It’s a bigger company: At its COVID testing peak, Genemarkers reached 50 employees, representing about 400 percent growth from early 2020. Today, 35 people work here, with openings for sales and accounting roles.
“A whole army” of high school and college students from Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University assemble test kits and prepare samples for processing in labs. The company turned to training students as traditional hiring plans collided with the workforce shortage, work that will continue as the company begins to shift away from COVID.
Genemarkers also now has a customer service team, and an area of its office dedicated to the logistics of receiving supplies, assembling them into test kits and shipping them. It has built sales relationships. Its IT contractor, Arivium of Grand Rapids, made changes to Genemarkers’ online patient portal that can be adapted to new types of testing results.
The infrastructure is now in place to “take this runway that we’ve built and ride it post-COVID,” Langerveld said.
The company’s R&D business, lost in the early weeks of the pandemic, started to return in 2021. And now Genemarkers expects that work to increase as it establishes more pharmacogenomic testing in place of COVID tests.
The volume will be different. Its peak COVID testing was 3,500 tests per day in December 2020, three times what it was a year later during omicron.
Revenue at the private company grew 10-fold over that first year, Langerveld said. It isn’t remaining at that peak, but it did allow for the purchase of a $500,000 next-generation sequencer to boost testing speed. She had wanted it back in 2019, but couldn’t afford it then.
COVID, Langerveld said, helped the company recognize its potential and generate the operating revenue to get there faster. It also built confidence in its ability to shift gears.
“But,” she added, “also there was a lot of enthusiasm about being able to participate in and play a role in providing a solution to something that was a serious problem.”
"filled" - Google News
February 24, 2022 at 03:14AM
https://ift.tt/Vo1iFJk
Kalamazoo lab filled COVID testing void. As cases wane, it eyes next step. - Bridge Michigan
"filled" - Google News
https://ift.tt/bBg3zuL
https://ift.tt/8jIz93k
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Kalamazoo lab filled COVID testing void. As cases wane, it eyes next step. - Bridge Michigan"
Post a Comment