Users administer the Atlas test themselves with a simple saliva collection kit. After that, a smartphone application provides results, in only 20 minutes – without complex lab equipment or highly trained technicians.
Atlas was developed with funding from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) as part of a joint challenge issued with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) through the government’s Innovative Solutions Canada (ISC) program.
Product development
Ryan Denomme, Nicoya’s CEO, told us about the background to the development of the innovative test.
“This all started around this time last year. The government of Canada put out a call to industry for the development of a new type of diagnostic technology.”
He said that move was spurred on by the lack of testing capacity that not only Canada, but many other countries, were facing at that point.
“Testing at that stage was being done in central labs with the turnaround time from swab to result taking around 3-5 days, if not longer.”
The Canadian government, as many other countries have done, identified that that central lab model was not exactly ideal for managing outbreaks of something as infectious as SARS-CoV-2 so they wanted to develop some new technologies that would enable rapid turnaround time – 20 mins from sampling to test result – but with the same level of sensitivity and specificity as you would get from a traditional PCR test in a lab, explained Denomme.
“So a lot of requirements, needing new approaches and new technologies: they funded four companies in phase one to a total value of $300K. We were one of those; we demonstrated proof of concept of our novel approach that we call Atlas and showed it would be applicable for meeting the requirements of the challenge they had set. Evaluating further results a couple of months later, they really liked what we had achieved, and they funded us for the next stage – phase two: we were awarded a grant of about $2m to go from proof of concept to the prototype stage. We are currently in the process of developing that prototype now. It will be ready soon.”