With support from the Ontario Water Consortium’s Water Industry Growth Program, IDEXX Tecta is advancing water safety with its automated bacterial testing platform, ensuring rapid onsite detection of harmful microorganisms and enhancing public health protection.
IDEXX Tecta’s journey began more than two decades ago, not long after E. coli had killed seven people in Walkerton, Ontario and made more than 2,000 ill. It was the country’s worst case of contaminated drinking water, and faster detection would have saved lives. So a group of Queen’s University researchers and industrial partners set out to change the way we detect harmful microorganisms in drinking water.
The standard way to look for E. coli is to put a water sample into a container with growth medium, leave it to incubate, and then manually count the number of bacterial colonies that form.
But doing that requires a microbiology lab and a trained technician. It’s also time-consuming: when you add the time needed to ship samples to the lab, it can easily take 72 hours to get results. Meanwhile, any human error — either in counting the colonies or recording the numbers — can produce faulty results.
To tackle those problems, the team at Queen’s developed a fully automated bacterial test for drinking water and launched a company to bring the technology to market.
The resulting TECTA platform is a portable device that allows users to test water on site, eliminating the need for lab facilities. Simply pour a water sample into a cartridge containing a pre-measured reagent. “You drop it in the instrument, you press start, and you walk away,” explains Doug Wilton, Director and General Manager of the Tecta Business Unit of IDEXX Water.
Different cartridges are available for different pathogens, including E. coli, total coliforms, fecal coliforms and enterococcus. If the target bacteria are present, they’ll break down the reagent, releasing a fluorescent molecule that the instrument’s optical sensors can detect and measure. When the analysis is complete, the system automatically emails the results, alerting the customer to microbiological contamination in as little as two hours or giving the all-clear in less than a day.
In the years since their launch, the little Kingston startup achieved success after success. They secured U.S. EPA approval for their device. They sold it to water utilities, public laboratories and industrial companies in 30 countries around the world. And most recently, they were acquired by IDEXX Water, a leader in microbiological testing and diagnostics.
Greater growth, safer water
Since acquiring Tecta, IDEXX Water has added resources and team members to their new business unit. Today, Tecta is preparing to move into new manufacturing facilities twice the size of their current space, where they will serve as the instrumentation and automation centre of excellence for the entire global company.
That includes expanding into new applications. “This is one of the tremendous benefits of working with IDEXX,” says Wilton. “They are a world leader when it comes to the development of assays.”
At the same time, Tecta is building the next generation of the technology that started it all. “We’re always looking for faster. We’re always looking for better,” he explains.
To move that project forward, the Tecta team leveraged support from OWC’s Water Industry Growth (WIG) program: an initiative that helps accelerate the development of high-impact water technologies in Ontario. WIG funding allowed them to optimize their supply chain and explore new engineering methods to streamline production.
According to Wilton, programs like WIG are incredibly important for companies of any size. “It doesn’t matter if you’re large or you’re small, capital is king. And this was not an inexpensive project that we had to pursue,” he says.
Now, they’re enjoying the payoff: creating local jobs, contributing to the success of IDEXX and helping make sure tragedies like the Walkerton crisis don’t happen again. “We aren’t solving all the world’s problems,” says Wilton. “But we are proud that we’re doing our little piece.”
WIG supports industry innovations that accelerate growth, create jobs and strengthen Ontario’s water sector. For more information, click here.