A biotech conglomerate led by Canadian real estate investors has developed a rapid COVID-19 test they believe can help governments lift lockdowns and businesses reopen. 

Tridan/CBS claims its device, called the Zekmed, can detect antibodies for active infections and those from which patients have recovered. If approved by Health Canada, it would be among the first Canadian rapid tests on the market. 

“The biggest problem in Canada right now is speed,” said Alexandre Triquet, CEO of Montreal-based real estate firm Tridan and its new joint venture with a local biotech firm CBS. “We need mass screening in the country. It needs to happen in the field, and it can’t take days to get the results.” 

While Triquet and his Montreal colleagues have funded Zekmed’s development, the device itself is manufactured in Switzerland by the group’s European colleagues. It works like an insulin test by pricking a patient’s finger to draw a small amount of blood. It processes the sample onsite and claims to deliver results within 15 minutes. Triquet said the firm has the capacity to deliver five million tests per week to Canada. 

Rapid testing is considered a more affordable method of COVID-19 screening than standard tests that need to be processed in a laboratory. And while antigen and antibody tests like the Zekmed are less accurate than molecular diagnostic tests, more governments have started employing the kits to fill gaps in public health units’ regular testing capacities. 

While Health Canada has approved a few rapid testing options, their rollout has been limited.  Triquet said he was motivated to increase Canada’s access to rapid testing in part by self-preservation. By the time the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, he was already worried about the impact on his real estate business. He had been watching the virus spread across China and Europe—two important markets for Tridan—closing travel and business in its wake and driving down the stock market. 

He knew that for Canada to keep its economy afloat, and for his business to survive, governments needed better access to resources to track the virus and protect residents; Triquet wanted to help make that happen. 

He leveraged his contacts in China and Europe and, starting in early April, he helped charter planes for Quebec full of personal protective equipment to the province—including two deliveries from the Antonov An-225 Mriya, the world’s largest cargo plane. 

During those missions, Triquet said he got a glimpse of rapid tests being shipped elsewhere around the world. He brought one of them to Dr. Richard Marchand, a medical microbiologist and infectiologist at the Montreal Heart Institute and a medical-device consultant. “He said this is the thing we need to win against the pandemic,” said Triquet. 

While Triquet was working with government officials and medical experts to import PPE, another Montreal-based entrepreneur was developing the kind of rapid COVID-19 test that Triquet was looking to distribute in Canada. In early February, Lionel El Haddad, a microbiologist specializing in disaster management, began working with colleagues from the European Union’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Risk Mitigation Centres of Excellence Initiative  on a test to rapidly detect who in the population had been exposed to the virus. The group began testing their device on patients in China who were known to have had the virus. “We started improving the quality of the test and increasing the accuracy by getting to know more about the virus,” said El Haddad. 

After hearing about El Haddad’s work, Triquet reached out for a meeting. He convinced the microbiologist that his government contacts in Canada and globally could be an asset for getting customers and finding distribution networks for their test. By late April, they had created a joint venture and secured exclusive rights to distribute the Zekmed.

Tridan/CBS has conducted clinical trials in Russia and Switzerland, and has received regulatory approval in both countries. In September, the company completed a third clinical trial at the Cirion research lab in Montreal. The study tested staff of the Montreal Heart Institute who were infected or had possibly been infected by the virus. The researchers collected 113 blood samples and tested them using the Zekmed and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 antibody reference test kit. “The comparison made showed an agreement of 99%,” according to the study results, which have yet to be published. The company claims it replicated the results three times. 

Triquet and his team, which includes ten of his real estate colleagues from Tridan, are now waiting for U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada approval to distribute the test in North America. They’ve had meetings with the Ontario and Quebec government officials in a bid to secure public orders for the tests, and the company has registered to lobby Ottawa to “[pursue] a contract” for the test kits. It is also working on a second device that El Haddad said can detect an active infection in less than a minute. He said the company plans to file a patent for the technology imminently; it has yet to be tested. 

Tridan/CBS isn’t the only Canadian firm vying to fill the dearth of rapid testing in Canada. In June, Guelph, Ont.-based Precision Biomonitoring received Health Canada approval to sell and distribute a COVID-19 rapid test from U.S.-based firm Biomeme. In April, Spartan Bioscience received Health Canada approval for its rapid-test kits under an interim order that accelerated the authorization and use of COVID-19-related medical devices. The governments of Ontario and Alberta placed orders for over 900,000 and 100,000 tests, respectively, and the federal government pledged US$74 million to help Spartan ramp up production. Less than a month later, the Public Health Agency of Canada noted that Spartan’s swabs may not be collecting enough material to produce accurate test results; the product was pulled and sent back to the lab for more clinical testing; Health Canada still has not approved it for commercial use. 

A Dartmouth, N.S.-based company, Sona Nanotech, began developing a rapid COVID-19 test back in February. Eight months later, the firm—whose technology promises results in 15 minutes—is still waiting for Health Canada approval. 

Canada was well positioned to lead in rapid COVID-19 testing early in the pandemic, said Sahir Khan, executive vice-president at the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, a University of Ottawa think tank. “I was getting information from U.S. think tanks on the state of vaccines and quick tests. The sense was that nobody else was doing this,” said Khan.

In the following months, however, the government has attracted criticism for falling behind on approving rapid tests and placing orders to buy and distribute them. Health Canada didn’t approve its first antigen test until October 6 (Ottawa has yet to receive shipments of the test), and the government received its first order for rapid tests to detect active infections last week; both tests are manufactured by Chicago-based medtech firm Abbott. 

Triquet is expecting a response from Health Canada this week on whether his product is approved. If successful, the company hopes to land purchase orders from the federal, Ontario and Quebec governments.

Correction: The story has been updated to clarify that the Zekmed tests for antibodies, and to include information about a rapid test offered by Biomeme and Precision Biomonitoring.