Feds move closer to quick, portable COVID-19 testing through contract with Ottawa company

Ottawa-based medical device manufacturing company Spartan Bioscience is just weeks away from shipping out portable COVID-19 testing devices, expected to deliver results for patients in a half hour.

CEO Dr. Paul Lem says his company is still waiting on Health Canada approval, but the government has signed a contract which has allowed it to get production started.

“The challenge was simply to get the financing to actually ramp up our supply chain,” explained Dr. Lem on 1310 NEWS' The Rob Snow Show. “So the government was extremely flexible with us where we now have the capital, we have the purchase orders, and so we've literally been spending millions and millions of dollars in the last week and a half, ramping up our supply chain.”

The Spartan Cube testing device is about the size of a coffee cup and has been used for the last 14 years as a DNA analyzing tool.

Dr. Lem said it's been modified to test for COVID-19 and it definitely works to produce accurate results. He added, there is a low technical risk to what his company is doing because it is simply taking the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-approved swab test and putting it into a regulatory-approved design.

The way the test works is a swab sample goes into a test cartridge, and that test cartridge goes into the cube, which produces the final result.

Dr. Lem says Spartan Bioscience is getting ready to produce millions of cartridges, and the company has even linked up with a local swab manufacurer to make that part of the overall package eventually being shipped out.

The CEO said mass testing, along with physical distancing, helped stem the tide of the coronavirus in South Korea, and he's hoping to be part of a similar solution in Canada.

“It could be anyone you're walking past on the sidewalk — they look healthy, but they're actually not, and they could infect you,” said Dr. Lem. “That's why you need that wide-spread testing to identify the people who even have no symptoms, and then once they know, they can go into isolation.”

Spartan Bioscience has recieved offers from other countries for their device, but Dr. Lem says they are looking to serve Canada first.