News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

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News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel
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Forbes Ranks Epic’s Judith Faulkner the Richest Woman in Healthcare in Its 2021 List of 100 Richest Self-Made Women in US

Within the in vitro diagnostics and clinical laboratory space, Bio-Rad’s Alice Schwartz and 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki also were recognized by Forbes

At $6.5 billion net worth, Forbes, in its 2021 list of the 100 richest self-made women in the US, ranked Judith Faulkner, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Epic Systems Corp., in second place overall. But in the industry of healthcare, she tops the list by far. The next nearest healthcare-related “richest woman” is Alice Schwartz, co-founder of Bio-Rad Laboratories, at $2.9 billion.

Faulkner was surpassed on Forbes’ list only by roofing material magnate Diane Hendricks, co-founder of ABC Supply Co., whose net worth of $11 billion puts her squarely in the top spot.

Richest Self-Made Women in Healthcare

Becker’s Hospital Review highlighted the seven richest “self-made” women who ran healthcare-related companies. They include:

Also listed by Forbes was Anne Wojcicki, CEO and founder of 23andMe, a personal genomics and biotechnology company. Wojcicki’s net worth of $1.1 billion puts her in the 25th position, according to Forbes.

In “Genetic Test Company 23andMe Completes Merger with Richard Branson’s VG Acquisition Corp., Stock Now Trades on NASDAQ,” Dark Daily noted that since the Sunnyvale, Calif. direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing company will now be filing quarterly earnings reports, pathologists and clinical laboratory managers will have the opportunity to learn more about how 23andMe serves the consumer market for genetic types and how it is generating revenue from its huge database containing the genetic sequences from millions of people.

Judith Faulkner and Alice Schwartz

Judith Faulkner (left), founder and CEO of Epic Systems Corp., and Alice Schwartz (right), co-founder of Bio-Rad Laboratories, ranked 2nd and 10th respectively in Forbes’ list of the top 100 richest self-made women. In healthcare, Faulkner ranks 1st and Schwartz 2nd. Clinical laboratory personnel will likely be familiar with Epic Beaker, which, according to Healthcare IT Leaders, “is Epic’s laboratory information system (LIS) for hospitals, clinics, patient service centers, and reference labs. The software supports common workflows for clinical pathology (CP) labs as well as anatomic pathology (AP) labs.”  (Photo copyrights: HIT Consultant/Science History Institute.)

How did Faulkner Make Epic So Epic?

It all started in 1979 when Faulkner and a colleague invested $70,000 to launch Human Services Computing, which became Epic, noted Forbes in “The Billionaire Who Controls Your Medical Records.”

“I always liked making things out of clay. And the computer was clay of the mind. Instead of physical, it was mental,” Faulkner, who is 77, told Forbes.

Company milestones noted by Forbes include:

  • Inking a deal in 2004 with Kaiser Permanente for a three-year, $400-million project.
  • Moving in 2005 to a corporate campus in southern Wisconsin—an “adult Disney World” with the largest underground auditoriums and more “fantastical” buildings.
  • More recently, AdventHealth of Altamonte Springs, Fla., contracted with Epic for a $650 million remote build and installation.

“Epic’s system has tentacles that go out through amazing networks. You can actually help a person get the care they need wherever they need to get it,” AdventHealth’s CEO Terry Shaw told Forbes.

In about two years, Epic plans to launch an artificial intelligence (AI) Electronic Health Record (EHR) documentation tool aimed at transcribing clinician and patient conversations in real-time, EHR Intelligence reported.

However, Epic may face competition from IT startups in areas including ancillary services, where clinical laboratories, for example, are seeking genomic data storage and introducing new genetic tests, according to Becker’s Hospital Review in its report on analysis by CB Insights, titled, “Unbundling Epic: How The Electronic Health Record Market Is Being Disrupted.”

“I think that what will happen is that a few of them will do very well. And the majority of them won’t. “It’s not us as much as the health systems who have to respond to the patient saying, ‘Send my data here,’ or ‘Send my data there,’” Faulkner told Forbes.

Bio-Rad’s Alice Schwartz an IVD ‘Pioneer’

As Faulkner rose to prominence in healthcare IT, Alice Schwartz of Bio-Rad Laboratories found massive success in the in vitro diagnostics industry.

