Invention could revolutionize blood and fluid testing
By ALAN FINDLAY -- Toronto Sun
TORONTO -- Tucked in the northwest corner of Etobicoke, Umedik has grown in the past year from Dr. Peter Lea and borrowed lab space to two dozen employees knocking elbows around the counters.
E.coli research chat
Umedik's Cindy Mickune and Mike Novack joined us to discuss E.coli detection and other developments in speeding up diagnosis. Read the transcript.
The quiet company has another growing pain most researchers wouldn't mind suffering: Too many ideas.
The root of Umedik's enviable problem is an invention Lea likens to a three-dimensional, microscopic colander that doesn't clog. It's a kitchen-table invention that excited onlookers say could revolutionize testing procedures for health care, agriculture and any industry looking for a faster way of testing blood and other fluids of humans and animals.
Last May, anxious to test the freshly patented technology in a practical way, Lea's staff approached exhausted medical technicians in Walkerton testing for E.coli infections. The outbreak killed at least six people and sickened 2,000.
Lea's staff received 21 stool samples the technicians had already tested using the 24-hour procedure considered the industry's gold standard.
In less than 20 minutes, the lab had strained the samples and tested them. It confirmed seven infections and found four others that had gone undetected by the traditional test, which needs more time to let the bug multiply in order to better see it under a microscope.
DRAMATICALLY FASTER
Not only does Lea's little filter make the testing dramatically faster, it's also about 1,000 times more sensitive, he says. And, considering the E.coli bug doubles its population every 20 minutes, time is of the essence.
Dr. Peter Lea, owner of Umedik Inc. holds a Dia/Pro biochip. (SUN Photo, Ernest Doroszuk)
"So, if you have a million bugs, in 20 minutes you're going to have two million bugs -- and 20 minutes later you're going to have four million bugs. By the time you get around to get a result, you are probably dead unless you're (already) getting some kind of treatment," Lea says.
The astonishing result was just one in a series of eureka-like moments Lea and company have experienced at their Galaxy Blvd. lab in the past year.
One initially skeptical Toronto doctor who toured Umedik's small lab recently was stunned by the potential of Lea's discovery.
"To be quite honest, it's incredible," said Dr. Miles Moore, who has practised emergency, family and aviation medicine in Canada, the U.S. and Britain. "Each week, something new comes up that is feasible to do."
Paramedics and emergency room doctors could soon test the blood of cardiac patients on scene within minutes, accelerating treatment and diagnosis.
If all goes according to plan, a person with high cholesterol on vacation could soon test their blood (only a pin prick on the finger required) with a hand-held reader, get the results and be referred immediately to a doctor if need be. Government officials could test imported livestock for contamination before it enters the country.
The speed and ease of the testing could also help doctors detect irreversible diseases such as Alzheimer's and osteoporosis before symptoms arise, Lea says.
Using just a few drops of blood, a family doctor could run up to a dozen tests on a single, $10-or-so biochip slide.
Lea's filter and ensuing DIA/PRO biochip system was born at his kitchen table 12 months before Walkerton's E.coli outbreak. At the light-hearted prodding of a few colleagues, Lea set out to find a fast, direct way to separate plasma from blood cells.
Current technology is a slow and expensive process of carting vials of blood to a lab where it's run through a centrifuge and separated before tests can be run. Quantitative results for heart attack patients, for example, can take a couple of hours, doctors complained to him.
"One day in the shower I had this crazy idea and I tried it out and it worked the first time," he says.
Lea borrowed a corner of donated lab space from a colleague and set to work on patenting and developing his ideas, which incorporate quantum physics, biotechnology and computing. Having proven the technology using pin-prick-drawn blood samples, he wondered whether it would work on other biofluids.
Lea asked a researcher to stop by a farm on the way to work and pick up some cow feces.
"We swabbed some on the chip and all the E.coli instantaneously came out of the cow crap, pure and labelled," he says, showing a crystal-clear computerized image of several E.coli bacteria glowing brightly in a fluorescent green dye.
They tried cheese and yogurt, especially tough foods to test, and both ran through the filter in an instant, he said.
IMPACT RINGS HOME
With each discovery, the potential impact of their discovery began to ring home, says Christine Simonelli, who heads Umedik's corporate affairs.
The American agricultural market alone tests 570 million cattle carcasses each year, she says. Fewer than 5% of those tests at $10 a pop is more than $250 million a year, she says.
"How big can this be? Let's put it this way: It's too vast. It's so big we couldn't conceivably do all the tests with the people we have in 20 years," she says.
The small, private company has already attracted some large investors. In April 1999, Umedik made an unlikely alliance with junior mining company Columbia Metals Corp. Ltd. for $850,000 in research funding. Last January, a New York-based venture capital company called Invisible Hand served up $8.65 million US in funding.
Umedik plans to release its first DIA/PRO kit for testing E.coli contamination this month. The kit includes a small clear chip resembling a microscope slide that automatically filters samples and prepares the strained fluid for testing. A specially designed bench-top chip reader will test for E.coli contamination in stool samples within minutes rather than hours.
If the reader detects an infection, it would also count the E.coli. Subsequent tests could then tell whether the infection is getting better or worse. Another kit is expected out by next spring to detect a protein that may predict the onset of Alzheimer's long before clinical symptoms appear.
Ultimately, the company envisions providing hand-held readers to patients to run simple tests on themselves using the cheap, disposable biochips. The results would be transmitted and stored in a central database so that each patient would have a complete record of tests in one location.
After spending five hours touring Umedik's lab, Bradford-based Dr. John Fitzsimons is eager to test the new technology in his semi-rural practice.
"That's quantum leap, that's remarkable," he says. "For me, it's like discovering a new microscope." |
