IT Blog

The call came at 3:30 a.m. “Does your stuff work on COVID?”

Giancarlo Beevis sighed. He had been pulling his hair out trying to lock down a specialty lab that could test his antiviral fabric treatment’s ability to deactivate the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “We’d searched everywhere for anyone who could test for COVID, specifically,” said Beevis, who is the CEO of the Canadian biotech firm Intelligent Fabric Technologies North America (IFTNA). “We weren’t interested in testing it against the human coronavirus, which our competitors were doing, because to us it didn’t have value. We wanted to deal with the pandemic.”

The voice on the phone belonged to longtime client Youngdo Kim, CEO of Okyung International, a Korean textile manufacturer. Turns out, he’d gone to university with a professor who went on to run a biosafety level 3 lab. “Why don’t I reach out to them and see if they can do it?” he said.