She and her late husband, David, started Bio-Rad with $720 in 1952 in Berkeley, Calif. They were intent on offering life science products and services aimed at identifying, separating, purifying, and analyzing chemical and biological materials, notes the company’s website.

“They were at the right place and at the right time as they became pioneers in the industry,” International Business Times (IBT) stated.

Bio-Rad Laboratories (NYSE:BIO and BIOb) of Hercules, Calif., offers life science research and clinical diagnostic products. The company’s second quarter (Q2) 2021 net sales were $715.9 million, an increase of about 33% compared to $536.9 million in Q2 2020, according to a news release. Its Clinical Diagnostics segment Q2 sales were $380 million, an increase of 34% compared to 2020.

Norman Schwartz, the founders’ son, is Bio-Rad’s Chairman of the Board,

President, and CEO. However, at age 94, Alice Schwartz, the oldest person on Forbes’ richest self-made women list, “has no sign of stopping soon,” IBT reported.

Lists are fun. Medical laboratory and diagnostics professionals may admire such foresight and perseverance. Judith Faulkner and Alice Schwartz are extraordinary examples of innovative thinkers in healthcare. There are others­—many in clinical laboratories and pathology groups.

Donna Marie Pocius

Related Information

Forbes’ Ranking of the Country’s Most Successful Women Entrepreneurs and Executives 2021

Healthcare’s Richest Self-Made Women, Per Forbes

Epic Systems Founder-CEO Judy Faulkner Wields Great Power and Responsibility in Healthcare IT

Unbundling Epic: How the Electronic Health Record Market is Being Disrupted

The Billionaire Who Controls Your Medical Records

Epic in Process of Developing AI EHR Documentation Assistant

Epic’s Revenue Hit $3.3B in 2020; 10 ways the EHR Giant’s Dominance is Opening Doors for Competition

Bio-Rad Reports Second Quarter 2021 Financial Results

Alice Schwartz Net Worth: Oldest, Richest Woman in U.S. is Worth $2.2B

Genetic Test Company 23andMe Completes Merger with Richard Branson’s VG Acquisition Corp; Stock Now Trades on NASDAQ

New CDC-led Genomics Consortium That Harnessed Genetic Sequencing to Track the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus includes Clinical Laboratories and IVD Firms

Medical laboratories are already using gene sequencing as part of a global effort to identify new variants of the coronavirus and their genetic ancestors

Thanks to advances in genetic sequencing technology that enable medical laboratories to sequence organisms faster, more accurately, and at lower cost than ever before, clinical pathology laboratories worldwide are using that capability to analyze the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and identify variants as they emerge in different parts of the world.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now plans to harness the power of gene sequencing through a new consortium called SPHERES (SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing for Public Health Emergency Response, Epidemiology, and Surveillance) to “coordinate SARS-CoV-2 sequencing across the United States,” states a CDC news release. The consortium is led by the CDC’s Advanced Molecular Detection (AMD) program and “aims to generate information about the virus that will strengthen COVID-19 mitigation strategies.”

The consortium is comprised of 11 federal agencies, 20 academic institutions, state public health laboratories in 21 states, nine non-profit research organizations, and 14 lab and IVD companies, including:

  • Abbott Diagnostics
  • bioMérieux
  • Color Genomics
  • Ginkgo Bioworks
  • IDbyDNA
  • Illumina
  • In-Q-Tel
  • LabCorp
  • One Codex
  • Oxford Nanopore Technologies
  • Pacific Biosciences
  • Qiagen
  • Quest Diagnostics
  • Verily Life Sciences

‘Fundamentally Changing How Public Health Responds’

Gene sequencing and related technologies have “fundamentally changed how public health responds in terms of surveillance and outbreak response,” said Duncan MacCannell, PhD, Chief Science Officer for the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (OAMD), in an April 30 New York Times (NYT) article, which stated that the CDC SPHERES program “will help trace patterns of transmission, investigate outbreaks, and map how the virus is evolving, which can affect a cure.”

The CDC says that rapid DNA sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 will help monitor significant changes in the virus, support contact tracing efforts, provide information for developers of diagnostics and therapies, and “advance public health research in the areas of transmission dynamics, host response, and evolution of the virus.”

