An Ottawa-based biotech company, Spartan Bioscience Inc., is filing for creditor protection and temporarily laying off staff following concerns about the consistency of the company’s rapid COVID-19 tests.
Spartan told CTV News on Tuesday that about 60 of its 90 employees and a number of students and interns would be laid off as the company deals with the issue.
The “performance-related” issues the company started seeing after the rapid test was launched last year, coupled with a lack of resources that larger biotech companies have, “has left us in a position where we have a strain on our cash,” Spartan interim Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Ross-Carriere said in an interview.
“So as a result we’ve had to follow creditor protection. That allows us to do some restructuring so that we can take a breath and work on optimizing our products and getting back out there for Canadians.”
Ross-Carriere said “some customers were reporting a higher level of inconclusive results than we would like to see. And so we made the decision to pause shipment in production so that we could investigate those issues and those root causes and optimize the product further.”
The rapid tests were approved by Health Canada in late January, and Ross-Carriere said the company is working with the agency on a fix.
With files from BNN Bloomberg
