Southern Ontario Spotlight - May 2020

In southern Ontario’s rich innovation ecosystem, FedDev Ontario clients are collaborating to quickly manufacture medical supplies and answer the call to help fight COVID-19. Many of their encouraging efforts are profiled below.

 

Baylis Medical partnered with Canadian manufacturers consortium Ventilators for Canadians to manufacture ventilators for hospitals across Canada. The company intends to produce 10,000 ventilators.

 

The Northumberland.io Producer Alliance filed for Health Canada approval to manufacture Class 1 medical devices at the Venture13 Innovation & Entrepreneurship Centre. This group of Cobourg-area manufacturers, engineers, producers and volunteers came together to produce over 200 face shields per day for healthcare workers.

 

Ben Machine Products and L3Harris/Wescam are partnering to manufacture and donate reusable face shields to Trillium Health Partners.Trillium approached Ben Machine Products Co. on April 2 for support creating reusable face shields. By that afternoon, the company had created a simple design in partnership with L3Harris/Wescam and, within a week, they had donated 1,000 units.

 

Thank you to all businesses, organizations, communities and individuals who are rapidly pivoting to support Canada’s response to COVID-19. To learn more about Ontario manufacturers that have joined the effort, read the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing’s list of more than 200 companies from across Ontario that are manufacturing medical devices, personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies.

As we face an unprecedented global situation, the need for innovative solutions is critical. Many innovators in  southern Ontario continue to answer the call for medical equipment and technologies.

 

Mississauga-based Microbix Systems Inc. attained licensing enabling the immediate usage of its quality assessments products (QAPs^TM) to help ensure the accuracy of COVID-19 disease testing. The company has capacity to make enough QAPs to verify the accuracy of 1.5 million diagnostic tests per week, and began shipping QAPs to labs across Canada on April 30.

 

McMaster University researcher Donald Arnold is co-leading one of the world’s largest clinical trials of a potential treatment for COVID-19 in collaboration with academic and health partners across the country. The consortium will study the effectiveness of convalescent plasma therapy, where blood plasma is drawn from recovered COVID-19 patients and their antibodies are used to treat other patients with acute COVID-19. The trial is expected to involve 1,000 patients from across the country.

Always ready to adapt and respond to changing market conditions, southern Ontario’s business accelerators, incubators and industry organizations have quickly launched new initiatives to support COVID-19 response efforts.

 

Evrlinx, winner of Ryerson University’s national #HackTheCurve tech challenge, is receiving $15,000 in funding and more than $200,000 in services to help strengthen Canada’s supply chain for personal protective equipment with its hassle-free online marketplace.

 

Ryerson also partnered with Dalhousie University to launch Lab2Market-Health (L2M-H), a four-month program that provides resources, training and guidance to help graduate students and research institutions bring new vaccines, therapeutics, devices and diagnostic tools to market.
 

The Accelerator Centre launched Ontario’s COVID-19 Support and Recovery Cohort, which will provide companies with $30,000 in seed funding and $10,000 in business support to accelerate the launch of products and services related to COVID-19.

 

London-based Go Fog It will receive $20,000 in seed funding and a personalized suite of business services as winners of the first Recovery and Rebuilding the Region Design Challenge, an initiative co-presented by WEtech Alliance and Communitech that supports technology-enabled solutions for COVID-19. The company’s disinfectant fogging services will help stop the spread of coronavirus and support business owners with their new disinfecting responsibilities as they reopen to the public.

 

Bioenterprise Corporation is offering additional cost coverage and flexibilities for companies and eligible projects that are addressing COVID-19 through its SmartGrowth Program, which helps grow food and agri-businesses while strengthening the regional economy.

 

The Southern Ontario Smart Computing for Innovation Platform (SOSCIP) is waiving fees and fast-tracking applications for collaborators to use its network of high-performance computing resources to support COVID-19 research and advanced manufacturing efforts.

The Southern Ontario Network for Advanced Manufacturing Innovation (SONAMI) and its member institutions are switching gears to support Canada’s healthcare workers as they combat COVID-19:

 

• The Centre for Advanced Manufacturing and Design Technologies (CAMDT) at Sheridan College is producing 5,500 face shields for local healthcare workers;
• Niagara College’s Walker Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre is producing 37,000 face shields, including 12,000 for the Niagara Health System, and has acquired a Medical Device Establishment Licence (MDEL Class 1) to supply face shields to hospitals frontline healthcare providers outside of the Niagara region;
• Mohawk College is supplying face shield bands to the Family Health Team in Cambridge;
• McMaster University is repurposing equipment to produce face shields and 3D-printed laryngoscopes for Hamilton Health Sciences;
• Researchers at Conestoga College’s Smart Manufacturing and Advanced Recycling Technologies Centre are co-developing a software application that will help critical supply chain workers maintain physical distancing;
• Lambton Manufacturing Innovation Centre (LMIC) at Lambton College partnered with local craft brewery, Refined Fool, to help produce hand sanitizer for donation to Bluewater Heath. The team is also working on rapid prototyping services for the design and fabrication of personal protective equipment for Bluewater Health, and helping Link2Feed, a company that provides emergency food organizations with software solutions to manage operations and resources, with an online client enrolment tool.
• Fanshawe College’s Centre for Research and Innovation (CRI), has partnered with KGK Sciences and Brock University to develop and test peptide inhibitors against SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. It is believed that the peptides could help the immune system more quickly detect and fight against the virus.