innovator
| by Michelle Currie
Qvella’s technology set to reduce time to results in microbiology Tino Alavie President, Co-founder and CEO of Qvella
T
he constant need for speed isn’t just for race car driving or the roadrunner. It is imperative in many aspects of the modern world – including medicine and technology – as society advances towards a more syndicate future. Qvella, a company from Richmond Hill, Ontario, specialises in molecular diagnostics making it their mission to dramatically reduce the time to results in microbiology. This objective has the company whizzing to attain actionable results in clinically relevant time frames that may save a patient in the nick of time. Tino Alavie, president, co-founder and CEO of Qvella, realised that microbiology was still being done in very much the same style as Louis Pasteur – a technology a hundred years old – and that where molecular technology has clearly penetrated virology in bacteriology, it was nowhere to be seen. Recognising that there was not yet innovation in this category for clinical laboratories, he and four of his colleagues came together
to create Qvella. The aim is to speed up the process of microbiology and develop technologies that would dramatically change the way microbiology was being conducted in clinical settings. Hence, their tagline “Microbiology in minutes”. “We identified the Achilles heel of microbiology as sample prep,” says Alavie. “It’s very difficult to deal with blood because of two things. One is the background in blood, you have lots of interference, but also because of the scarcity of the pathogens. If you’re looking for pathogens in one millilitre of blood, you have tens if not hundreds of billions of cells – human cells, white blood cells, red blood cells, countless platelets, and just a few pathogenic cells in that sterile fluid. So, it’s a complicated problem because you’re truly looking for a needle in the haystack.” It is a monumentally challenging task. Traditionally, Louis Pasteur cultured biological fluids so that over time the pathogens and environment would flourish to become detectable and visible and no longer lost in the milieu. However, patients don’t always have the time for that. Time is of the essence in health care. Tino visited The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to learn of the magnitude of health care problems that surround the industry. Here he was informed of the increasing prevalence in multi-drug resistant pathogens, commonly referred to as ‘Superbugs’ that are learning mechanisms to circumvent the antibiotics. Also that sepsis, an inflammatory response to the presence of an infection is increasing and is the second leading cause of death in hospitals in North
America, while at the same time is the most expensive condition to treat. The confluence of all these problems suggested that there is a very large issue in health care and that it may become worse over time. For altruistic reasons, Alavie and his colleagues created Qvella because this was something they just couldn’t ignore. “For the first couple years, we were simply solving science problems. It was a science project. We all believed it and believed this was the opportunity,” says Alavie. “So, that was the first two years. Then, as we made progress, we reached out to various government agencies and some angel investors to reach a point where we were able to demonstrate the clinical utility of our alpha prototype in 2015. We were then able to track venture capital institutional investors for a Series A that we closed in late 2015. For the past two years we’ve been productising, and in late 2017 announced the Series B financing and our plan to finish the product manufacturing process and be able to start
“What I find extraordinarily exciting about Qvella is that we are doing something that could change human lives, save human lives.” April/May 2018 BIOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS 27
