Wisconsin’s economic development team and Senator Tammy Baldwin got a firsthand look Tuesday at where truth meets practice — or perhaps where chips meet electrons — in a $49 million federal investment to build out the state’s health technology sector.
During a tour of Accuray, a Madison-based company that makes sophisticated devices to treat cancer patients, Baldwin said the work at the company is emblematic of what Wisconsin’s new biohealth technology center plans to focus on in the coming years.
Federal investments in technology centers are part of the CHIPS and Science Act 2022, which aims to strengthen U.S.-based technology-related companies.
The idea grew out of a 2019 Brookings Institution paper that called for fostering “innovation hubs” across the country based on local industry strengths, Baldwin said. And when the CHIPS and Science Act was being drafted, “I thought about including the tech program in the bill, knowing Wisconsin was well positioned to be at the center of it all.”
Wisconsin’s proposal was one of a dozen that made it to the final selection for the federal technology center program. The state’s technology center focuses on “personalized medicine and biohealth” — advancing medical technology with diagnostic and treatment methods that can account for differences between patients.
“The health care we receive is often one-size-fits-all,” Baldwin said. “Personalized medicine will change that — it will tailor the care each of us receives to our individual characteristics. That means our friends, families and loved ones can get the care they need sooner and faster.”
Accuray designs and manufactures devices that use radiation therapy to treat cancer, as well as software and imaging technology for healthcare. The company’s Radixact system combines targeted radiation therapy with CT-like imaging. The system is designed to give users greater control over how much radiation a patient receives and where, allowing treatment to be more precisely targeted to the tumor rather than the healthy tissue around it.
The Cyberknife uses a robotic system to deliver X-rays or light particles to both malignant and non-malignant tumors. Because it can be maneuvered in many different ways, “the system expands the possible positions to focus radiation on the tumor while minimizing dose to surrounding healthy tissue,” Accuray explains on a patient education website.
Accuray is just one of 20 companies and organizations participating in the Wisconsin tech hub. “The synergy between all of these organizations will create something that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Baldwin said.
Wisconsin’s health technology center is expected to create 30,000 jobs and generate up to $9 billion in new investment over the next decade, she said.
The economic role of the public sector
The CHIPS Act and the Tech Hub program offer a test of how robust public investment can stimulate the domestic economy.
“This really shows the power of collaboration between state governments and the federal government. It gives states the opportunity to take advantage of things happening across the country and bring them here,” said Missy Hughes, CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
Publicly funded research universities such as the University of Wisconsin and the state technical college system, which trains people to work at precision manufacturers such as Accuray, are both part of the consortium involved in developing the technology center.
“These are public institutions that are important partners,” Baldwin said, “and none of this would work if we didn’t make the investments that we’re making in public research, nor what you see in industry across the state.”
A priority for the federal government is to invest in areas designated as technology hubs, whether it’s health care in Wisconsin or areas from clean energy to quantum computing, Hughes said – “in, as (Baldwin) said, your public institutions, your universities, your technical colleges.”
She added that there are other roles in the public sector, such as her own agency.
“You also need people like WEDC (in the) public sector to make those connections and help support the entrepreneurs and make sure that entrepreneurs have connections with companies like GE Healthcare or get the resources they need from the university,” Hughes told the Wisconsin Examiner. “So a collaborative approach to the tech hub driven by these public institutions helps grease the wheels and make sure that everyone is working together and seeing the opportunities to collaborate.”
Daniel Biank, vice president of Accuray, said in an interview that some of the public funds will go to support a common database to support the personalization of medical care.
“These are things that no company could build on its own — collecting all of the oncology data in the state of Wisconsin,” Biank said. “So we can see where our products are effective and then develop new products, especially for people who may not have been reached by our technology in the past, for the underrepresented population.”
There are limits to what the private sector alone can do, says Lisa Johnson, CEO of BioForward, an umbrella organization for the biohealth industry.
“These projects would not have happened without the government’s intervention – they would not have happened,” Johnson told the Wisconsin Examiner.
Johnson noted that Wisconsin lawmakers have been asked across party lines to contribute $7.5 million in addition to the federal funding for the technology center.
“Only one person voted against it because (the rest) recognized it’s an investment in Wisconsin,” she said. “This will help manufacturers across the state if we can continue to build on this. That requires some investment.”
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