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Henrico-based Genetworx sees surge in growth, jobs during COVID-19 crisis D8

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A year of COVIDone year after coVid-19 hit Virginia, the Richmond Times-dispatch is looking back at how the pandemic has shaped, changed and challenged all of us.

by JoHn reiD bLACKWeLLRichmond Times-dispatch

As the coronavirus pandemic surged early in 2020, Bran-dywine Living, a New Jersey-based company that operates assisted-living communities in seven states including Virginia, found itself in the same position as many other senior living fa-cilities and institutions.

They were all scrambling to find laboratories that could conduct COVID-19 tests for their residents and staff.

“This virus is insidious and invisible, and many of the trans-mitters are asymptomatic,” said Ken Segarnick, the chief cor-

porate officer of Brandywine, which has more than 3,000 resi-dents in its 31 communities and about 2,000 employees.

“You have to test people early,” he said. The turnaround time on tests also is key for helping to control any spread of the virus, he said.

Brandywine Living turned to Genetworx, a Henrico County-based laboratory company that started operations eight years ago in the Innsbrook Corporate Center.

Genetworx provides a vari-ety of laboratory services. When the pandemic hit, though, the company jumped into COVID-19 testing, ramping up its staff, equipment and real estate foot-print to do so.

The result has been a massive surge in growth and employ-ment for the company, to more

Henrico-based Genetworx sees massive growth amid pandemic

Investments in testing for COVID to be useful for its other lab services

BOB BROWN/TIMES-DISPATCH

A technician handles samples in a lab area. Genetworx has invested about $2 million to scale up its CoViD-19 testing operations.

BOB BROWN/TIMES-DISPATCH

A technician works in a lab area at Genetworx in Henrico County. the demand for CoViD-19 testing “was like a rocket ship,” said Ken segarnick, the chief corporate officer of brandywine Living.

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than 1,000 people.“The demand for testing was

like a rocket ship,” said Segar-nick, adding that his company was concerned its testing needs would become secondary to those of larger institutions.

“They [Genetworx] scaled along the way,” he said. “It was not just that they were provid-ing Brandywine’s needs. They were taking on a lot of clients and a lot of growth. That level of growth and scale can present speed bumps along the way, but they did a good job of navi-gating that for us.”

“We were seeking to build a moat around our kingdom, and they were — and are — an important line of our defense strategy,” he said.

Genetworx first set up opera-tions in 2013 in the former Hen-rico Innsbrook Library branch, a 17,794-square-foot building on Innslake Drive.

Today, though, the build-ing looks nothing like a library, at least on the inside. Book shelves have been replaced by laboratory rooms housing rows of testing instruments, and the staff members walk around in white coats, masks, face shields and gloves.

Tens of thousands of pa-tient specimens arrive at the lab daily for COVID-19 testing. The company’s goal is to pro-vide the test results to patients within 24 hours.

“We have been averaging anywhere between 45,000 and 60,000 samples per day,” said Bill Miller, the diagnostic mo-lecular laboratory company’s

co-founder and CEO.

The lab has the capacity to test as many as 80,000 samples a day.

“We also ser-vice all 50 states,”

Miller said. “A sample could be dropped off in California at 9 at night, and it will be in our lab at 6 the next morning. We count on our couriers to make sure our specimens get delivered.”

The company has invested about $2 million to scale up its operations for COVID-19 test-

ing. It also has expanded its operations into two nearby buildings in Innsbrook to house laboratory and office space, as well as a warehouse on Parham Road.

With the COVID-19 testing boom, the company has grown in less than a year from about 60 employees to more than 1,000, most of them working in the Richmond area.

“We are looking for about 500 more people,” Miller said. “We can’t grow fast enough. We have been fortunate. We have worked with universities and recruiting agencies as we have grown. The amount of talent here [in Virginia] is great.”

Newly created jobs at the company range from laboratory technicians to customer ser-vice representatives. “Medical technologists are our ideal tar-get for the lab side,” Miller said, but entry-level jobs also include data entry and couriers.

v v v

Genetworx was founded long before anything like COVID-19 was on the radar with the goal of doing pharmacogenet-ics testing, an emerging area of medicine that enables physi-cians to determine how an in-dividual’s genetic profile can affect the effectiveness of medi-cations they take.

It is a field that the company still sees as a growth market.

“We saw a gap in the system and we wanted to fill it,” Miller said. “We look for genes that metabolize specific medica-tions. That is individualized and varies from person to person.”

“We wanted to give physi-cians more actionable informa-tion,” Miller said. “We are able to look at individuals’ drug-to-drug interactions and their drug-to-gene interactions, so they are placed on the medica-tion that was appropriate for that individual.”

For instance, certain car-diovascular disease medica-tions cannot be metabolized by some people. Genetworx’s tests were designed to identify those cases.

“We are really focused on personalized medicine,” said Miller, a native of Phoenix and an Air Force veteran with a master’s degree in health care administration. His career be-fore founding Genetworx in-cluded working in management for several other laboratory companies.

Pharmacogenetics is also im-portant in conditions such as depression and anxiety, said Sarah Jacobs-Helber, Genet-worx’s laboratory director since the company was founded.

“There are a lot of medi-

cations that are affected by genetic mutations,” Jacobs-Helber said.

Pharmacogenetics “can give physicians a lot of insight as to why a drug is not working in a certain patient,” she said. “A lot of times it is because our

body cannot break down that drug and use it, and that is what pharmacogenet-ics does.”

Recovery Cen-ters of America, a Pennsylvania-based company

that provides addiction treat-ment programs and operates treatment centers in six states, acquired Genetworx in 2017.

Genetworx has expanded its testing services into different specialties such as women’s health, gastrointestinal and uri-nary health, and flu testing.

“Thanks to our parent com-pany, we were able to adapt quickly to COVID testing,” Miller said. “They were crucial in the funding we needed to get COVID testing up and going.”

v v v

Coronavirus testing is down across the U.S. The average number of tests being con-ducted daily has dropped by 33.6% since January, the Wash-ington Post reported, citing the COVID Tracking Project.

Company executives say they expect to see long-term de-mand for some COVID-19 test-ing even when the pandemic recedes, as the virus is likely to remain in the population for a long time or possibly for good.

But the company’s invest-ments to do COVID-19 test-ing will be useful for its other lab services, including growth opportunities in pharmacoge-netics. Genetworx is currently doing about 5,000 tests per month in pharmacogenetics, Jacobs-Helber said.

“People are starting to see the value in it, and we are get-ting more requests for it,” she said. “It is one of our core areas, and we see it continuing, I think we are going to be seeing a lot

BOB BROWN/TIMES-DISPATCH

Genetworx jobs range from lab techs to customer service representatives; this is the billing department.

BOB BROWN/TIMES-DISPATCH

Laboratory director Sarah Jacobs-Helber talks about the results shown on the screen of one of the company’s IntelliQube machines.

Jacobs-Helber

Miller

Genetworx, Page D12

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more growth in other per-sonalized medicine such as heredity cancer and even genetic mutations in-volved in cardiac diseases, because that is informa-tion we can give the pa-tient that will allow them to make better choices.”

Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, Genetworx has added additional equipment such as high-volume sample purifi-cation instruments and analysis machines called IntelliQube. The company can test thousands more samples per day than it could just a year ago.

“The thing about the COVID situation is we have been able to parlay that testing so that now we have more capacity to run our non-COVID testing,” said Jacobs-Helber, who has 20 years of experience in laboratory manage-ment. She earned a doc-torate in microbiology and immunology from Virginia Commonwealth University and did post-doctoral re-search at the National Can-

cer Institute and at VCU.While no lab can ever

achieve 100% accuracy in testing, “we aim for greater than 99% accuracy,” Ja-cobs-Helber said. “We have processes in place to minimize that happening [false negatives or posi-tives]. We do daily decon-tamination and daily and weekly checks of instru-mentation and also review of all data to ensure that controls for all tests are working properly.”

v v v

Ramping up the COVID-19 testing over the past year has presented a num-ber of challenges, from obtaining laboratory re-sources to managing re-porting of test results, Jacobs-Helber said.

One challenge was meeting various state gov-ernment requirements for reporting the results of COVID-19 tests to health departments so they could track the outbreak.

“The states did not nec-essarily have the resources or infrastructure to receive hundreds of thousands of test results,” she said. “It was a challenge coordinat-

ing the reporting of our test results.”

Another challenge was making sure the com-pany had the good people to do the work, she said. “We are fortunate that we have been able to get a great team of dedicated technicians and technolo-gists. We are a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation.”

The hundreds of new hires over the last year have included Carlton Cheeley,

a Hanover County resi-dent who joined the company last July as a laboratory supervisor and a senior

medical technologist after seven years working for other laboratories.

“I was looking for a grow-ing lab,” said Cheeley, a Midlothian native who has a master’s degree in medi-cal physiology from the University of Florida. “I was looking to be part of some-thing that was growing and doing innovative work as well, so I feel like I landed in the perfect place.”

v v v

Genetworx’s custom-ers include health care providers as well as insti-tutions such as universi-ties, government agencies, senior living facilities and other companies that need large-scale testing.

“We have a large foot-print with senior living fa-cilities,” Miller said. “We feel that will be crucial going forward because they are the most vulner-able and at risk,” for ongo-ing COVID-19 outbreaks.

It also sells self-admin-istered COVID-19 nasal swab test kits that can be ordered by colleges for their students, by health care providers for their patients and residents, and by employers for their workers.

The company also has introduced mobile COVID-19 testing units in New Jersey and in Arizona and is working on start-ing another mobile unit in Florida.

“As people start getting back to work, the turn-around time in testing is crucial in identifying as-ymptomatic patients, so our mobile units have proven to be effective for that,” Miller said.

Another big part of Genetworx’s business is providing COVID-19 man-

aged testing programs at numerous U.S. colleges, including Southern Illinois University, Loyola Univer-sity Maryland and Lewis and Clark State College in Idaho.

One campus client is Washington and Lee Uni-versity, which set up a COVID-19 testing facility at its Lexington campus for students and faculty and is using the compa-ny’s lab service for weekly COVID-19 tests of stu-dents who are back on campus. Student athletes are tested three times a week.

Paul Youngman, the university’s associate pro-vost, said the school had initially sought out Genet-worx’s services early last

year, but the company did not have the capacity to do all the needed tests at the time, so the school used another provider until last fall, when it switched over to Genetworx.

“The turnaround time with Genetworx is fast,” Youngman said. “I took a test one day last week at 3 p.m. and got the results early the next day.”

Rapid testing “is every-thing in terms of being able to isolate the virus,” he said. “The minute we get a positive test, we can ask that person to quarantine.”

“That has contributed to our ability to stay open,” he said.jblackwell@timesdispatch.com(804) 775-8123

GenetworxFrom Page D9

BOB BROWN/TIMES-DISPATCH

The company has grown from about 60 employees to more than 1,000 in less than a year.

BOB BROWN/TIMES-DISPATCH

Genetworx expects some demand for COVID-19 testing even when the pandemic recedes.

Cheeley