John Gregory, a former journalist, and a partner at Toronto-based CGC Educational Communications, describes work to design and build and what is said to be the world’s first organ regeneration laboratory, at Toronto General Hospital in Canada. A senior redevelopment director at the new facility says the procedures undertaken there will ‘change what is done across the planet’.
The largest health research organisation in Canada had one chance to get it right — 'it' being building two mini-operating rooms (ORs) in a live suite of 20 sterile ORs. "We're talking about a city of individuals that are having different surgeries in 16 to 18 ORs at any one time," said Christopher Rizzo, Executive director of redevelopment at the University Health Network (UHN). Complicating the endeavour was the pandemic. "The first day we did our site review was the day COVID hit," explained Keith Button, Senior architectural designer at Kearns Mancini Architects (KMAI). "We were on site when everything locked down. We had to get the director of Infection Control at UHN to help us exit the hospital."
Not the typical start to a new project, but then again this is among the most unique projects on the planet.
Christopher Rizzo and Keith Button are specifically speaking about the design and building of the world's first organ regeneration laboratory (ORL) at Toronto General Hospital (TGH), the number one transplant hospital in North America. The TGH transplant surgeons who developed the regeneration technologies had been honing their techniques in an existing operating room. Such ORs can be up to 700 to 1,200 ft2 in size, so it was overkill for their spatial needs, and not the best use of precious hospital resources. They brought the concept of a dedicated lab to Christopher Rizzo.
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