General Campus - Regenerative Medicine Research Floor

Regenerative medicine is an emerging field that offers the best hope for promising advances in new therapies and possible cures for many diseases. It applies the tremendous advances that have been made in our understanding of genes, stem cells and biomaterials in order to develop new ways to stimulate growth and renewal—essentially allowing the body to heal itself.

The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute is becoming a major centre for this growing area of research, with 11 core scientists in the Regenerative Medicine Program and another 25 scientists and investigators conducting research in this area.

The urgent need for new facilities

The Sprott Centre for Stem Cell Research has allowed scientists to unlock many mysteries surrounding stem cells and how they function, including new insights into ways to stimulate cardiac stem cells to repair the heart. But to successfully turn these advances into new therapies, the OHRI needs more lab space and equipment to fully launch the next phase of this exciting research.

A new regenerative medicine floor will be created by developing and equipping an existing floor above the Sprott Centre at the General Campus – and we need your help to do it.

Expected benefits

• Larger facilities will allow the OHRI to hire up to six more research teams to expand its innovative programs. More state-of-the-art equipment will ensure that this lifesaving research can grow in scope and potential.
• The floor above the Sprott Centre currently houses vision researchers who are studying stem cells in an effort to treat and prevent age-related blindness. Once the research floor is fully developed and equipped, additional scientists will be able to work in tandem with vision researchers to apply the advances already underway, to other areas of the human body, including the brain, the spine and the heart.

Research already underway

• Eyes: Dr. May Griffith and her team have developed the world’s first bio-engineered cornea. They have created a “living” artificial cornea that is placed in the eye and, when injected with stem cells, becomes a new cornea—grown right inside the body.
• Heart: Dr. Duncan Stewart is working on a new stem cell strategy to repair damaged heart tissue (after a heart attack). The first-ever human clinical trials using this new therapy on cardiac patients will begin in Ottawa in 2009. Dr. Lynn Megeney has discovered a way to stimulate the growth of newly identified heart stem cells, which may offer a simple method to “bulk up” a failing heart. Ottawa is leading the world in this innovative clinical research in stem cell therapies.
• Spine: Dr. Eve Tsai is a neurosurgeon who is developing tube-shaped bio-structures that could be seeded with stem cells and inserted into a damaged spinal cord to stimulate growth and regeneration in the area of the injury. The ultimate goal is to patch a broken spinal cord, helping paralyzed patients walk again.

How you can help

The OHRI has been awarded a significant grant from the prestigious Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). But CFI grants require support from community donations. This floor cannot become a reality without your support.

The cost to complete the floor is $21.3 million. To date, $13.7 million has been contributed. The CFI will provide a $4.3 million grant. We are counting on the community to raise the remaining $3.3 million and make regenerative medicine a reality at The Ottawa Hospital. Your support is critical to help the OHRI move the revolutionary stem cell research already underway into clinical trials with patients in our community.

You can donate online, download our donation form or call us at 613-761-4295.