Healthcare execs discuss working during a pandemic.

• Author: Bicknell, Lindsay
• Position: QA

This month Utah Business, in partnership with Holland & Hart, hosted a roundtable event featuring leaders in the life sciences space to discuss COVID testing, federal regulations, and innovation. Moderated by Kelvyn Cullimore, president and CEO of BioUtah, here are a few highlights from the event.

How has COVID-19 affected your business and how are you responding to it?

Fred Lampropoulos | CEO | Merit Medical

We've had to do furloughs and we've had to cut headcount. We've had to do a lot of things that are unpleasant, but we have had portions of our business, like our critical care business that has been very, very busy. Our critical care business, which is based out of Singapore, is up about 25 percent for the year. Overall we're down about 25, but our business is coming back [because] we started producing COVID-19 test kits. We started that on April 5th and here we are today, in the middle of July, and we've produced over 3 million swabs and hundreds of thousands of test kits. We, as a business, adapted by filling the needs that were out there and making sure that we assize the inputs.

Andrea Kendell | Acting CEO | BioFire Diagnostics

As part of a global in-vitro diagnostics company, BioFire is part of Biomerieux. Our development teams responded to [the pandemic] by adding a COVID target to our current respiratory panel and getting that FDA EUA in AO days, [which] is unprecedented. For some time we've been in the molecular diagnostics space focused on many different infectious disease targets, but our upper and lower respiratory panel has really come into play. We have basically had to pivot and figure out how to keep our products safe while manufacturing. [We also moved] all of the non-essential employees off-site to really control contamination to our products. We've gone from a position of being able to fully manage our customer requirements, to being in a place where we are in allocation, managing customer demand that far exceeds our capacities.

Since March, we've not been able to keep up with demand and we foresee that this challenge is just going to get greater as we reintroduce. All of the other bugs have really been laying low because of quarantining and we're starting to see them come back as the economy has reopened and people are out there socializing in ways that are really creating problems. We are in a fortunate place here where we have not had to furlough people.

Guochun Liao | President & CEO | IDbyDNA

IDbyDNA is another...