Cindi Morshead is a professor and chair of the anatomy division of the Department of Surgery with the University of Toronto, with appointments in the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. Sowmya Viswanathan is an affiliate scientist with the Krembil Research Institute through the University Health Network, and an assistant professor at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto.
This article first appeared in The Hill Times. It is reprinted here with permission.
This image is shared courtesy of Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images
Despite its immense value and future promise, the Stem Cell Network will soon cease to exist.
Health care in Canada sits upon a precipice. We are faced with a looming crisis as costs for degenerative disease nears $200 billion each year and hospitals struggle to contend with chronic overcapacity. And yet, at no time before has there been so much promise for new and innovative therapies—many of which will provide treatments for these same diseases and drive down the costs of health care in this country. The next generation will deliver on this promise.
What do we need to do to facilitate this outcome? The answer is found in effective training that will foster innovation in both basic and translational research. The federal government acknowledges this through its innovation and skills development agenda. Canada’s regenerative medicine community is at the forefront of providing the specialized and hands-on training needed to succeed in the knowledge economy of the 21st century.
Regenerative medicine is often heralded as the most disruptive technology of our age, with the potential to transform health care across the globe. It is based on a Canadian innovation—the identification of stem cells in the early 1960s—and since then, Canadian scientists have been working diligently to bring the promise to fruition.
For the past 18 years, many of us have been aided in our efforts by the Stem Cell Network, a national organization that has provided funding to 170 labs across the country and trained more than 2,500 highly qualified personnel.
If we seek a future in which illness and disease no longer have a stranglehold on productivity and well-being, we need to ensure that opportunities exist for the necessary skills to be acquired and leveraged into jobs, not just in the laboratory, but in industry and manufacturing, policy-making, and in the clinical environment.
This is a key space in which the Stem Cell Network operates in Canada. In our two laboratories alone, where we are working on stem cell repair strategies for spinal cord injury, stroke, and joint degeneration such as arthritis, we are helping to train more than 25 people who will be part of this next wave of innovation. They are women and men, many from Canada and some from abroad, all with the same interest in finding answers that will improve our health and livelihood.
Not all of them—in fact, very few of them—will end up running their own research lab at an academic institution. It’s vitally important that we continue to offer diverse, interdisciplinary, and high-quality training to these individuals, to ensure their future employability and ultimately realize our collective health-care goals.
In our field, the Stem Cell Network’s role in this training is unparalleled: its program of courses, workshops and networking opportunities provides skill development not only for research activities, but also for the translational activities that will bring potential treatments into clinical trials and the promise of approved therapies.
Yet, despite the immense value and future promise, the Stem Cell Network will soon cease to exist. This will effectively end the progressive training programs that have provided comprehensive skills development for hundreds of our brightest minds.
We lament the pending loss of such a vital organization because of the essential role it plays in the stem cell research ecosystem. It’s time to double-down and make strategic investments in skills development and research that is closing in on a radical shift in how we treat the most costly diseases of our time.
Sowmya Viswanathan
Latest posts by Sowmya Viswanathan (see all)
- Raman spectroscopy for monitoring therapeutic cell manufacturing – Part 2 - March 28, 2019
- Without new funding, key part of Canada’s stem cell research ecosystem to close - February 28, 2019
- Raman spectroscopy for monitoring therapeutic cell manufacturing – Part 1 - September 6, 2018
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