Skip to main content

Paul Lem, CEO and founder of Ottawa startup Spartan Bioscience Inc., has created a device that can bring on-the-spot DNA testing into every pharmacy, doctor’s office – and eventually home – by enabling people to perform DNA tests in 30 minutes.Alex Collier

Paul Lem has worked for 12 years to develop a breakthrough technology: a portable device that would bring DNA testing to the masses. The co-founder and chief executive of Ottawa startup Spartan Bioscience Inc. has long believed his patented clock-radio-sized device called The Cube could one day be ubiquitous in hospitals, pharmacies, doctors' offices and homes, enabling users to test for everything from E. coli to venereal diseases. He has even been financed by giant Canon Inc.

But Dr. Lem needed a "killer app" to drive mass adoption, similar to what spreadsheets did for personal computers and wireless e-mail did for smartphones. He always assumed it would come from the medical field (the Mayo Clinic is using his technology in a study to determine how heart-disease patients respond to drugs based on gene types). "We never knew what the application was going to be, [only] that it was going to be huge," Dr. Lem said.

Now, he believes he's found his killer app. It's not for doctors, but building managers: a test for Legionnaires' disease, a severe and often fatal respiratory affliction caused by inhaling airborne water droplets emanating from man-made water systems such as cooling towers and fountains contaminated with legionella bacteria.

Thanks to an inbound inquiry from a Canadian property-management company last year, Dr. Lem learned that legionella is a pervasive, serious and expensive problem: There have been countless outbreaks since the 1976 disaster for which it is named, when 34 attendees died at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. In the past year, outbreaks caused by contaminated cooling towers have hit casinos in Las Vegas and Macau, the California Disneyland and facilities in New Zealand and New York State.

In the United States alone, the number of reported cases has sharply increased since 2000 and the U.S. Occupational Health Administration estimates there may be up to 50,000 cases annually. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found in a recent survey that 40 per cent of tested U.S. cooling towers contained live legionella bacteria, and has estimated related costs for those admitted to hospitals run into the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The risk is heightened among men, smokers, the elderly and those with weak immune systems.

"I had no idea about this" beforehand, Dr. Lem said. "Then, as we peeled back the onion, [we realized] this is probably bigger than the whole medical market … and it's [addressing] a clear and present danger to human health."

Where regulations exist for regular legionella testing – Ottawa, a global leader in regulation, requires its buildings to be tested and Quebec recently mandated similar checks for all cooling towers in the province – property managers spend thousands of dollars monthly for every building.

Samples are shipped to labs that can take two weeks to produce results, which are often inaccurate.

Spartan's machine, a miniaturized lab in an aluminum box, uses a different DNA-testing method based on Nobel Prize-winning chemistry known as Polymerase Chain Reaction. It can produce accurate results onsite in 45 minutes, and is designed so that lay people can use it by inserting a tiny cartridge of sample water into the machine.

"It's elegant, it's small, it's portable, it's robust, it works really well and you don't need to call in Scotty from the Enterprise to make things work," said Brenda Jarrell, Spartan's patent lawyer with Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston. The solution recently won an innovation award from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

Now, Dr. Lem is awaiting the results of a 12-week pilot study in Canada being conducted by the federal Public Services and Procurement department. Using The Cube, the department – which had legionella scares at three buildings in the Ottawa-Gatineau region in 2015 – is testing to detect the bacteria legionella in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems, cooling towers and water systems at

35 properties and comparing the results with those from traditional DNA labs.

Depending on the results, the department will "decide whether it will integrate the innovation into its operations" – which includes 3,800 properties managed by Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions (BGIS) – a government spokesperson said. At a price of $5,000-plus a year for every building to use the Spartan system, such a contract could provide millions of dollars in annual revenue. That's just a start.

Dr. Lem said several property managers are testing the device at close to 100 properties, including BGIS and Ottawa's KRP Properties, owned by tech entrepreneur Terry Matthews. "The potential for [Spartan] are pretty impressive," said Terry Young, KRP's director of operations. A spokeswoman for BGIS said her company is "reviewing its potential application across our portfolio of properties" based on test results.

The market could be worth billions of dollars globally, encompassing office buildings, malls, hospitals, schools, theme parks, spas and so on, Dr. Lem figures. "Nobody really knows because the market doesn't really exist yet," he said. While New York State last year implemented testing regulations for owners of cooling towers, hospitals and residential health-care facilities, there is no single set of legionella-testing guidelines in the United States, and standards vary across jurisdictions, where they exist. A few countries, including Germany and Singapore, have testing regulations. Spartan's potential market size could depend on Canadian authorities pushing global standard-setting bodies to follow its lead.

Meanwhile, Dr. Lem is ready to go big. He's struck a deal with an unidentified Asian electronics contract manufacturing giant to invest in Spartan and produce the device. Spartan, with 70 employees – including several seasoned executives from Ottawa's tech scene – is preparing to hire hundreds more so it can scale up.

Dr. Lem still believes Spartan has a big opportunity in medicine and continues to pursue those applications. "It just turns out this new product area [in legionella testing] will probably dwarf our other products," he said.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe