Covid gave my diagnostics machines a new lease of life

The move from corporate America to cash-strapped academia in Britain was quite a shock for Helen Lee, who’d had an annual budget of “around $20 million” and access to state-of-the art-research facilities at Abbott Laboratories, the US pharmaceutical giant where she ran a division.
Checking into her new laboratory at Cambridge University in 1995, where she was to set up a new diagnostics unit, she was shocked by the basic set-up. “I said to the facilities person, ‘It doesn’t have a lab store — can you get me a lab store?’ And they said, ‘No, you have to find the money to do it.’ Then I looked at the Venetian blind and I said, ‘That’s broken, can you fix it?’ And they said, ‘No, you’ll have to get it fixed yourself.’ ”
It was a salutary lesson in doing more with less. She launched her unit with £200,000 from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and grew it with subsequent grants from organisations including the Wellcome Trust, the charity that provides funding for health research. The goal of the unit was to develop simple, rapid and inexpensive tests for the detection of infections in “resource-limited” settings.
Once it was up and running, she launched and then spun out her start-up, Diagnostics for the Real World (DRW), from the university, and developed a diagnostic machine called Samba. This is designed to work in sub-Saharan Africa to speed up the detection of diseases including HIV through blood tests, and to help guide their treatment. It can also be used in more developed economies to detect respiratory illnesses using nose and throat swabs.
Adoption in Africa was slow going, but when Covid hit in 2020, DRW’s scientists adapted the technology to work for Covid testing, and the firm applied to supply the NHS with its Samba II machines. The company grew exponentially, hitting a turnover peak of £60.8 million and a pre-tax profit of £28.6 million in 2021. Since then, sales have stalled and Lee is resetting the business with the launch of a third version of the system, which is scheduled for March next year. The profits from the Covid testing contracts have provided the capital for its development.
“We have some amazing scientists and are now going beyond respiratory disease,” said Lee, 83, now the chair and chief executive of DRW. “We are doing sexually transmitted diseases and we want to go into cancer. So it’s a whole vista that has opened, and the profit we were able to make now gives us a very firm foundation to increase the menu and make it more robust, easier, faster and better.”
The Samba III is the culmination of Lee’s 60-year career in science, but she toyed with other options as she made her way in Taiwan after her family were forced to flee mainland China in the long run-up to the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, beginning with the “Great Leap Forward” in 1958. They had feared her father, a teacher at high school in Shanghai, would be killed. “So we left with almost nothing but the clothes on our backs and had to start again,” recalled Lee.
Before this, she’d had a “very happy childhood” thanks to her parents, whom she describes as “exceptional people” and “discretely progressive”. Her father’s job, first as a teacher and then at the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, meant the importance of education was instilled at a young age, and Lee toyed with different career options — first as a writer and then as a doctor.
“But I realised my nature is such that I would get so involved with the patient, I wouldn’t be doing them any good. So I decided to go into technology and specifically diagnostics, because it encompasses so many different things — it’s people, it’s machines, it’s chemistry, it’s everything you can think of. And I’ve never regretted that decision. It’s a fascinating tool that’s always developing.”
After completing the first year of her degree in China, Lee won a scholarship to study at Elmira College in New York, and later did a PhD in biology, microbiology and parasitology at Cornell University, also in New York, Because of the high cost of airfares, she didn’t see her mother for ten years, but she adapted well to American life. “It was a wonderful place to be in the Fifties and Sixties. It was a country that was plentiful. People were generous and life was safe.”
In the early part of her career, she moved between academic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, first working as an assistant professor in veterinary virus research at Cornell, before moving for the first time to the UK, where she worked at Oxford University in insect viruses.
Stints in Geneva and Paris followed, with Lee establishing herself as an expert in diagnostics. She is listed on 14 patents or patent applications and has won many awards for her work, including the prestigious European Inventor Award in 2016 for her low-cost diagnostic kits for developing countries.
In 1995, after four years at Abbott Laboratories in Chicago, she co-founded Sentinel Biosciences, a biotech company based in Palo Alto, California, which worked on developing technologies for viral discovery, mainly focusing on hepatitis and HIV. She juggled it alongside a role at Cambridge University, where she established the diagnostics development unit. When Sentinel Biosciences was sold in 1999 to the pharmaceuticals giant Roche for an undisclosed amount, Lee focused all her attention on her work at Cambridge.
This is when she spotted a gap in the market for diagnostic tools in developing countries. “A lot [of the tools] were really for rich companies, rich cities and rich settings. And yet, if you go to Africa, or to slums in other places, you can see that the right kind of diagnostics is really lacking. And that’s because there’s no money in it. So that’s a problem we really wanted to fix.”
It was an idea that had been percolating for some time. “I saw that infectious disease in Africa was a real problem and that we needed to develop the technology and platform suitable for that environment,” said Lee. But while the invention was a technological success (“we developed a platform that is heat-stable, simple and visual, so it can be used in the developing world”), it was not a business success. “We were a total failure because commercialisation in sub-Saharan Africa is very complicated. The politics are very complex and we didn’t manage that well. But we never gave up.”
The Covid contracts gave Diagnostics for the Real World a new lease of life, with the team swelling from 10 to 200 in the UK and US in just a few months. Lee said that on Christmas Eve 2020, she and her staff were working until 4am.
“We grew exponentially and it’s not something anybody can teach you in business school. There’s no strategy — you have to go by your wits. It’s a period of my life I will never forget. It [Covid] was a terrible thing to happen, but it was also a gift to us to really make us grow and to see what we could become.”
The Samba machines were used in hospitals for rapid diagnosis of critically ill patients, and to guide their treatment. DRW has since shrunk back to 45 people — a process that Lee said “was very natural, not traumatic” because lots of the extra recruits were students and part-time workers hired hastily during the pandemic.
As for Lee, she is focused on the launch of Samba III and will stay with the company for a short time afterwards, before passing the reins to a new chief executive.
However, retirement isn’t calling just yet, with plans for her next start-up idea well underway — a community to be named “Grey Matters” that will bring “brilliant old people” together with younger generations for mentoring and co-working on projects. “I’ll invest whatever money I have to do this,” said Lee, who doesn’t think the experiences and knowledge of older generations are as revered as they should be — especially compared with countries such as China.
“I’m not self-conscious at all about my age because my parents were not self-conscious. But I think it’s difficult to grow old in the western world. A couple of friends, who are both accomplished people, said that when they go on the street, people almost walk through them.
“Society looks at you differently, and I want to do something about that,” said Lee. “So I will use whatever savings I have to create this environment where the young can benefit from the older, and vice-versa. I’m really excited about that.”
My heroes … my mother, for not imposing a limit on me — I could be who I wanted to be— and the doctor Rosemary Biggs, who I worked with earlier in my career.My best decision … to climb the Organ Mountains in New Mexico in my 20s. I never would have thought I could do it and it showed me what I was capable of.My worst decision … I’m a sore loser. I hate to lose. So even if something bad happens, I try to turn it into something good.Funniest moment… I went to the job interview at Abbott Laboratories, the heart of corporate America, in my bright pink Hush Puppies. My boss told me later that the HR person had said to him, “This woman is going to come on her own terms.”Best business tip… Never give up. If there’s something I want to do, I’ll find a way. If it’s not over, it’s under, to the left or to the right. There’s always a way.