Diagnostics · Cell free synthetic biology
LSK Technologies
A toaster sized plate reader, built by two graduate students from off the shelf parts, that read paper based Zika tests on hundreds of patient samples in Brazil. It was sold to a neighbouring instrument maker in 2022 and never carried a medical device authorization.
Two out of three arrived intact
In March 2018 a University of Toronto lab team flew to Quito with four hand built machines in their luggage. They took the packed boxes through secondary inspection at customs, then opened the cases to see what had survived.
“Two out of three had made the journey intact,” the team leader wrote afterwards. The third needed a few tense hours to trace a dislodged wire.
The machines were called Plum, and they were the point of the trip. Keith Pardee, a pharmacy professor and Canada Research Chair in Synthetic Biology in Human Health, had brought graduate students Yuxiu Guo and Seray Çiçek to Ecuador’s national public health institute to hand devices to local scientists and train them to run the tests. They kept one Plum in Toronto so they could troubleshoot from a distance.
The bottleneck nobody funds
The chemistry came from work Pardee began at Harvard’s Wyss Institute: gene circuits taken out of living cells, freeze dried into paper, made to turn purple when they meet a target sequence. Freeze drying removes the cold chain, and the reagents sit outside the PCR supply chain.
What the field lacked was a way to read the result. A commercial plate reader costs between $30,000 and $100,000, according to a 2020 write up by Front Row Ventures, an early backer. A clinic in a town with no diagnostic laboratory does not buy one. So cheap, shippable tests ran into an instrument problem.
PLUM was the answer: an incubated reader running on off the shelf electronics inside a 3D printed and laser cut housing, with a camera and image analysis standing in for expensive optics. About 5 kg, 384 wells in one image capture, mains power or a 12 volt battery.
Two graduate students and their supervisor
Çiçek took an engineering science degree in 2017 and a master’s in pharmaceutical sciences in 2020; Guo followed the same schedule. Çiçek had already co-founded a device startup, Xpan, and worked at Sanofi Pasteur. Front Row described the split: Çiçek on hardware, business and molecular biology, Guo on software and analytical chemistry. Pardee became chief scientific officer.
The company entered the U of T incubators UTEST and H2i in 2019. In February 2020 it won $100,000 at the Velocity Fund Pitch Competition, the largest cheque that fund had written. Y Combinator took it into the Summer 2020 batch and invested US$150,000. By December 2020 an investor put the total raised at roughly $350,000 from angels, small funds and non-dilutive sources, with a $2 million seed round in progress.
Recife, and then a sale
In April 2019 the readers went to the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Recife for the study that mattered. The results appeared in Nature Biomedical Engineering on March 7, 2022: double blinded field testing of paper based Zika and chikungunya tests against RT-qPCR.
Then COVID-19 arrived. The company adapted the platform to SARS-CoV-2, joined a federally funded effort to scale up portable testing, and started talking about clinics, pharmacies and workplaces. By late 2021 the university reported 20 pre-orders and devices heading to Canada, the United States, Ecuador and Colombia.
The seed round never closed. On May 2, 2022, Nicoya Lifesciences, a Kitchener instrument company a few kilometres away, announced it had bought LSK. Terms were not disclosed. Nicoya’s chief executive told BetaKit that LSK had been looking to raise before the deal came together. Three LSK people, both founders among them, moved across to a firm of more than 100 staff.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Zika field trial | Nature Biomedical Engineering, Mar 7, 2022. Accuracy 98.5 per cent for Zika (95 per cent CI 96.2 to 99.6) across 268 serum samples in Recife, and 98.5 per cent for chikungunya across 65 samples. On cultured virus, equivalent to real time quantitative PCR. | Public record |
| SARS-CoV-2, multicentre | PLOS ONE, May 11, 2022. Direct RT-LAMP on FluoroPLUM caught 76.9 per cent of samples at Ct below 25 and 100 per cent below Ct 22.5, then fell away above Ct 25. | Public record |
| Ecuador validation | PLOS ONE, Apr 16, 2025. At Ct below 25, 83 per cent sensitivity and 90 per cent specificity in the laboratory, 91 and 92 per cent in the field at Tena. Across all positives, sensitivity 72.3 per cent. | Public record |
| The 94 per cent claim | A 2021 university page reports “a 94 per cent accuracy rate” from 2020 Canadian trials. No publication reports that figure, and published accuracy depends heavily on viral load. | Differs from the papers |
| Regulatory authorization | Health Canada returns no company record or licence for LSK, Life Sciences Key or Nicoya, checked Sep 23, 2026. No FDA clearance. BetaKit reported both firms sold research only products in 2022. | Public record |
| The stated plan | The same 2021 page said the team was “on track to apply for regulatory approval in mid 2021”. No authorization has appeared since. | Differs from the record |
| Registered trials | None found in a records pull run Sep 23, 2026. The validations were investigator led studies on patient samples. | Not found |
| Patents | US provisional 62/982,323, filed Feb 27, 2020 by the University of Toronto and assigned to LSK Technologies Inc. No granted patent found under the company name. | Public record |
| Federal support | A $500,000 award for field testing the device as a COVID-19 diagnostic, with LSK as supporting partner. No award number was published. | Institution stated |
| After the sale | FluoroPLUM, about $500 US, is one of the instruments in a multisite study in Science Advances, May 29, 2026. Guo and Çiçek are authors and credited with the reader. | Public record |
Read plainly: the science held and the company did not. Four peer reviewed papers show a $500 box doing work that normally needs a $30,000 instrument, with the caveat that sensitivity falls at low viral loads and RNA extraction still needs trained hands. What never arrived was an authorization, a named paying customer, or the seed round that would have funded either.
