TCA/ GENETWORx Laboratories announced today that it has added substantial testing capacity and is now providing COVID-19 diagnostic test results in 72 hours or less to help battle the surging coronavirus epidemic. TCA/GENETWORx has performed thousands of COVID-19 tests since March and recently experienced some delays, like most other United States laboratories. In order to supply results in 72 hours or less, TCA/GENETWORx invested millions of dollars in real estate and equipment and has recruited hundreds of employees.
In partnership with Nucleus, TCA/GENETWORx has also created a test and sample management program called Aura. By having all patients download Aura, TCA/GENETWORx provides patients and customers including healthcare providers, universities, government, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and other large population organizations a total end to end digital management and a medical data system which provides test locations, test scheduling, sample tracking, symptom tracking, contact tracing assistance, dashboard compliance reporting, and government reporting.
Aura expedites turnaround times, reduces laboratory process time, and allows large population customers, including municipalities, state and federal governments, universities, large corporations, and others to manage the COVID-19 compliance and health of their entire workforce, student, and/or patient population.
TCA/GENETWORx has also developed an end to end program to test large inner-city populations in order to greatly reduce testing inequality. According to Brian O’Neill, Chairman of TCI/GENETWORx, this specialized testing for the inner city is desperately needed, “The age-adjusted COVID-19 death rate for African American people is 3.6 times that for whites, and the age-adjusted death rate for Hispanic/Latino people is 2.5 times that for whites. This is unconscionable and we are offering U.S. cities a managed testing solution to address this problem on a large scale.”
The company is building the capability to perform 870,000 tests per day or 26 million per month. In order to meet demand, the company launched a massive recruiting campaign called Re Employ America and is currently extending offers to 50-100 people per day. Moreover, in the company’s Glen Allen, Virginia laboratory, the TCA/GENETWORx “Families Work Here” program employs multiple generations of families. This has instilled an “all hands on deck” culture at the company which has helped it to grow to meet the demand required by the pandemic.
CEO and Co-Founder of GENETWORx William Miller is a member of one of the multi-generational families working together at Genetworx.
“I’m happy to support the U.S. and Virginia economies through our Re Employ America campaign and I’m proud to have members of my family working side by side with me at TCA/GENETWORx to help battle this pandemic,” said Miller.
Another multi-generational family employed by the company includes a twenty-year laboratory testing veteran and Chief Laboratory Officer Sarah Jacobs-Helber. “My daughter and my son work here in the medical technology and operations departments. We all feel a tremendous sense of pride that we are contributing in a very real way in our different job roles at Genetworx as we all work together to perform the vital service of testing hundreds of thousands of Americans during this crisis,” she said.
Miller, who co-founded Genetworx in 2013 with two other scientists added “The heart of our lab is full of national pride and that comes from starting out as a smaller lab whose employees really want to make a difference during the country’s infectious disease crisis.”
