QvEllA’S TEchnOlOgy SET TO REDUcE TiME TO RESUlTS in MicRObiOlOgy

Qvella’s technOlOgy set tO reduce time

to results in microbiology

the 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

tino alavie president, co-founder and ceo of Qvella

“what i find extraordinarily exciting about Qvella is that we are doing something that could change human lives, save human lives.”

clinical trials with the final product sometime late 2018.”

The name Qvella is meant to encapsulate all pathogenic cells. So, the “Q” is derived from the idea that in medicine “Q” means everything, and with the company desire to capture what is difficult to capture they took the Spanish form of the word sail, which is “vella” and put the two together. It is analogous to being able to capture all pathogens.

“In the beginning, we faced financing hurdles and being able to do some of the things we wanted to do. So, on the financial side, we had some hurdles attracting money and finding money in Canada. That’s why a huge part of it was self-funded at the beginning. But finding money in Canada, especially for an in vitro diagnostics company is very difficult,” comments Alavie.

“The other problem we had, because we started out with urine and that’s what we had come to appreciate from UCLA, was quickly learning that the biggest prize and most challenging is blood. Blood is a very difficult sample to deal with. So, when we transitioned from urine to blood our problems in terms of technical difficulty went up by two if not three orders in magnitude, maybe even more,” adds Alavie. “It actually set us back over a year because we had to go back to the drawing board and come up with techniques and methodologies that would enable or lend themselves to being able to process blood samples.”

Qvella’s technology is comprised of two parts – an instrument the size of a printer and a cartridge that contains all the chemistries in wet and dry format that you would need to run the assay. It is a touchscreen system that is fairly simple to use and only takes 60 seconds of your time. Overall, the machine will need to take 45 minutes to complete the testing, but it is a step in the right direction to bring results from the bench to the bedside in a shorter duration of time.

“We are now over 60 employees,” says Alavie. “I consider myself an extraordinarily lucky man to be by such intelligent, hardworking people. We’ve been blessed with a pleasant start-up environment because we know the strengths of the various individuals and they know their place in the company and what they need to do, and that functions well together.”

Tino is a serial entrepreneur and has been running companies in various stages of growth for over two decades. Qvella is the fourth company with which he holds the title of CEO.

“What I find extraordinarily exciting about Qvella is that we are doing something that could change human lives, save human lives,” says Alavie. “If you look at how antibiotics are administered today and how they are prescribed, it’s always empirically done because microbiology is simply too late to meaningfully impact treatment decision making. So, the ability to within less than one hour inform clinicians if you have an infection and what type of infection is remarkable. It enables them to a) administer therapy right away, b) start with a tailored therapy, reduce side effect profiles, reducing associated costs, reducing perhaps length of hospitalization and increased mortality, reducing comorbidity, all those things. It’s a very exciting time.”

The technology from Qvella’s lab has the potential to revolutionize the way researchers look at microbiology. Drastically cutting the time for physicians to receive pertinent information, only increases the potential to save a life – and that is what this industry is all about.

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.

To see this story online visit https://biotechnologyfocus.ca/qvellastechnology-set-to-reduce-time-to-results-i n-microbiology/