Thank you for this opportunity to testify before the committee. So who is TRIUMF? TRIUMF is Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics. It's run and operated by a consortium of about 14 Canadian universities, stretching from Saint Mary's in Nova Scotia to McMaster—my colleagues next to me—through to the west coast, the University of Victoria.
We're here to talk about nuclear medicine, but first let me say a little bit about what TRIUMF does for nuclear medicine. We have five cyclotrons at TRIUMF, all of which produce medical isotopes of various types. The main research program of TRIUMF is particle physics and nuclear physics, and the nuclear physics component is studying rare isotopes—isotopes of the future, if you want to think of it that way.
The present cyclotrons, however, actually play a significant role in producing medical isotopes, so TRIUMF produces all of the PET isotopes for the British Columbia Cancer Agency for clinical use. We produce all of the isotopes for the Pacific Parkinson's Research Centre. We've had a 30-year manufacturing partnership with MDS Nordion where we produce 2.5 million patient doses of isotopes per year. We collaborate with the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton and with Sherbrooke. TRIUMF-designed cyclotrons are scattered around the world. They're in Taiwan, Korea, the U.S., and so on.
The point there is that TRIUMF designs the cyclotrons, which are used to make the isotopes. We're involved in the radio chemistry that's needed to attach molecules to those isotopes, and we have experts in PET imaging.
I'm here today to talk about an alternative method of producing moly-99, and that is using an accelerator. There are basically two ways to make moly-99. One is in a reactor, which you've heard about, and the other is in an accelerator. In our proposal we would use non-weapons grade uranium. We would use U-238, and I think this is a strength of what we're talking about. The result of irradiating U-238 with an electron beam, which we've proposed, is that in principle the final product should be identical to the product that comes out of the NRU.
We have recently signed an agreement with MDS Nordion, where on a time scale of 2012 we would like to irradiate a target and demonstrate this technology. What we expect to find is that the definition of moly-99, which comes from a drug master file, would be identical in the case of our radiation to the one from the NRU. If that is the case, then we think that within about a year and a half the private sector could take that, build an accelerator or accelerators, and produce moly-99 and have it in the production stream. In other words, four to five years from now, moly-99 could be in the supply chain from the private sector using an accelerator. This assumes that the five-year funding of TRIUMF, which is presently going through the Government of Canada via the National Research Council, which covers our funding from 2010 to 2015, is fully supported.
I know you are looking at moly-99 today, but in my opinion, the future of nuclear medicine is in PET cameras versus moly-99. PET does not use moly-99, as you probably know. So the fastest-growing component of nuclear medicine is PET imaging. Last year the sales of PET cameras in the U.S. exceeded the sales of SPECT cameras. SPECT cameras use moly-99. The medical revolution that you probably sense we're all part of, which is genomics plus molecular imaging—molecular imaging allows you to look inside the body and see metabolism, and nuclear medicine is a big part of molecular imaging—I see that as the future of health care around the world. I think we should be playing a big part in that.
Thank you.