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Five to choose from.
By Shawn Lawrence
Collaboration and co-operation among academic, government and industry partners is at the core of Saskatchewan’s growing life science industry.
Our March and September issues highlighted how some of these collaborations and initiatives undertaken by organizations such as the Saskatchewan Research Council and the provinces Ag-bio industry in general have helped Saskatchewan broaden its reputation as a life science leader. One of the more significant drivers for the province lies on a bluff high above the South Saskatchewan River in the provinces largest city, with the presence of the University of Saskatchewan and the numerous research enabling facilities found on campus.
As the largest academic and research institution in the province, coupled with the presence of one of the most rapidly growing, and most successful, university-related research parks in North America, Innovation Place, the university campus has become an epicenter of sorts for biotech in the province. In fact roughly half the research activity in the province happens here.
To further solidify its position, the university is in the midst of its largest building boom ever with more than $740 million in construction currently underway. As part of this construction the University will soon be home to such centres as the Aquatic Toxicology Research facility (ATRF) and InterVac.
The flagship of the Toxicology Centre’s expansion- the ATRF is the first of its kind in Canada and one of only a few similar research resources in the world, while InterVac, at a price tag of $110.4 million will be the largest Level 3 vaccine research facility in Western Canada.
As a precursor to this growth and perhaps even a major cause of it stands the crown jewel of this growing cluster, the Canadian Light Source.
Built at an initial cost of $174 million and roughly the size of a football field, the CLS is Canada’s first and only synchrotron. It has drawn the attention of synchrotron enthusiasts from all over the globe and broadened the scope of the province’s biotech industry.
The decision to build the synchrotron here was mostly out of convenience. For over 30 years, the University was recognized as a Centre of Excellence in particle physics as home of the Saskatchewan Accelerator Laboratory (SAL). It was SAL’s linear accelerator and resident expertise along with the support of both the people and research community in Saskatoon that put the city’s bid over the top in a competition to be the site of the CLS.
Not surprisingly both the city of Saskatoon and the University of Saskatchewan are incredibly proud of its synchrotron. The fact that it also happens to be the only synchrotron in the world located on a university campus that features colleges and research centres in all areas of the medical and life science, is just as impressive. And, in just three short years of operation the CLS has come a long way in enabling innovation of likes that have not been seen and fostering the idea of collaboration amongst the research community at the University of Saskatchewan.
In 2006 alone, more than 700 scientists used the CLS for their research, while more than 3,000 academic, industrial and government researchers a year from across Canada and around the world are expected to use the facility once the full compliment of beamlines go into operation.
“Many of the scientists (approximately 80%) that use the facility are from the academic community,” said CLS communications coordinator Matthew Dalzell. “But the plan is to expand on that especially in the industrial sector. We have collaborative agreements with individual researchers who work in research groups that have started up because of the CLS. There are researchers working with industry, more formal agreements between CLS and industrial clients as well as with other synchrotrons and other universities around the world.”
The 130 employees that work out of the CLS, consisting of scientists, engineers, technicians and administrators, aid users in their research at the CLS.
What exactly is a synchrotron?
Explained Dalzell; a synchrotron is a light source. Offering high intensity and a wide spectrum of light, synchrotrons can be used to analyze a wide variety of biological, physical, chemical, and geological processes. Synchrotron light has many properties that make it ideal for research purposes. The beams themselves are incredibly intense, approximately a million times brighter than sunlight. Through the use of magnets and electrical currents in the storage rung, the synchrotron accelerates subatomic particles in circles at speeds approaching the speed of light causing them to emit light that spans the infrared, ultraviolet and x-ray regions of the spectrum. The light is shone down beamlines to laboratory end stations where researchers are able to observe matter right down to the atomic level. The beamlines are categorized into groups or types based on selected wavelengths. These groupings include infrared, soft x-ray and hard x-ray.
The first synchrotrons were built to study subatomic physics but when the remarkable qualities of the beams were recognized, researchers set out to find new ways to use it.
Researchers soon found new applications and developed them. Some disciplines make more use of certain techniques than others but most of the CLS beamlines are actually capable of multiple techniques.
“What distinguishes our beamlines is not so much the technique but rather the range of the spectrum used. For any given chemical question or molecular analysis, selected wavelengths of synchrotron light and techniques are necessary for different applications,” said Dalzell.
Many of the scientists that use it can be found at the colleges of engineering, science and medicine. The CLS has given these colleges the opportunity to explore from multidisciplinary relationships in solving problems in parallel. In a way the CLS is acting like a magnet, stirring interest from the Canadian and international science community while drawing researchers and specialists to the university.
