If you do an internet search on cleanrooms in Canada, you might find a few American based vendors who sell into Canada, the rare Canadian vendor in the cleanroom industry, and articles about my former company. You probably won’t find new information about cleanroom manufacturing and supply chain in Canada, which is unfortunate. We Canadians need to market ourselves and our cleanrooms better than we have to date.

With that in mind, it was quite refreshing to look around at Interphex Canada in Montreal this past September, and see that the contamination control and critical manufacturing industry in Canada is alive and well and thriving. The fact is, it has been for quite some time; we just forgot to tell everybody. Canada has a strong cleanroom manufacturing sector supported by a smaller but educated supply chain that provides everything from filtration to consumables to hard wall cleanrooms for pharmaceutical, biotech, aerospace, food, and electronic assembly, to name but a few industries. Controlled environments range in classification from ISO 4 to ISO 8 in degrees of cleanliness, in both aseptic and non-aseptic applications. Though the majority of these facilities are in Ontario and Quebec, typically within proximity to Toronto or Montreal, there are many manufacturing, academic, and governmental cleanroom facilities throughout Canada.

The diversity of cleanroom uses and ownership is somewhat unique to Canada — with cleanrooms that are used to process and package cottage cheese and specialty hams and prosciutto, and others used to manufacture cancer vaccines, glycotherapeutics, drugs to treat antibiotic-resistant microorganisms, molecular farming, and proteomics. Canada also has a number of GMP-certified facilities for the production of recombinant proteins, vaccines, and humanized monoclonal antibodies. Canadian facilities currently manufacture the majority of flu vaccines distributed through the World Health Organization.

Federal and provincial government operated cleanrooms include support for biotechnology, organic chemistry, microbial fermentation and SME research and development, and facilities to support start up companies, as demonstrated by the Alberta Research Council at the Edmonton based campuses. In Winnipeg, Manitoba, the High-Containment Biodefense Research Laboratories with a full fledged BSL-4 rated laboratory conducts research on a range of diseases and biohazards, including avian pandemic Influenza analysis.

Though fewer in number, Canadian academic institutions also operate cleanrooms throughout the country, supporting research in pharmaceutical, life sciences, microwave and photonic research, silicon fabrication, and nanotechnology-based research. Whereby North Carolina is home to the Research Triangle, Waterloo, Ontario is home to Canada’s Technology Triangle, which leads the pack in many pioneering technologies from wireless to internet to production technology; employing more than 18,000 people at more than 500 high tech companies. CTT is home to 150 research institutes as well as $347 million in Private-Sector Research and Development (2005). Companies like RIM Research in Motion (maker of the famous BlackBerry wireless handheld), Open Text, Electrohome, Dalsa, COM DEV International, AGFA Healthcare, NCR, Raytheon, MKS, and Descartes System Group are just a few of the names on the cutting edge of information technology, many of which have been fuelled by spin-off technologies from the University of Waterloo. The University of Waterloo is also now home to renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who recently accepted a research post at Waterloo. Professor Hawking will hold the title of distinguished research chair at the prestigious Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Waterloo.

So what’s doing in Canada? Just keep looking for this column to find out.

Robert Nightingale is Director of Research and Development, Ameripride Services Inc., and Canadian Linen and Uniform Services, CleanStyle Cleanroom Division. He has 20 years of experience in human source contamination and cleanroom apparel processing, as founder and President of Cleanroom GarmentsTM, with multiple cleanrooms supporting a vast array of cleanroom applications from aseptic fill operations, aerospace, and MEMS fabrication, to automotive paint spray operations. He is also a co-owner of several international patents for cleanroom soil removal processes. He holds bachelor and masters degrees in international relations from The University of Windsor, Canada, and is also a senior member of the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology.

Rob is the newest member of the Controlled Environments Editorial Advisory Board. We welcome his expertise as well as his perspective from years in the industry. Rob will be contributing articles on the Canadian market throughout the year.