Taking five with Dr Tony Cooke, CEO - Cambridge Clinical Laboratories
Back in November 2020 we spoke with our CEO Dr Tony Cooke about how Cambridge Clinical Laboratories had responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. We discussed how in 2020 CCL’s team doubled, in the height of the pandemic we were processing the equivalent of four months (pre pandemic) testing every week, and Tony was at the forefront in enabling private labs to support with Coronavirus testing.
Nine months on, how are things looking for this leading UK diagnostics lab?
Since we last spoke how have things developed / changed for CCL?
After the Government ended the private Covid-19 testing contracts in December that left a hole in what some labs were doing. We carried on with our oncology and virology work and continued looking for new development opportunities.
We have also been looking at how we can still contribute to Covid-19 testing. It has taken us a few months to get here but we now have a travel testing service in place. We have set up our own direct portal using Recova software. We are still running an occupational testing service for companies trying to make sure their employees stay safe and we are also working with a number of external front end providers who provide clinic-based travel testing.
In the first six months of this year we’ve done a lot less Covid-19 testing, instead we have built our capacity to run other services such as Next Gen Sequencing, collaborated with other businesses, and prepared the business to be able to offer more sophisticated services in the future. It has gone where we wanted it to go just in a roundabout way because of Covid-19. The health of the nation is still being very much impacted by Covid-19, the NHS is still catching up – especially with oncology – and we want to help with that backlog as much as we can.
In the Autumn we will look closer at what we can provide as a fertility testing service. We also have the opportunity to work with hospitals and labs in Albania and the Balkans. Fertility services in the UK are a postcode lottery, and even more impacted with the financial impact of Covid-19, so if we can help we will.
In 2022 we will come back to looking at what we can support with regards to gastroand men’s health.
How are you coping with the constantly evolving landscape of Covid-19 and healthcare in the UK?
It has settled a bit, but it is changing every couple of weeks. You have to be reactive. The oncology and virology routine work is settling down. There are two sides to our business at the moment - one still being reactive to the requirements of Covid-19 testing, the other re-establishing those strong links with the NHS and private healthcare. We’re seeing a lot of interest in the companion diagnostic work we do.
What do you foresee happening with regards to Covid-19 testing?
It depends on what happens with the vaccination programmes in other countries. To me it seems obvious that Covid-19 will fall into a serious flu category, rather than fatal disease category. I think we will be stuck with some measures over the winter, booster vaccines will help, and then we’ll have boosters each year. As the population either becomes vaccinated or infected, herd immunity will take over. I think Spring 2022 will be a new birth.
You have been vocal re the lack of regulation of companies offering Covid-19 tests, what needs to happen in your opinion?
It needs to be policed. When you sign up to meet certain quality requirements – someone needs to check that you’re doing what you’re doing. The problem is you have a Government agency who are setting the tone, you have an accreditation body – where is the regulator? Where are the MRHA in all of this? It doesn’t seem like anyone is getting monitored.
What is next for CCL? What are you most excited about?
We now have a direct to consumer platform which we could expand to other areas outside of Covid-19. In September we will launch our urology portfolio, and really we just need to get back to some kind of normality.