Trek tests for antibiotic resistance--and stays in Northeast Ohio

An attractive young woman walked up to Mike Burke at a trade show a while ago. She handed him a slick magazine about RTP and invited him to come down—free of charge—to visit Research Triangle and see if he didn’t want to move his company down there. Burke, CEO of Trek Diagnostics Systems, Inc. wasn’t up for it, but they keep sending him this magazine.

Meanwhile Trek Diagnostics is busy making news, winning awards and developing new technologies, instrumentation and workflows for testing for antibiotic resistance. One of their latest is for testing blood culture—one of the most critical tests in the microbiology lab. The blood must be sterile, and morbidity (sickness) rates are high.

Many physicians put patients on drug therapy as a precaution, but with a culture you can identify that there is in fact a blood-borne pathogen. Then after you grow it in a culture bottle, you test further to see what drugs are most effective against it. The Trek test is about speed, getting positive results, and confirming the proper treatment as soon as possible to prevent using resistant antibiotic.

Trek invents and markets the software, the hardware and the background technology—users just want to know what’s available and to have tests that are easy to use

Trek has been wholly funded through equity and banking—never used any venture capital. “We were lucky that our volumes of existing products generated enough cash flow to warrant the financing,” says Burke. All product development is done in Trek labs and with an engineering firm they use. They collaborate with Hillcrest and the Clinic for workflow advice and design advice. “They’re very willing to support us by reviewing our ideas and the workflow designs we propose,” he says. “It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Trek has undergone rather dramatic changes since it was founded as a small division of another company with 95 employees in 1999. From a fledgling organization fighting to maintain share, they’ve now achieved a very competitive position and employ 160 people. They recently won an award from an In Vitro Diagnostics organization that publishes a review, IVD Technology.

“Our products, people, and processes put us on a growth curve,” says Burke. “We’re very fortunate we have some real supporters here.” They hire med-techs from Cleveland Clinic Foundation as they added staff.

Molecular testing next

Technologies for traditional microbio testing haven’t changed significantly yet, but new testing is being developed at the molecular level that complements what’s been being done in the lab. “Molecular testing is generally faster and more accurate, but it’s not as broad, “says Burke. “For example, there’s no molecular test that can accurately read blood cultures like ours.”

Bacteria in the blood are not homogeneous, and when you draw blood, it’s easy to end up not capturing the blood going past the needle. For accurately capturing bacteria, you need larger samples 20 ml, but the test can only work with minute specimens. So you need to place it in a blood culture bottle (10 ml in aerobic and in anaerobic bottles), then grow it and detect it. Burke says molecular testing will not replace that part any time soon, but once you grow it, you can take a piece from the mass of bacteria and run a molecular test on it.

Molecular testing can tell you what the pathogen is, but it’s not good at determining resistance, according to Burke. Trek is looking at partnering with some molecular testing companies, molecular manufacturing companies, not doing it themselves. From Trek's point of view, this as an ideal type of company to attract--and would serve Northeast Ohio well for the long run.

“Molecular is the future in many areas of science,” says Burke. “I’ve heard it said that metals or building materials as we know them have been restricted by physics of the material. But at the molecular level we can get around physics by designing new materials molecularly—nanotech is an example.” New materials, not bound by physics, will be much stronger than steel or other known materials. Burke expects we will see an explosion of these materials in the next 50 years.

How’s Cleveland for resources? Burke says the work ethic is strong here. “We rely on UH and CCF and Metro to help us with certain positions, but for non-science areas, the educational level of the people here is good.”

To become a bioscience/tech hub, Burke says Northeast Ohio needs to start with dedicated organization. “Part of the Greater Cleveland Partnership or a separate funded organization like NEOBio.” Rather than trying to bring any and everything in, Burke says it make sense to build on existing areas of expertise: cardiology, orthopedics, etc. “Companies in those areas could use our institutions to leverage getting some of the R&D done here. They could develop divisions here. That’s how it’s being done in North Carolina. A lot of companies have located divisions there. Not startups or incubators; they’ve located large manufacturing divisions in these areas.”
Burke suggests the area should be specific about the types of companies it wants to attract.