Dean Janusz Kozinski is one such researcher that was lured to Saskatoon by the mammoth tool. He credits the synchrotron for the way it has helped him in his areas of expertise in ways other technologies have failed to do.
“It’s a fantastic fit and has allowed me to do things I wasn’t able to do before with my research,” said Kozinski who leads the SunFuel biofuel research project on campus looking into the processing and applications of biofuels as an environmentally friendly fuel source. “Not only has it aided in my research but it has also made recruiting top talent to the engineering program easier,” said Kozinski, who is also the Dean of engineering on campus. Kozinski credits the CLS for also helping his program secure strategic grants from NSERC at a 78% rate, which is the highest rate across Canada.
The CLS also gives his students the opportunity to access it.
Like Kolzinski, Dr. Graham George a fellow University Saskatoon faculty member, and Canada Research Chair in X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy, credits the CLS for enabling advancements in his work.
In terms of the science, George is the project leader in the Bio XAS Phase III beamline development, a $20.6 million project, to build two new beamlines at the CLS in the hopes of using x-ray beams to try and understand the metals within proteins to develop an understanding of the biochemistry of metals and toxic metals in intact living tissues.
“Our research critically depends on synchrotron light, its essential. What the synchrotron can do for us is allow us to look at metals and metalloids without sample pre-treatment. Only with the synchrotron can we say what’s really there inside the cell without destroying it in acid or things like that during analysis. It’s like before the synchrotron we had a book that we couldn’t really read because we didn’t have corrective lenses and now all of sudden we can read all the words now that we have our fancy high beamlines. This is the power the synchrotron has,” said George
Brought to the campus for his expertise in synchrotron research, George has seen first hand how the collaborations and intermingling of scientific disciplines spurred by the synchrotron have resulted in advancements in many fields. He also remembers vividly the initial response researchers on campus had to the massive structure.
“There was such a torrent of stimulating new thought and ideas coming from the researchers who were already on campus catalyzed by the presence of the synchrotron,” remembers George. “From the beginning it (the CLS) acted as a catalyst bringing people together who normally wouldn’t interact and causing people to cross traditional boundaries of disciplines and think about how they can help their colleagues in new ways.”
One such interaction has seen Dean Chapman, a physicist by trade, switch disciplines and work as a researcher in anatomy and cell biology in the college of medicine as the group leader of a research group that uses synchrotron radiation for gene expression. Originally from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chapman came to CLS from another synchrotron in 2003.
“Historically the University of Saskatchewan was a campus that didn’t have a lot of work in this area, but since the facility opened it has drawn a number of people including several CRC chairs here for various kinds of research. Its really changing the character of the campus,” said Chapman who was lured here by the biomedical beamline (BMIT), which is still not in full operation but should be up and running next year as part of the Phase II beamlines.
In all the facility runs seven beamlines, which have been in operation since 2005. Seven new beamlines are expected to be online in 2008 as part of a Phase II construction at the CLS with five more on the way as part of Phase III that are scheduled to begin construction once Phase II is completed. The idea is that the more beamlines there are, the greater the variety of materials that can be tested.
Chapman says the two beamlines he is working on will offer advanced imaging with unprecedented detail for medicine, as well as high-precision radiation therapies for cancer and are designed to incorporate humans at some point in the future.
The High Throughput Macromolecular Crystallography beamline is one such beamline designed to incorporate humans. It comes online next year. This beamline is of particular importance to the life science industry, as it will be used to provide detailed atomic scale images of molecules like viral and bacterial proteins, a necessary foundation for novel drug design.
Of particular importance to pharmaceutical research also is the protein crystallography beamlines, which do protein crystallography and x-ray defraction using crystals. Protein Crystallography at synchrotrons can offer quicker disease identification and potential for generation of pharmaceutical therapies. According to Dalzell, all rational drug design, specifically HIV drugs have been produced by using knowledge from synchrotrons.
Among the CLS’s biggest accomplishments thus far, is its work in the agriculture sector, which has enabled scientists to look deeper into nutrient composition, concentrations of the content, while addressing issues of bioavailability and helping them to understand proteins and improve crop resistance. But other important advancements are on the horizon particularly in the areas of cancer. Among them are the detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer, specifically in areas of breast cancer research and in identifying cancer cells in general. Synchrotron light also allows researchers to see the shape and size of all tumours more clearly than conventional methods.
Other synchrotron breakthroughs could one day include finding a vaccine for malaria, advancing medical imaging and a finding the cure for the common cold. These accomplishments don’t even include what the CLS has meant to industries such as mining, natural resources and the environment.
It truly has become an incredibly versatile tool for Canadian scientists and researchers from around the world, and a landmark of importance to the Saskatchewan biotech community.