The sequencing laboratories in the consortium have agreed to “release their information into the public domain quickly and in a standard way,” the NYT reported, adding that the project includes standards for what types of information medical laboratories should submit, including, “where and when a sample was taken,” and other critical details.

Even in its early phase, the CDC’s SPHERES project has “made a tangible impact in the number of sequences we’re able to deposit and make publicly available on a daily basis,” said Pavitra Roychoudhury, PhD (above), Acting Instructor and Senior Fellow at the University of Washington, and Research Associate at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in an e-mail to the NYT. “What we’re essentially doing is reading these small fragments of viral material and trying to jigsaw puzzle the genome together,” said Roychoudhury in an April 28 New York Times article which covered in detail how experts are tracking the coronavirus since it arrived in the US. (Photo copyright: LinkedIn.)

Sharing Data Between Sequencing Laboratories and Biotech Companies

The CDC announced the SPHERES initiative on April 30, although it launched in early April, the NYT reported.

According to the CDC, SPHERES’ objectives include:

  • To bring together a network of sequencing laboratories, bioinformatics capacity and subject matter expertise under the umbrella of a massive and coordinated public health sequencing effort.
  • To identify and prioritize capabilities and resource needs across the network and to align sources of federal, non-governmental, and private sector funding and support with areas of greatest impact and need.
  • To improve coordination of genomic sequencing between institutions and jurisdictions and to enable more resilience across the network.
  • To champion concepts of openness, standards-based analysis, and rapid data sharing throughout the United States and worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic response.
  • To accelerate data generation and sharing, including the rapid release of high-quality viral sequence data from clinical and public health laboratories into both the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) repositories in near-real time.
  • To provide a common forum for US public, private, and academic institutions to share protocols, methods, bioinformatics tools, standards, and best practices.
  • To establish consistent data and metadata standards, including streamlined repository submission processes, sample prioritization criteria, and a framework for shared, privacy-compliant unique case identifiers.
  • To align with other national sequencing and bioinformatics networks, and to support global efforts to advance the use of standards and open data in public health.

Implications for Developing a Vaccine

As the virus continues to mutate and evolve, one question is whether a vaccine developed for one variant will work on others. However, several experts told The Washington Post that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is relatively stable compared to viruses that cause seasonal flu (influenza).

“At this point, the mutation rate of the virus would suggest that the vaccine developed for SARS-CoV-2 would be a single vaccine, rather than a new vaccine every year like the flu vaccine,” Peter Thielen, a molecular biologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told the Washington Post.

Nor, he said, is one variant likely to cause worse clinical outcomes than others. “So far, we don’t have any evidence linking a specific virus [strain] to any disease severity score. Right now, disease severity is much more likely to be driven by other factors.”

That point was echoed by Anthony Fauci, MD, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a March 22 interview with CBS News. “I have no doubt it’s mutating as all RNA viruses mutate,” he said. However, he added, “we have not seen thus far any type of change in the way it’s acting.”

Fast improvements in gene sequencing technology have made it faster, more accurate, and cheaper to sequence. Thus, as the COVID-19 outbreak happened, there were many clinical laboratories around the world with the equipment, the staff, and the expertise to sequence the novel coronavirus and watch it mutate from generation to generation and from region to region around the globe. This capability has never been available in outbreaks prior to the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.

—Stephen Beale

Related Information:

Genome Canada Leads $40 Million Genomics Initiative to Address COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 Genomics UK

Bad News Wrapped in Protein: Inside the Coronavirus Genome

How Coronavirus Mutates and Spreads

Covid-19 Arrived in Seattle. Where It Went from There Stunned the Scientists

8 Strains of the Coronavirus Are Circling the Globe. Here’s What Clues They’re Giving Scientists

SARS-CoV-2 Genomes Let Researchers Retrace Viral Spread, Mitigation Effects

Varied COVID-19 Strains Not a Problem for Vaccines—For Now

The Coronavirus Mutates More Slowly Than the Flu, Which Means a Vaccine Will Likely Be Effective Long-Term

Response to “On the Origin and Continuing Evolution of SARS-CoV-2”

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