good news story on the medical equipment business in Winnipeg
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Companies spawned by city research centres
THE Winnipeg company that makes an expensive automated machine that fills intravenous bags and syringes has just hired one of the top U.S. experts on handling hazardous drugs.
Intelligent Hospital Systems has about 40 employees and has enough customers for its robotic IV automation system (RIVA) to sell out its 2008 production run at about $1 million each. Its CEO, Kevin McGarry, figures they will sell about 50 by the end of the year.
Not too far away from IHS's brand new production facility near Kenaston and McGillvray boulevards, another medical technology company, IMRIS (which used to stand for Innovative Magnetic Resonance Imaging Systems), has recently moved into a large space formerly occupied by Gendis Inc.
IMRIS has close to 100 people on the payroll, several with post-graduate degrees, including its vice-president of technology, Steve Huschek, who has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Both companies are experiencing a flush of success after many years of expensive development with the certainty of commercial viability only a recent phenomenon.
Success in the globally competitive medical-device field almost automatically brings with it the ability to recruit world-class talent. These high-tech Winnipeg operations prove that attracting the best people from around the world has more to do with the quality of jobs than where the company is located.
Both of these Winnipeg companies have grown out of research based at a couple of the city's research centres -- IHS from the St. Boniface General Hospital Research Centre and IMRIS from the National Research Council's Institute for Biodiagnostics.
The research and development process was a process lasting more than 10 years and on top of the difficult challenges in continuing to finance development before there were any paying customers, it also required a certain amount of luck to keep them in Winnipeg.
IMRIS has developed a surgical imaging system for use in brain surgery and spinal and soft-tissue procedures and has the only system of its kind in the world designed so that the magnet moves over the patient for imaging and then is retracted to allow complete surgical access to the patient.
After its successful demonstration in Calgary's Foothills Hospital earlier this decade and new ownership led by Winnipeg technology entrepreneur David Graves arrived in 2005, IMRIS has ramped up operations dramatically. It has installed about a dozen units all over the U.S. -- with a pricetag of about $5 million each -- and is in the process of designing new applications and configurations that will expand its marketing potential even further.
The NRC wasn't as lucky when it came to its other most successful spin-off company, Novadaq Technologies. Another company that has developed imaging technology that surgeons can use in the midst of operations, it moved its operations to Toronto about five years ago primarily to be closer to investors and potential investors.
But in addition to IMRIS and IHS there are several smaller Winnipeg medical and technological device companies in the works including another spawn of the NRC that will make smaller, less expensive magnetic resonance imaging machines that would be marketed to communities not large enough (or rich enough) to afford the larger multi-million dollar versions.
The creation of companies like these is a lengthy, costly, risky process that requires luck along the way.
But these are the companies that create the kind of jobs a city like Winnipeg needs keep pace with the world. Nothing breeds success like success so maybe the next round of medical device companies will find the road just a little shorter and less dirty.
martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
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