SAN DIEGO (KGTV) - A San Diego genomics company has big plans for the future of healthcare, and the COVID-19 pandemic may have helped them reach their goals faster.
Helix just moved into a brand new lab in Sorrento Valley. The state-of-the-art facility has the ability to process thousands of samples per day. It's a tool they hope to use as they promote the idea of genomics in healthcare.
"We can give people genetic information up front," says Marc Laurent, Helix's VP of Partnerships and Operations. "That's really the point. To help people understand that genomics, their DNA, holds information that can help manage their health in a proactive way, and not a reactive way."
During the pandemic, they had to divert their focus away from Genomics and towards diagnostics. Helix was one of the largest, single-site COVID-19 test labs in the US. They say they ran more than 1.5 million COVID tests for San Diego County, and more than 12 million tests for other places across the Country.
"At the peak of the pandemic, we were getting 30,000 specimens a day," says Efren Sandoval, the Helix Lab Operations Director.
That taught the company a lot about logistics. It also forced them to grow from a small startup into a bio-tech leader.
The new lab helps them continue that effort. Everything they learned about scaling, logistics, and more went into the design. That includes the furniture. Sandoval and Laurent say one of their biggest lessons from the Pandemic was the need for flexibility in the lab. That's why the had every piece of equipment built on wheels. They can rearrange work stations in a matter of hours to fit their needs.
They're still processing COVID tests, and the lab houses a sample bank with every variant they've seen. The NIH uses those for research. They can also use current tests to track new variants and predict where outbreaks may occur.
But as the pandemic eases, Helix is getting back to its original mission. Laurent hopes genomic testing will soon become the norm to help people understand their health risks inherent in their DNA.
"Are we done? No," says Laurent. "We still have a lot of work to do. We're really interested in continuing to impact people the way we did through COVID. Now through genetics."
