Partners

Governance

The HLI is a University of British Columbia (UBC) Senate-approved centre of cardiovascular and pulmonary expertise, housed within Providence Health Care's St. Paul’s Hospital. Therefore, as shown on the right, we have dual reporting structures. The HLI Director reports directly to both the VP of Research of the PHC Research Institute (PHCRI) and UBC’s Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Medicine. HLI’s Strategic Plan, as well as targets for annual research productivity, operations, and overall deliverables, are reviewed and updated upon initiation of each new Director’s five-year term.

The HLI has been dedicated to establishing and maintaining processes to secure diversified and growing sources of funding over the past 35 years. Indeed, we have significantly leveraged our initial Canada Foundation Innovation awards in 2000 to attract further investment (including public, private and foreign investments into infrastructure and operations) and have garnered more than $104M in operating grants. This success reflects the importance of our work and the excellence of our research and expertise, as does the strategic priority given to us by partners Providence Care Health Research Institute, UBC Faculty of Medicine, and St. Paul’s Hospital. These institutions have committed to ongoing fundraising campaigns (e.g. cardiopulmonary research chairs) and/or support for HLI research activities and associated needs.

Diverse Users and Processes to Allocate Access to the Facility

Further revenues are provided by our established fee-for-service models. These procedures have worked well for more than a decade of HLI core technology and research service provision to internal and external users from both academia and industry. Our service provision not only extends the scientific impact of our capabilities to other Canadian researchers, but has also become a growing source of funding on the path to self-sufficient sustainability.

Over the past three years, in addition to our 33 internal investigators, a minimum of 697 external users per annum have requested and received access to the HLI Technology Cores each year to contribute to their national and international research projects. In 2013, for example, 96% of users were external to the HLI. Of these, 74% were external to UBC and 54% were external to British Columbia (see Table 1).

Table 1. Geographic Distribution and Number of External Facility Users between 2012- 2014

Geographic Distribution of HLI Users	Total number of users
	2012	2013	2014
From Host Institution (UBC)	184	176	181
From local Institutions/Organizations	124	133	140
From Provinces (excluding users at Host Institution)	134	135	142
From outside Canada (USA and international)	255	255	242
Breadth and Diversity of HLI Users
From Industry (Pharmaceutical companies)	36	37	40
From Academic Biomedical Engineering	5	6	10
From Academic Health Sciences	625	609	596
From  Academic Computer Sciences	3	6	9
From Academic Pharmacy/Pharmacology	8	14	17
From Academic Clinical	14	19	22
From Biotechnology Companies	6	8	11
TOTAL (% of Users External to HLI PIs)	697 (95%)	699 (95%)	705 (96%)

As noted in Table 1, the HLI’s external users are not just geographically diverse but also encompass a broad range of scientific disciplines and conduct their research on different scales and across sectors (e.g., from single academic labs, to large research networks, to biotech and big pharmaceutical industry  players). Too numerous to list comprehensively, some of our industry-based users include Merck, Astra Zeneca, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline. The far-reaching partnerships and collaborations fostered and enabled by our facility are local, national and international.