McMaster teams with MDA to take health robotics inventions to market

Second CECR Competition

McMaster Univ and MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates Ltd (MDA) have been awarded $14.8 million over five years to develop and commercialize robotics technology for surgical applications. The funding for the Centre for Surgical Invention and Innovation (CSII) comes from the second competition of the Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) program and brings together much of the country's expertise in the field, with an initial aim of preparing a system ready for clinical trials within two years.

The CECR funding will be matched with roughly equal contributions from MDA and McMaster, raising the Centre's budget to $30 million. The objective is to become self-sufficient at the end of five years, replacing CECR funding with royalties from the sale of products and revenues from a number of other services and the sale of related hardware and software developed over the course of commercialization. CSII will be located in McMaster's Innovation Park.

"This is the start of a new industry for Canada," says Dr Mehran Anvari, CSII's inaugural director and director of the McMaster Institute of Surgical Invention, Innovation and Education. "Our first milestone is to get the commercialization process underway and develop some deadlines."

The CSII bolsters the ongoing interaction between the university and MDA, which stretches back years to the days when MDA's Robotics Division was part of Spar Aerospace Ltd. Collaboration between the two was strengthened in 2004 when MDA invested $450,000 to sponsor a new medical robotics laboratory at the university's then-new School of Biomedical Engineering and Health Sciences. The aim of the MDA-sponsored lab was to develop a platform for surgical robotics with the university conducting research for developing MDA's medical robotics business.

The lab also provided an opportunity for MDA researchers to work with Anvari and his research team. Anvari is a widely respected pioneer in the areas of surgical telementoring (connecting surgeons across Canada with two-way video) and telerobotic surgery (allowing experts to assist in procedures in rural or remote regions through the use of sophisticated three-arm robots).

"This CECR is an extension of that lab's work. We have a prototype system and we want to apply it to surgery," says Tim Reedman, MDA's director of terrestrial initiatives and a 22-year MDA/Spar robotics veteran. "CSII will help commercialize the research and create a sustainable centre of excellence in the field of innovative surgery, which at the moment is medical robotics."

While Canada has pockets of expertise in medical devices, the sector is dominated by large foreign-based multinationals. Anvari says the strategy behind CSII is to "identify niches where needs are not being met". With the bulk of necessary research already complete, the focus will be on software and hardware development, with some R&D for the development of new platforms.

"There are many areas that are not covered. It's a very new field. Robotics are just entering the market," he says. "We're not trying to go head-to-head with the big players but we may disrupt their markets in the long run."

Tech industry veteran Dr Douglas Barber chairs the CSII board of directors. He says he's confident the collaboration between McMaster and MDA will result in world-leading products, but concerns with commercialization remain.

"The commerce here is difficult. You've got to get these products into a hospital or specialist so where do the dollars come from that actually buy this equipment," asks Barber. "How will it get distributed? Who has the connections to the marketplace, those hospitals and those surgeons?"

McMaster is not the only Canadian university with which MDA collaborates. The company has been working with the Univ of Calgary-affiliated Foothills Hospital to develop the neuroArm, a three-armed robotic system with 3-D imaging for use in neurosurgery. Based on MDA's previous generations of robotic systems, it provides surgeons with real-time data obtained during all stages of an operation. The neuroArm is designed to perform many operations from soft tissue manipulation and blunt dissection to suturing, cauterizing and irrigation.

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