Diagnostics
exactly what can be achieved in times of crisis, with new technologies rolled out more quickly and extensively than previously thought possible. “The pandemic catalysed innovation across the healthcare and life science industry,” comments Karen Taylor, director of the UK Centre for Health Solutions at Deloitte. “It saw the rapid development and widespread adoption of diagnostic tests for Covid-19, with ‘lateral flow’ and ‘PCR’ tests becoming household names, and self- sampling becoming an accepted approach.”
Diagnostics development Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic, recalls how in the early days of the pandemic, the diagnostics community was gripped with a real sense of urgency. “In mid-February 2020, we were watching the emergence of Covid-19, and trying to decide whether to develop a test to identify cases,” he says. “We knew that if we did, we needed to bring it up in less than four weeks, just because of the likelihood that there would be cases impacting our patients and physicians.”
The Mayo Clinic pulled together a team of 15 people, who worked on developing and validating a diagnostic. They were able to reach that point within three weeks – a far cry from the 6–12 months that would be typical in such situations. “That was just one example of a team of people coming together to meet an urgent need in a very, very short amount of time,” says Binnicker. “It played out in other ways with other companies – many companies have brought up Covid-19 tests, and other infectious disease tests, over the course of the past two-and-a-half years in a way we probably haven’t experienced before.” Many of us can remember that sense, so common in 2020, of being united over a shared adversary. In the life sciences industry, this meant embracing a spirit of collaboration, with different companies working together to pool expertise. On the governmental side, it meant a willingness to cut red tape and speed up regulatory processes. “One silver lining to the pandemic has been the openness among different companies to come together to bring up new testing solutions in a faster time frame,” says Binnicker. “There’s also more openness from agencies like the FDA to partner with diagnostic test manufacturers and clinical laboratories.” Taylor adds that, with large numbers of the population contracting Covid-19,
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clinical researchers had more scope than usual to test out new technologies and treatments. Governments also had more data at their disposal, which helped them target their overall response to the pandemic.
“A notable example of diagnostic advancement is the widespread use of genomic sequencing to identify variants and track the spread of the virus, with the UK leading in these efforts,” she says.
“The pandemic catalysed innovation across the healthcare and life science industry.” Karen Taylor
Accelerated innovation
In many ways, the past few years have been a triumph for open science. So now that we’ve seen what’s possible, might this collaborative environment – bolstered with regulatory support – be here to stay? And might we be entering an era of accelerated innovation, in which protracted timelines are a thing of the past and new diagnostics appear within weeks? As Binnicker sees it, the answer is ‘yes and no’. On one hand, the infectious disease community will have learned some lessons from Covid-19. If you’re developing a new diagnostic, you’ll know which parts of the process are truly necessary, and which steps are likely to be redundant. On the other hand, you won’t have the same incentive to hurry as you would during a public health emergency.
“Many of these tests can be developed and studied over longer periods of time, because there's not that sense of urgency,” he says. “That being said, things will have changed – we will learn some lessons and hopefully improve the process moving forward.” An interesting case in point here might be monkeypox, which first cropped up in Europe in May 2022. Only a few weeks after the first cases emerged,
Monkeypox first appeared in Europe in May 2022.
2bn UK Government 11
The number of rapid antigen tests provided by the UK Government over a two-year period, with delivery capacity peaking at nearly a million kits per day.
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