About Epocal

History

Epocal was founded in March 2001 and is located in Ottawa, Canada. Epocal's founding entrepreneur, Dr. Imants Lauks, is a recognized world leader in biochips and micro-fabrication of solid-state diagnostic devices. The technology that he developed in the 1980s and 90s, at a previous company he founded, led to the world's first commercial biochips. This biochip technology was the enabling core of the clinical diagnostic products invented by Dr. Lauks. The products comprise a range of acute-care tests run on the world's first handheld general purpose patient-side blood analyzer. This system is now a well established tool of the medical profession available worldwide.

Epocal has brought together a team of professionals having well over 200 years of combined technical, sales, marketing, operational and manufacturing expertise in the development and commercialization of state-of-the-art blood analysis systems. Epocal is now commercializing a new generation of point-of-care blood diagnostic products (The epoc Blood Analysis System) based on its patented technologies.

Epocal is implementing an entire blood diagnostic system in FlexCard™ technology, a card format similar to the smart card used in conventional cheque and telephone cards. Epocal manufactures cards at ultra low cost, leveraging already existing high volume / low cost production technologies for smart cards. The proprietary FlexCard technology, comprising biosensors and integral fluidics on flex circuit modules in a credit card-sized housing, constitutes a disruptive technology advance resulting in products 10 times less expensive to manufacture than existing products. This disruptive advantage enables the company to penetrate markets that are completely inaccessible to current competitors.

The new enterprise point-of-care blood diagnostic system, epoc™ — comprising diagnostic test cards and wireless card readers — is intended to be used in all low volume, distributed testing applications, where high sensitivity and lab quality accuracy is required: in hospitals at the bedside, in physicians' offices and in patients' homes. Epocal's mission is to build a patient-side blood testing business that offers for the first time a much desired high precision point-of-care product that is cost-effective, allowing broad adoption.