It’s no secret the impact Queen’s University has on the local economy. When the students arrive each fall, it boosts the fortunes of local merchants. Similarly, the university is also one of the top employers in the city.

But there’s an often overlooked aspect of the university’s economic impact — the business the university spawns that locate in the city. There are a growing list of companies that have started and stayed in Kingston as a result of its proximity to the academic minds that gave the businesses their starts, and products, to begin with.

Take Endetec, for example. Until last year, it was known as Pathogen Detection Systems Inc. before being brought under the umbrella of France’s Veolia Environnement, the world’s largest environmental services company, and its water technology and solutions subsidiary.

The company was the beneficiary of $5 million in government funding — half from the feds’ Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the other half from the province’s Ministry of Research and Innovation — last year in addition to its cash infusion from parent company Veolia.

“You can only fast-track things when you have some money to spend,” said David Dolphin, Endetec’s president and managing director.

The company is also expanding, with some 20 staff members expected to be on its payroll by the end of the year. Tucked away in the Biosciences Complex on the Queen’s campus, its connection to the university remains intact.

“We’ve retained a team of researchers that are based at Queen’s, actually employed by Queen’s,” Dolphin said. “We basically fund that work for developing further tests and refinements of the process.”

Pathogen Detection Systems was started in 2003 by a group of university researchers led by Dr. Stephen Brown to commercialize a quicker, more efficient

method for testing water.

The impetus for creating a safer and quicker way of testing water was the Walkerton tragedy just over 10 years ago, when seven people died and hundreds fell ill after the town’s water supply being contaminated with a fatal form of E. coli bacteria.

Now, seven years later, the company is unveiling and selling its invention, called the TECTA, and its accompanying methodology.

Continue reading via Company tests the water – The Whig Standard – Ontario, CA.