Thank you for the opportunity to be here, Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the committee.
I want to compliment you on the organization of these panels. The first panel focused on emergency response and first aid. As witnesses, we're looking a little bit further down the road.
I'd also like to thank the citizens of Canada for their vote of confidence in TRIUMF with the announcement of core operating funds in Minister Flaherty's budget 2010. It really sets TRIUMF up to make a big difference for the future.
We're discussing today the present state and future vision for medical isotopes in Canada. I'm here to say that repairing the NRU reactor is only half the story. We need, and Canada needs, more than a return to business as usual.
Some may remember the oil crises of the 1960s and 1970s. These incidents gave the western world a glimpse of the fragility and the vulnerability of the oil-based energy supplies of the day. Although there's not a direct parallel, the current crisis in supply of reactor-based medical isotopes should open our eyes. Yes, a return to operation for the NRU is urgently needed, but is there a broader lesson?
Fortunately, Canada is rich with alternatives for making and using medical isotopes and there are promising moves forward to exploit this. In fact, Canada has a global advantage that we can use to save lives and maintain a dominant role in a billion-dollar global market. You've heard about some of these alternatives from my distinguished colleagues.
Let me say something about TRIUMF's role in this. As a national laboratory owned and operated by 15 of Canada's great universities, we are committed to developing short- and medium-term solutions, as well as a long-term vision for nuclear medicine in Canada. You've heard some of that from the other folks this morning.
We have a 30-year partnership working with MDS Nordion in Vancouver, which generates 15% of the medical isotopes exported by Canada each year. This amounts to about 2.5 million patient doses.
TRIUMF is a centre of excellence for the physics, chemistry, and biology of medical isotopes. We are fundamentally a basic research and development laboratory. Deployment of technologies we do with commercial partners. TRIUMF is not in the business of producing isotopes for commercial sale; we're in the business of generating the ideas and the technologies that true business people can use.
Our short-term solution examines the viability of using existing medical isotope cyclotrons around Canada for direct production of technetium-99m. That's the isotope actually used in the radiopharmaceuticals.
Dr. Turcotte referred you to this brief earlier. He is part of a collaboration that was funded in October of last year for $1.3 million, with support from NSERC and CIHR, to examine this technology. TRIUMF and the B.C. Cancer Agency are leading this effort. The collaborating institutions include Sherbrooke with Dr. Turcotte, Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, as well as Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, and there is a small company involved as well.
This technology would use proton beams from existing commercial cyclotrons to irradiate a new target material, known as molybdenum-100, to produce the technetium. The advantage of this technology is that we'll be conducting human clinical trials within 18 months and it could be deployed without significant changes to the equipment already in place around Canada.
The disadvantages, some of which you've already heard, are that the medical isotope cyclotrons in Canada are limited, and by directly producing technetium, which has a six-hour half-life, you're limited to how far you can transport this medical isotope. However, as the regular adage goes, most of Canada is concentrated within a few hundred kilometres of the major population centres.
Another advantage is that this technology, if proven in the laboratory, is easily licensed in the private sector. The participating institutions are using cyclotrons manufactured in Canada, as well as models manufactured by General Electric. So this technology could not only work in Canada but also be licensed around the world.
TRIUMF is also investigating a more sophisticated medium-term solution, known as photofission, about which you've heard several times, and Dr. Turcotte referred to it earlier. This builds on Canadian breakthroughs in accelerator technology and proposes to integrate almost seamlessly with the current supply chain for molybdenum-99 generators.
We used to use reactors as the most intense source of particles for experiments. The world is moving to using accelerators for some of these applications because they can be easier and cheaper to license and operate.
With support from CFI—the Canada Foundation for Innovation—and other agencies, TRIUMF is constructing a new multi-purpose research accelerator. This device, known as the e-linac, or superconducting electron linear accelerator, will be used to validate the proposal of creating molybdenum-99 with a linear accelerator using natural uranium.
So there are two distinguishing features of this technology. It does not use weapons-grade uranium. It does not use diluted weapons-grade uranium. It's actually using U238, the isotope most naturally abundant and occurring in the ground, for instance in Saskatchewan. The second element of this technology is that the current competitive advantage that Canada enjoys in producing moly-99 is based on the partnership between AECL and MDS Nordion in separating out the moly-99 from the uranium and the rest of the junk. Thus, linear accelerator photofission technology would use that same mechanical and chemical separation.
Now, TRIUMF is in the business of fundamental research. This is a technology demonstration, which will be the first experiment we run on this new accelerator. If this demonstration lives up to its promise, the technology could be commercialized and licensed by about 2015. We're working with MDS Nordion to benchmark the business case.
It's key to point out that there's been some confusion about this technology and its generation of radioactive waste. It does use electricity, not a nuclear power reactor. In fact, a more powerful accelerator being built in Switzerland using similar technology is going to be powered entirely by windmills. It's possible. B.C., of course, is plentiful in hydro power. We're also working with other solutions that span the space of short and medium term.
Now, our long-term vision asks the question: the medical isotope crisis is really a supply and demand issue, how long will the global demand for moly-99 last? And you've heard some of the expert opinions on that. Our assertion is that the market dominance of molybdenum-99 is going to last for about a decade and probably not much longer. The future is being driven by the so-called PET isotopes and technologies, about which you've heard quite a lot from both Lantheus Medical Imaging and Dr. Turcotte.
PET isotopes offer lower radiation doses to the patient, improved sensitivity resolution, and, perhaps not as well known, much more sophisticated probing of biological and pathological pathways within the body. As we've heard, the challenge is deploying the production infrastructure and the scanning infrastructure. There are 31 PET scanners in Canada. In terms of the scanners for using technetium, there are about 2,000. However, for the first time in the last 40 years, the new sales of PET scanners have surpassed the new sales of the technetium scanners. So we are on the cusp of a market shift.
Canadians are in a tough spot presently, with the shutdown of the NRU and the HFR reactor. Our health care providers and nuclear medicine specialists have been incredibly resourceful to help us get through this time period.
There are a number of exciting paths forward. New developments are quite promising, such as the $48 million in federal funds announced in budget 2010, which will be dedicated to research and development for diversifying the supply of medical isotopes. The future is bright, and there is much work to do.
Thank you, again, for your time.
