Evidence of meeting #8 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 43rd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was testing.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, LuminUltra Technologies Ltd.
There are 10 different provincial health laboratories, one in each province, and then there's the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, and we are shipping to those 11 specific locations.
Chief Executive Officer, Spartan Bioscience Inc.
For our company, it's the same. The federal government goes to the National Microbiology Laboratory, and we have separate contracts with the provincial governments and also with the territories.
Liberal
Patrick Weiler Liberal West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
You mentioned that some of your tests are going to be dropping in the per test cost. I'm wondering what the cost of your tests are right now and where you see those going in the future.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, LuminUltra Technologies Ltd.
From our side, we are providing one component of the overall test regime, and the per test cost for us is around $3.50. Then there are some other components that are sourced from other locations, and we're currently looking at shoring up those supply lines as well.
Chief Executive Officer, Spartan Bioscience Inc.
For our product, our device cost $8,000 Canadian and our per test cost, which includes everything—swab, cartridge, obviously everything we use to test—is $73 Canadian.
Liberal
Patrick Weiler Liberal West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
You both mentioned earlier looking into the future as we're getting to another stage in recovering from this pandemic. You mentioned potential change of your production to focus more on environmental testing. I'm curious what exactly that would look like for both of your technologies.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, LuminUltra Technologies Ltd.
For us, similar to Dr. Lem's company, our traditional business is providing more of a complete test kit where we provide the swabs, the equipment and all of the reagents as well, so we already have a version of this style of test that would also be used for testing surfaces, air, water and sewage, all of the vectors of potential point-to-point contamination for COVID-19 and other pathogenic diseases. The way it would work would be identical to the way it's used for testing people. The only difference is where you take the sample from.
Chief Executive Officer, Spartan Bioscience Inc.
Our environmental testing is a relatively small part of our business. What we are now moving towards is driving the cost of the devices down and also increasing what we call the test menu. In addition to offering COVID-19, we can offer strep, flu, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and then, for future variants of COVID for other seasons, we will be able to rapidly release a test for, let's say, COVID-20 or COVID-21. We already have that installed base ready to run these different cartridges as we release them.
Liberal
Patrick Weiler Liberal West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
One of the big challenges we're going to have going forward is being able to trace all the different cases. I'm wondering if your products can incorporate contact tracing in their software. Once you test positive, would it be possible to, in some way, connect to some type of contact tracing? How can we ensure that the data that's produced from your test best gets to the different health agencies in Canada?
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, LuminUltra Technologies Ltd.
That is something we are investigating, as we do have a very large cloud-based software infrastructure. We're just getting into understanding the possibilities of that right now, but we're following the old adage at the moment of focusing on the things you need to focus on now and leaving the other stuff to the future. We haven't gotten too far in the software discussion, but there would absolutely be a lot of potential there.
Chief Executive Officer, Spartan Bioscience Inc.
We just hired a VP of software and data who used to be a top person at Shopify. That person is going to be building out this contact tracing implementation. For example, Tobi Lutke, the CEO of Shopify, is actually leading the team to develop this software. There's another team that just got approved by Health Canada called Thrive, and we're also working with NML and the provincial lab information systems for how we're going to do this.
Liberal
Patrick Weiler Liberal West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC
Last, because I'm running out of time, what measures are you taking within your company to protect your workers?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
That's a very difficult question, but give a very quick answer, if you could, please.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, LuminUltra Technologies Ltd.
We have strict physical distancing procedures, shift work, and a maximum number of people who can be on site at a given time, and most of our staff are working from home.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
Our final five-minute intervention in this round will be by Mr. Redekopp.
Mr. Redekopp, you have five minutes, please.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Thank you, guys, for being here.
Mr. Lem, I want to pursue a little bit the price of these units. You indicated they were about $8,000 currently.
Can you give us an indication of where you see them coming to? If Mr. McCauley, for example, wants to buy one for his wife for the bathroom, that's a fairly expensive Mother's Day present.
Chief Executive Officer, Spartan Bioscience Inc.
Yes, and so we've already agreed with the government that as of, I believe, July, the price will come down by 50%, and so it would go down to about $4,000 Canadian. As well, we're about to launch a redesign effort that, hopefully, within six to nine months, will drive that further down, probably to the $1,000 to $2,000 mark.
Our ultimate goal is to get this to the several hundred dollar mark so, as is the case with a blood glucose meter, no one will have to think twice about purchasing one of these things.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Right, and there's probably a large market for that.
You mentioned also that if you were to put this on the market right now, you would have no trouble selling all of your inventory to whomever, and you were looking to the government to provide some guidelines. How do you see that moving forward so that you are able to sell those to Canadians, as Canadians need them, and not send them overseas or to other countries?
Chief Executive Officer, Spartan Bioscience Inc.
The way we're planning internally is that we're giving the government the first shot at all of our future supply. Once they tell us they don't want any more, our second phase will be to give it to Canadian corporations. After we've satisfied that domestic demand, then we'll open it up to foreign governments.
We're also in discussion with foreign governments to potentially set up manufacturing within their country and basically give them some sort of licence whereby we would give them our designs and intellectual property, and that wouldn't affect our supply in Canada.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Where are you with the federal government on those negotiations, and what sort of responses are you getting from them?
Chief Executive Officer, Spartan Bioscience Inc.
We've had excellent interaction with ISED, PSPC and also PHAC. Right now PHAC is creating a model as to how many Canadians will have to be tested in order to get back to work. Once they have those numbers, we will, hopefully, be negotiating a contract to increase that supply to meet that demand.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
In my riding, and in many others, different companies have been contacting the government about supplying products. I think there have been 26,000 inquiries to the government to this point.
Can both of you comment on your experience working with the government? Was the process smooth? Were there glitches that you had with that? What sorts of experiences did you have?
I'll start with Mr. Whalen.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, LuminUltra Technologies Ltd.
I would say, in these crazy times that we live in, that the experience was exemplary. I mentioned in my opening statement that we started on March 20, after the call to action by the Prime Minister, and within only a couple of days, we had gotten in touch with the people we knew could help the most, who were those at PHAC. It has been, literally, nights, weekends, whatever it took as far as engagement goes with the people out in Winnipeg, with people at PSPC in Ottawa, NRC and ACOA—all over the place. It has been very fast and very strong communication.
Chief Executive Officer, Spartan Bioscience Inc.
I agree with Mr. Whalen as to the sense of timing. I think the Prime Minister announced a letter of intent with our company on March 20, and by March 25, PSPC had a contract with us. Similarly on the Health Canada side, because ours is a regulatory-approved device, they had a team standing by evenings and weekends. As soon as we submitted data, they reviewed it immediately.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
How are you guys operating in this new environment regarding PPE specifically? Has that been an issue for you in terms of providing procedures and guidelines for your staff and PPE in your actual workplaces?