By VERNON CLEMENT JONES,Guardian Business Editor,vernon@nasguard.com

The Cancer Centre stands to leverage a $500k investment — expanding treatment to include chemotherapy — into 10 to 20 percent increase in the retention of Bahamian patients by 2011. It's a significant jump likely to help move it past the break-even point, its CEO told Guardian Business Monday.

"Our ultimate goal, of course, is to have it so 100 percent of Bahamians undergoing cancer treatment opt to do so here at home," Dr. Conville Brown said Monday, "but by moving to create a comprehensive center supported by the three pillars of cancer treatment — radiology, chemotherapy and/or surgery — we would expect to see our retention grow to 50 to 75 percent of Bahamians as opposed to the 40 to 60 percent we estimate is the current figure."

Meeting the goal is largely predicated on his ability to create a one stop shop for the large number of cancer patients who'll need to take more than one of those three treatment routes in order to arrive at recovery.

While the center welcomed its first patient for radiation in 2004 — with its doctors also performing surgical procedures at the country's hospitals — it has so far been unprepared to offer clients the regime of chemical therapy designed to kill cancer cells. That's poised to change sometime this quarter, said Brown. At the same time the addition of those services is likely to significantly grow the center's revenue stream in transforming it into the comprehensive unit he describes.

"We are current near the break-even point (financially)," he told Guardian Business. That in and of itself represents success, said one investment analyst pointing to the dearth of financing options for Bahamians entrepreneurs focused on growing our nascent medical services industry. While the center almost immediately won an exclusive agreement with the government for the provision of

cancer radiation for so-called "public patients", that deal, now in the renewals process, wasn't integral to winning financing for the $15 - $20m in medial equipment and infrastructure building needed to open shop, said Brown.

Funding came ahead of that contract, said the doctor, a cardiologist by training, whose center is certified by the U.S. authority in the field of cancer treatment, the American College of Radiation Oncology. The loans were, in fact, provided by GE and other vendors for its radiation equipment, that backing secured with the help of personal guarantees by the principals.

It was an onerous process that government should make easier, said Brown, if it wants to encourage the kind of diversification of the economy the center's Managing Director, Dr. Arthur Porter, will address at the Bahamas Business Outlook. That annual conference is focused on outlining the challenges ahead for the Bahamian economy and is set for this Thursday at the Nassau Wyndham.

While others advocating for the development of a full-fledged medical industry have called on government to extend guarantees for loans to entrepreneurs, Brown is suggesting its mere commitment to hire the services of those start-up businesses could be enough to sway bankers and other potential investors to loosen their purse strings. In theory, said one economists, that would help the grow our GDP outside of the struggling tourism and financial services sectors. Still, Brown looks at the development of his own industry from another perspective.

"Instead of having Bahamians be the medical tourists, headed off to the U.S., Canada or Cuba," he said Monday, "we are hoping to not only have them choose to stay here for their medical treatment but to have the level and quality of our care attract medical tourists to this country."