Here are some answers about the spartan cube, I've looked from time to time.
Don't engineers get tech from the lab to the consumer? Maybe they need one?
There’s a vast difference these days between what is and what should have been for Paul Lem, the founder of Spartan Bioscience of Ottawa.
ottawacitizen.com
The big wait: an entrepreneur's agony at Spartan Bioscience
There’s a vast difference these days between what is and what should have been for Paul Lem, the founder of Spartan Bioscience of Ottawa.
Three months ago, his company secured Health Canada’s emergency use approval for the Spartan Cube — a portable lab-in-a-box that tests for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. The Cube produces results in less than an hour, compared to days for tests done through laboratories.
Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and the federal government promptly ordered nearly two million test cartridges and the Cube devices that process them — approaching $200 million worth of potential business with more to follow, all of it contingent on the performance of the initial samples.
Lem reckoned Spartan would be shipping hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 test cartridges every week by mid-July.
Instead, he finds himself deep in limbo. On May 1, Health Canada advised him Spartan’s proprietary swab wasn’t picking up sufficient quantities of the virus DNA to ensure accurate readings, a not uncommon problem with testing technologies that rely on relatively non-invasive swabs, as is the case with the Cube.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/the-big-wait-an-entrepreneurs-agony-at-spartan-bioscience
Lem promptly shut down the firm’s production line and, ever since, Spartan’s scientists have been experimenting with different sampling methods. A decision from Health Canada on whether the revised methods work is expected any day. Of course, a ruling has been expected imminently for the past few weeks.
This is an entrepreneur’s nightmare.
It’s not just that Lem has to keep a rather complicated supply chain on standby. Wistron Corp. of Taiwan is to manufacture the Cubes and L-D Tool & Die of Stittsville makes the swabs and cartridge. Lem had also lined up a Toronto-based contract manufacturer, believed to be Sanmina, to handle the higher expected volumes of swabs and cartridges.
As long as these firms believe there’s a reasonable chance Spartan Bioscience can solve the technical issues, they’ll hang in.
What’s keeping Lem and his investors awake at night is the potential lost opportunity here. When Health Canada warned Lem about his test swabs two-and-a-half months ago, the country’s laboratories had conducted about 800,000 tests for the coronavirus. Since then, an additional 2.3 million tests have been performed, 56 per cent of them in Ontario.
These tests are all being performed by technology built outside Canada. Twenty-six devices have been authorized by Health Canada to perform COVID-19 tests since last March — including 21 aimed at detecting the infection caused by the virus, and five devices that can spot antibodies that signal the body’s response to an infection.
more...