McMaster Innovation Park will be taking a big step forward Wednesday with the official opening of a $33-million biomedical research centre in partnership with a giant German applied research organization.

The Fraunhofer Project Centre for Biomedical Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing (BEAM) goes to the heart of why the innovation park was established 12 years ago. It's goal is to find ways to commercialize applied science research, something that takes many years but can have huge payoffs in the end.

A delegation of officials from McMaster University and Fraunhofer along with Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger and city economic development director Glen Norton met with The Spectator's editorial Board Tuesday in advance of the official opening ceremony Wednesday. The project was first floated to the city four years ago.

John Brennan, the director of the Biointerfaces Institute at McMaster, says so much university research never realizes its potential because it doesn't make the transition over the "valley of death" between discovery and commercialization.

The centre has plans to bring together researchers from science, health sciences and engineering with dozens of industry partners to develop innovative medical technologies for biomarker discovery, point-of-care diagnostics, biomaterials and automating cell therapy production for cancer treatment.

The $33-million, state-of-the-art facility — with access to 16,000 square feet of laboratory space and 4,000 square feet of office/meeting room space — is located at the southwest corner of the innovation park and is expected to eventually create 75 highly skilled jobs.

The BEAM centre is especially interesting in that the university has partnered with an offshoot of the giant Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a leading organization for applied research in Europe. More than 25,000 people work for the firm that has an annual research budget of 2.3 billion euros.

Fraunhofer began in 1949 as part of the effort to rebuild Germany after the Second World War, and it spread around the world from there.

"We really think it is going to help to raise McMaster's profile ... partnering with Fraunhofer is a big feather in our cap," said Rob Baker, vice-president of research at McMaster University.

The new centre was financed by $12 million from the federal government with another $4 million each from the province and the City of Hamilton. Fraunhofer put up $3.4 million with McMaster paying for the rest.

Frank Emmrich, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology, said the challenge of life science product development is that it can take 10 to 15 years. One of the reasons Fraunhofer wants to become partners in North American centres is because "there is a much more open attitude toward financing life sciences in North America than in Europe."

Norton said the city hopes the centre will encourage biomedical companies to move to Hamilton to take advantage of the centre's technology and expertise.

"We see this as a great opportunity to grab those kinds of companies that will be growing in the future and offering great jobs. It is a lot easier to attract a company when Franhoufer is already here than if we have to start cold."

Eisenberger said: "Pittsburgh has thrived on this very model, using research to create a platform for future employment."

Fraunhofer's Friedemann Horn says it is an exciting time for the kind of research and product development that will take place at the centre. Humankind is in the midst of a "biological revolution over the last 10 years. After sequencing the human genome, it has turned out that life is much more complex and in the last 10 years we have gained extraordinary knowledge on the complexity of life."

mmcneil@thespec.com

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