What to watch
- Whether any PLUM descendant reaches a Health Canada licence or FDA clearance. Nicoya said in 2022 it would pursue point of care uses over time.
- Nicoya’s direction. Its June 2025 purchase of Applied Photophysics positioned it entirely around biologics characterization, with no diagnostics product named.
- The February 2020 provisional assigned to LSK. No granted patent has surfaced under the company name.
- Academic use of FluoroPLUM, described as open source hardware and still carried to field sites by the Pardee lab.
In their words
“This lab-based phase typically requires expensive equipment to read the diagnostics and so, through some ingenuity and creativity, we’ve built a $350 portable device, affectionately named Plum, to replace the function of equipment that can cost tens of thousands.”
Keith Pardee, U of T News diary from Ecuador, 2018 · University
“We realized we were building a product that people wanted to use and seeing that made us graduate as soon as we could to start working on this!”
Seray Çiçek, CEO, U of T Entrepreneurship, 2021 · University
“Livia (Guo) and I are surprised and excited to receive 100K funding. This definitely brings us a step closer to the commercialization of our device.”
Seray Çiçek, Velocity Fund Pitch Competition, February 2020 · Incubator
“We see emerging diagnostics, like the paper-based tests we’ve developed, as having tremendous near-term potential to augment existing PCR capacity, improve equity in access to health care, and aid in the responses to public health crises.”
Keith Pardee, on the Nature Biomedical Engineering results, March 2022 · University release
“This robust diagnostic platform displayed desirable features to be used in developing countries such as Brazil and in laboratories with basic infrastructure.”
Lindomar Pena, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, March 2022 · Collaborator
“We took it to the real world and it worked.”
Margot Karlikow, lead author, UTEST, March 2022 · Interview
“What they’ve developed is this really natural fit with the core tech platform that we have at Nicoya.”
Ryan Denomme, CEO of Nicoya, to BetaKit, May 2022 · Independent
“LSK Technologies will continue to work on the same vision of making lab quality testing accessible and affordable.”
Seray Çiçek, to BetaKit, May 2022 · Company stated
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordField validation of paper-based tests for Zika and chikungunya in serum
- Public recordMulticenter assessment of a SARS-CoV-2 RT-LAMP test for point of care use
- Public recordValidation of new equipment for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis in Ecuador
- Public recordInternational multisite cell-free protein biomanufacturing
- Public recordDesign to implementation study for toehold switch diagnostics
- Public recordDevice company and licence searches, no match
- Public recordFDA and SEC records pull
- IndependentNicoya acquires LSK Technologies
- IndependentNicoya expands into molecular testing with acquisition of LSK
- IndependentDiagnostic platform uses cell-free synthetic biology tools
- InvestorBehind the Deal: LSK Technologies
- UniversityDiary from Ecuador: Keith Pardee on his team’s trip
- UniversityThis is the place to scale up virus testing
- UniversityRapid Zika testing platform clears hurdle with Brazil trial
- UniversityField-based patient trial for cell-free Zika testing
- IncubatorFive startups take home $300K as Velocity unveils its 2nd pre-seed fund
- IndependentLSK Technologies Inc. acquired by Nicoya Lifesciences Inc.
- CompanyNicoya completes acquisition of LSK Technologies
- CompanyLSK Technologies website, about page and PLUM-HT page
- CompanyNicoya acquires Applied Photophysics
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
