TRIUMF to beef up scientific and commercial activities with $45 million in additional funding

Canada's premier physics laboratory can now implement more of its ambitious strategic plan with $45 million in additional funding. The Budget allocated the money to allow TRIUMF to launch and operate its new $100-million Advanced Rare IsotopE Laboratory (ARIEL) as well as maintain base operations including its core cyclotron facility. The funding begins to flow this year and augments TRIUMF's $222 million in base funding announced in Budget 2014.

The Budget award was made in response to TRIUMF's pre-Budget consultation proposal entitled CAPTURE - Canada's Accelerator Platform to Unlock Research Excellence - to expand the range of activities undertaken at the facility and boost its social, economic and scientific impact. The Vancouver-based facility is owned by a consortium of 18 universities and receives more than half of its funding through the National Research Council.

Without funding to implement CAPTURE, TRIUMF argued that it would be forced to "operate at reduced capacity, and the nation will forfeit considerable opportunities in fundamental isotope research, nuclear medicine, and materials science, and compromise the competitiveness of Canadian firms operating in these areas for years to come". While the new money isn't as much as the $68 million it requested, it will go a long way towards relieving mounting budgetary pressures.

"We've received flat funding for the past 15 years but at the same time we've been building the new ARIEL facility and committed to tripling the scientific activity of the lab. We couldn't go forward without this new funding," says Dr Jonathan Bagger, TRIUMF's recently appointed director (R$, March 31/14). "The loss to inflation over the past 15 years is about $100 so this $45 million makes up a good deal of that. We'll continue to build the nuclear medicine program and more new money would allow us to do even more and expand more quickly."

Bagger says that without new funding, TRIUMF was looking at the prospect of leaving its cyclotron idle for part of the year. Now that full operations are ensured, it will be easier to attract partnership and contract research funding. The Budget noted that "Government expects TRIUMF's research partners and end-users, including health-care organizations and businesses, to also increase their contributions towards the continued success of the facility".

TRIUMF currently has partnerships with a number of companies from several sectors, some of which are spin-offs through it commercialization subsidiary - Advanced Applied Physics Solutions (AAPS).

These include:

• PAVAC Industries Inc (hybrid electron beam technology for industrial applications);
• Nordion (medical isotopes);
• IKOMED Technologies (shutter technology to reduce exposure to radiation);
• Frontier Sonde Inc (well logging products for use in the oil and gas industry);
• D-Pace Inc (products and services to the particle accelerator industry)
• CRM GeoTomography Technologies Inc (geophysical mineral exploration technology);
• ARTMS (Alternative Radioisotope Technologies for Medical Systems) (manufacture and sell targets and accessories to cyclotron manufacturers and operators for the production of medical isotopes); and,
• Advanced Cyclotron Systems Inc (world's third largest supplier of medical cyclotrons).

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