Mike Hoge, senior vice president for global operations at Accuray, describes some of the firm's radiation treatment equipment to Sen. Tammy Baldwin, left, and WEDC CEO Missy Hughes, right, in a tour of the Madison company's operations Tuesday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
Wisconsin’s economic development team and Sen. Tammy Baldwin got a first-hand look Tuesday on where the rubber meets the road — or perhaps where the chips meet the electrons — for a $49 million federal investment in building the state’s health care technology sector.
On a tour of Accuray, a Madison company that makes sophisticated machinery for treating cancer patients, Baldwin said the work at the business is emblematic of what Wisconsin’s new biohealth tech hub aims to focus on in the coming years.
Federal investments in technology hubs are part of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, aimed at bolstering U.S.-based technology-related businesses.
The idea grew out of a 2019 Brookings Institution paper that called for fostering “innovation hubs” around the country based on local industrial strengths, Baldwin said. And when the CHIPS and Science Act was being drafted, “I thought to include the technical program in the bill, knowing that Wisconsin was well-positioned to be at the center of it all.”
Wisconsin’s was one of a dozen proposals that made the final cut for the federal tech hub program. The state’s tech hub focuses on “personalized medicine and biohealth” — advancing medical technology with diagnosis and treatment methods that can address the variations among patients.
“The health care we get is often one size fits all,” Baldwin said. “Personalized medicine will change that — will tailor the care that each of us gets, uniquely based on our individual characteristics. This will mean our friends, families and loved ones can get the care that they need earlier and faster.”
Accuray develops and manufactures machines that apply radiation to treat cancer as well as software and imaging technology for health care. The company’s Radixact system combines targeted radiation treatment with imaging similar to a CT scan. Its design allows operators greater control over how much radiation a patient gets and where, so that the treatment can be targeted more precisely just to a tumor and not the healthy tissue that might surround it.
The Cyberknife uses a robotic system to deliver radiation treatment in the form of X-rays or light particles both to cancerous and non-cancerous tumors. Since it can be maneuvered in a wide variety of ways, the system is “significantly expanding the possible positions to concentrate radiation to the tumor while minimizing dose to surrounding healthy tissue,” Accuray explains on a patient education website.
Accuray is just one of 20 businesses and organizations taking part in the Wisconsin tech hub. “The synergy between all of these organizations is going to create something greater than the sum of its parts,” said Baldwin.
Wisconsin’s health tech hub is projected to create 30,000 jobs and as much as $9 billion in new investment in the next decade, she said.
Public sector’s economic role
The CHIPS Act and the tech hub program offer a test of how robust public investment could boost a stronger domestic economy.
“It really shows the power that state and federal government working together can really demonstrate, as an opportunity for states to be able to take advantage of things that are happening across the nation and bring them home here,” said Missy Hughes, CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
Publicly supported research universities like the University of Wisconsin and the state technical college system that helps train people to work for precision manufacturers like Accuray are both part of the consortium involved in developing the tech hub.
“Those are public institutions that are key partners,” Baldwin said, “and this all wouldn’t work unless we were making the investments we make in public research as well as what you see in industry across the state.”
It was a federal priority to invest in the areas that were named as tech hubs, whether health care in Wisconsin or in areas ranging from clean energy to quantum computing, Hughes said — “in, as [Baldwin] said, your public institutions, your universities, your tech colleges.”
There are other public sector roles as well, she added — such as her own agency.
“You also need folks like WEDC [in the] public sector, providing those connections and helping to support the entrepreneurs, and making sure that entrepreneurs have connections to companies like GE Healthcare, or are getting the resources they need from the university,” Hughes told the Wisconsin Examiner. “So having a collaborative approach to the tech hub forced by these public institutions helps to grease the wheels and make sure that everybody is working together and seeing the opportunities to work together.”
Daniel Biank, an Accuray vice president, said in an interview that some of the public sector funding will go to support a shared database that will help the mission of personalizing medical care.
“These are things that no one company could build on their own — gathering up all the oncology data in the state of Wisconsin,” Biank said, “which allows us to see where our products are effective and then develop new products, especially for people that haven’t, perhaps, been met by our technology in the past, the underrepresented population.”
There are limits to what the private sector alone can do, said Lisa Johnson, CEO of BioForward, an umbrella group for the biohealth industry.
“These projects would not have happened without the government coming in — would not have happened,” Johnson told the Wisconsin Examiner.
Johnson noted that when the Wisconsin Legislature was asked to chip in $7.5 million in addition to the federal support for the tech hub, lawmakers did so across party lines.
“Only one person voted against that, because [the rest] recognized that’s an investment into Wisconsin,” she said. “That helps manufacturers throughout the state if we can continue to build upon this. That takes some investment.”
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