“When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the US, young biotech company Verve Therapeutics was only months away from a pivotal development: studies in animals of its approach to gene processing to lower cholesterol that would lead to heralding as potential” cure for heart disease. “
Mar Chief Executive Dr. Sekar Kathiresan had a problem: this is not the kind of work you can do at home.
“Our work includes work in cells and animal models,” Kathiresan said.
Initially, his company used tools such as social distance, hand hygiene, masks and a symptom survey to keep employees safe in the labs.
“But it became very clear in the pandemic that about 40% of people, when they develop Covid, are asymptomatic,” said Kathiresan, who is also a preventative cardiologist and geneticist. “Those individuals, you can not catch up on a symptom question. The only option to identify these asymptomatic individuals before they spread the disease on the work floor is to do regular surveillance tests.”
It was not clear how to do that kind of testing. Back in March, even people sick with what they thought was Covid-19 could not get a test.
A lab worker at Verve Therapeutics
Source: CNBC
Kathiresan felt he needed to make sure his company could catch potential infections that might not be detectable, in order to keep his employees healthy. So he tapped his connections. Verve’s offices are located in the heart of Kendall Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the heart of the world’s biotechnology sector. Kathiresan and a few biotech CEOs in the area came together to see if they could set up a test infrastructure to keep their employees safe as they continued to work in labs to develop potential medicines.
She started with the Broad Institute, a nonprofit just around the corner in Cambridge that is one of the world’s largest genome research centers. Prior to co-founding Verve, Kathiresan directed the Cardiovascular Disease Initiative on Broad. He knew the institute was working to get Food and Drug Administration approval for a Covid test, so he stepped out to Stacey Gabriel, senior director of the genomics platform.
“When the pandemic started, and testing was really so slow, in local hospitals and in the neighborhood, one of the faculty members of the Broad Institute, a doctor of infectious disease from Brigham and Women, Deborah Hung, came, to me and said, ‘You have it in CLIA-lab. You have an unusual amount of automation and expertise in high throughput processes. Were you able to pass this test? ‘”Remember Gabriel.” And that was really the beginning of it all. That was the second week of March. “
The amendments to improve clinical laboratories require a laboratory to be certified by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services before it can accept samples for diagnostic tests.
In lab at Broad Institute
Source: CNBC
The broad team developed their own test and took about two weeks to transform a laboratory from one focused on genome sequencing to one that performed Covid diagnostics. Initially, the lab could do 1,000 tests a day, then up to 10,000, and now has instrumentation in place to do about 35,000 tests a day.
The early users were hospitals such as Brigham and Women’s and Mass General. It then began a pilot in early April to test the city of Cambridge nursing homes.
“It was a few thousand tests,” Gabriel said. “We discovered about 200 infected people among the residents and staff that the nursing homes and Cambridge were then able to act on.”
Broad has added 145,145 staff members to assist with Covid testing, and it is expanding to Massachusetts health centers in Massachusetts, as well as providing testing for colleges and universities, such as Harvard.
Kathiresan calls Gabriel “one of the unsung heroes of this pandemic” in the local community.
To facilitate the testing process, he turned to Color, a Bay Area health technology company that conducts testing on the West Coast, and which now says it provides about two-thirds of the tests for the city of San Francisco. Like the Broad, Color had seen the test logjams at the beginning of the pandemic of the other coast.
“We saw that there was an enormous crisis,” said Caroline Savello, chief commercial officer of Color. “Tests locked up in traditional health care systems.”
Color began doing both its own testing, and delivering infrastructure that Savello said can be layered on top of other labs, such as the Broad’s. It streamlines the test process with full digital appointment making and notification of results, and operates test pages.
Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, Verve Therapeutics
Source: CNBC
In Cambridge, these sites are two trailers supplied by Alexandria Real Estate, the largest landlord of biotech companies, located in a parking lot in the Kendall Square biotech hub. More than 50 biotech companies are now part of the test group. The median turnaround time for results is 12 hours. The tests cost $ 80 each.
Verve’s employees are checked once a week, and are now relocated twice a week because the Boston area will soon see a swell of students returning, and because there is a slight uptick. has been infected in Massachusetts, Kathiresan said.
The average of 7 days in Massachusetts in new daily cases rose by 90% in early August, to 423, from its lowest in early July, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project, a data source conducted by Atlantic Ocean journalists.
“This has been an issue, I think, that has been well worth it,” Kathiresan said. “I can not think of a better use of resources than to make the work environment as safe as possible.”
And, he noted, “we have reached all of our milestones for research and development.”
—CNBC’s Harriet Taylor contributed to this report.
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