A fledgling Thunder Bay tissue bank is hoping for a fresh start with a leading edge advanced processing technique.
The Lake Superior Centre for Regenerative Medicine is on the verge of announcing a partnership arrangement with a U.S. tissue bank to import a new freeze-drying method of preserving donated tissue known as lyophilization.
The non-profit centre, also known as Regen Med, is finalizing a new business plan and contract that will bring the lyophilization method and some advanced tissue cutting techniques to Thunder Bay.
"There's nothing like it in Canada," said executive director Helen Lee, who was expecting to disclose the partners sometime this fall.
If a deal is signed, it will place Regen Med head and shoulders above other tissue banks in Canada.
"By the end of the year we will have everything in place," said Lee. The advantage of lyophilization is hospitals and tissue banks don't need huge freezers to store it and tissue can basically be shelf-ready.
Several large U.S. processing facilities have offered to train Regen Med staff in the lyophilization method, to assist them in equipment purchases, develop protocols and get accreditation with the American Association of Tissue Banks.
There has also been talks with big Canadian hospitals to source tissue which comes in the form of bone, tendons, skin, eyes and heart valves either from living donors or cadavers.
"There is a hospital willing to send us large volumes of femural heads," said Lee.
There is a nation-wide shortage of donated tissue like skin used primarily as a natural dressing which is a temporary solution to protect burn patients until their own skin can be grafted. Donated bone from hip replacement surgeries can be ground up and used for grafts or research.
After the grand opening in November 2007, Regen Med was billed as the only Ontario facility to process to living donor tissue. However, the Munro Street facility has yet to become operational.
Located in the ICR Discoveries building alongside Genesis Genomics, a local biotech company specializing in skin cancer detection products, Regen Med is being counted on as one of the anchor tenants of Thunder Bay's life sciences research cluster.
When Lee arrived as executive director last spring, she decided to re-jig and broaden the original business plan which called for only procuring and processing locally donated tissue.
She wants to build out the centre with this lyophilization method to service all of Ontario, and possibly Canada.
In talking with other Canadian tissue banks in Montreal and Halifax, she discovered Ontario imports $19 million worth of advanced process tissue annually.
Simply put, the availability of tissue isn't here because there isn't enough specialized recovery teams in Ontario to do it.
If Lee expects to expand the facility and add nine specialists by next year, she'll have to literally home-grow them in the lab.
Tissue banks at Hema-Quebec and Halifax's Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre offer basic recovery and tissue cutting skills, but no one in Canada teaches lyophilization.
One Regen Med staff, an honours grad from Lakehead University's molecular sciences program, is learning at Lifenet in Virginia Beach, VA., one of the biggest non-profit organ and tissue banks in the U.S.
It's expensive to send someone away for training. Lee would like to offer that kind of training at Lakehead University or Confederation College.
Regen Med has much working in its favour with its central Canada location, a new medical school, a research-focussed Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre and unlimited collaboration opportunities.
The existing 2,075-square-foot space on Munro Street contains a modern Class-10 clean room (more sterile than an operating room) along with two -80 C freezers, a blood lab, plus a 'dirty room' to dispose of waste by-products.
Lee's ideal facility would have its own operating room to do recoveries, contain an entire research and development wing, multiple clean rooms and several large lyophilization machines.
She has set the centre's expectations very high.
"The goal is to be the best, the state of the art, the leader, in tissue banking and processing tissue in Canada."
