CROWN POINT | Microbiologist Dawn McIver's plan 12 years ago was to do a little consulting work from her Crown Point home.

"I was just going to dabble in it," after several years of commuting to a job at a Melrose Park, Ill., microbiology laboratory, McIver said.

One consulting job quickly led to another, and by earlier this year McIver and her husband, Ed, opened MicroWorks Inc. in a 10,000-square-foot building on the city's north side.

The company tests for contaminants in pharmaceuticals and other products, and in laboratory environments, and provides consulting and training to companies that do their own testing.

In partnership with French diagnostic instrument maker Biomerieux, MicroWorks on Monday hosted the French firm's traveling laboratory.

Local hospitals and laboratory workers were invited to view Biomerieux's line of laboratory instruments, software and training tools used to track sources and screen for the presence of disease, among other applications.

The Odyssey's stop in Crown Point was part of the mobile lab's six-month tour crisscrossing the United States.

"We do a lot of work with them," McIver said. For the tour stop on Monday, "we invited our clients and they invited theirs, so we can introduce them to each other."

MicroWorks' work force of seven, most of them microbiologists, is expected to expand to 30 within five years, said McIver, the company's president.

Helping to drive the expected growth is a new requirement from the U.S. Pharmacopeia, the public standards-setting authority for prescription and over-the-counter medicines, that hospitals and other health care institutions routinely monitor areas where medicines are prepared or stored, McIver said.

The MicroWorks Inc. site, at 2200 W. 97th Place, also houses production space for the company's name-brand swab sampling system, used to test for environmental contaminants in medical settings.

Production and warehouse workers are expected to make up part of the growing work force, McIver said.