THUNDER BAY — Plans to make the Lake Superior Centre for Regenerative Medicine Ontario's new tissue transplant hub, creating more than two dozen new jobs, remain on hold pending a provincial review.
In May 2018, just before the provincial election, the Liberal government announced that the Ministry of Health had partnered with the non-profit RegenMed to expand Ontario's tissue processing system.
The Thunder Bay facility was to handle the preparation, storage and distribution of all tissue donated in the province for transplant purposes including skin, heart valve, bone and connective tissue.
Tissue, once processed, can be stored until needed for as long as five years.
Currently, RegenMed is the designated bone and connective tissue centre, while the heart valve processing centre is based at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, and skin for burn victims is processed at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.
At the spring announcement, officials said consolidating all services in Thunder Bay would integrate tissue services and eliminate redundancies, while at the same time resulting in 27 local jobs and three jobs in Toronto.
"This change is part of a larger provincial tissue system transformation recommended in the 2014 Tissue Banking in Ontario Report," the ministry said.
The new system would help meet the demand for tissue from hospitals across the province, and would also "help position Ontario as a leader in Canada for transplant-ready tissue."
RegenMed was to receive about $10 million to expand its laboratory.
Executive-director says RegenMed project has a solid business case
Dave Stezenko, executive-director of RegenMed, says that after the election, "the word that everyone in the province got was to hold tight" because the new government needed time to evaluate programs and budgets.
"We're just waiting now to find out when the government is going to move forward with the capital project and the expansion," he said in an interview.
No decisions have been announced yet about the tissue project, but Stezenko said he is optimistic that the business case remains strong.
RegenMed has already submitted a brief to government officials, and will have a face-to-face meeting with them next month in Toronto.
Asked if he was concerned the project might be cancelled, Stezenko said "There's no indication at this point that we should be thinking that way...We have every hope and expectation that it will move forward."
Thunder Bay Mayor Bill Mauro, who participated in the May announcement as MPP for Thunder Bay-Atikokan, was cautious in assessing the prospect that the project will eventually proceed.
It "seems to have stalled...there's not a lot that I can say. Only that the longer it goes on, the principals involved as well as the City of Thunder Bay, would have an increasing concern," Mauro told Tbnewswatch.
The mayor said the people involved in the tissue project in Thunder Bay have worked hard on it for a number of years.
"It has the opportunity to continue to grow and continue to diversify the (local) economy and add more knowledge-based jobs. We're still hopeful, and hopefully we'll have some good news in the near future."
According to Stezenko, an earlier plan would have seen tissue banks consolidated in Toronto "which would have meant the closure of ReGen Med. We got into the weeds to prove to the decision-makers that there was a real reason to have it in Thunder Bay...There are significant savings. We were delighted last year when that decision was made."
Tbnewswatch asked the Ministry of Health about the status of the review.
A spokesperson acknowledged the inquiry but the ministry has not issued a response as yet.
