids in terms of health care costs, while reducing the wait time from eight or ten weeks to a few days.
We have an ambitious plan to patent and license some of these products and reinvest the proceeds in new research. The market for these technologies at the heart of CIGITI's work amounts to more than $25 billion, with a projected growth of between 9% and 20% each year. By completing Kidsarm, we expect to be on our way to becoming financially self-sustaining.
However, I am here because we need your support. CIGITI has secured $5 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation toward the design and construction of the Kidsarm prototype. To complete the project, CIGITI needs an additional $10 million to make it a reality and an additional $20 million to construct a special operating theatre that's equipped with the MRI to run pre-clinical and clinical trials for these and other technologies that are being developed. It will make the transition from idea to research and bench to bedside even faster.
I've talked to you today about the benefits of Kidsarm—less suffering for children, lower long-term health care costs, improving access to appropriate care, training future surgeons, more high-skilled jobs, commercialization opportunities, and the potential to make Canada a world leader in surgical innovation. But for me personally, the biggest part of this endeavour is about giving hope to the parents of these small babies I've been treating for the last 15 years and passing on what I've learned to the next generation of surgeons.
We have key pediatric surgical leaders, from UBC to Montreal to IWK, who wanted to come here and couldn't, but they have sent letters of support.
I hope we can count on your support in this year's budget, and I look forward to any questions you may have.
Thank you.