[narrator] On "Tomorrow's World Today,"
we explore the cutting-edge advances
that are shaping four different worlds --
the world of inspiration,
where the wonders of the natural world
amaze and inspire us.
The world of creation, where ideas come to life
from traditional arts.
The world of innovation, where ideas and inventions
move us all forward.
The world of production, where innovations
are mass produced to improve our lives.
From Inventionland World Headquarters,
here's your host, George Davison.
Ready to jump into a world where tomorrow's tech
is today's reality?
Welcome to "Tomorrow's World Today."
Around 5,000 years ago, humans began experimenting
with plants and minerals, discovering and testing
early drugs, such as willow bark
to alleviate headache pain.
You know, back then, trying to relieve a headache
meant chugging a murky mixture of willow bark.
Then in the 1800s, alchemists began conducting experiments
probably because they noticed side effects.
They must have been convinced that there had to be
a better way than creating mysterious mixtures
with no consistent promise that it's gonna work for everyone.
Now, eventually, they began lab testing to extract pure,
safe compounds and developed consistent recipes
that could be produced, along with a warning
to some people who might have a bad reaction to that medicine.
Now, of course, back then, there wasn't some
large bank of human data,
so the results were, at best, chaotic.
So, let's fast forward to today.
We have warning labels on the back of all
of our prescription bottles.
For example, a label may tell us that
we should take a medicine with food or maybe not take it at all
if you were pregnant.
Lab testing helps to make sure that the medicines that we take
are safe today, especially when a specific medicine is
going to go out and scale on a national
or international level.
You've got to go out and collect and test
all sorts of samples from around the world in a timely manner,
and then analyze all this data to validate this new medicine.
Can you imagine the complexity of doing all that?
Now, I've heard that a global lab testing network system
has been invented, and I'm intrigued.
So, I'm gonna send Greg to the world of innovation
to explore it.
[Greg] At any one time, there are thousands of clinical trials
being conducted around the world, resulting
in tens of thousands of samples.
Now, all of those samples have to be collected,
transported, processed, analyzed,
and cataloged correctly.
And that's why we're here at LabConnect
in Johnson City, Tennessee.
We're gonna meet with Chief Executive Officer Wes Wheeler
and his team of experts to discuss innovative solutions
to these challenges and more today and in tomorrow's world.
-Hi, Wes. -Hey, Greg.
-Welcome to LabConnect. -Thank you very much.
I'm super excited to find out about everything
that you do here.
Let's kind of get an overall idea, though,
of what it is that LabConnect is all about.
You are a vital part of the drug development process.
Tell me about that.
Well, drugs are developed over a period of about 10
to 12 years, and there's a drug discovery portion,
there's a drug development portion, and then there's
a drug launch, approval and launch.
We fit in the middle of that.
LabConnect is a provider of central lab services.
We work for our clients.
Once the patients are recruited, we are able to bring
lab kits to the patients' home or to the patients' clinic
and take the blood, bring the blood back to the lab.
The labs are local, typically.
We will test the data from the blood,
and then we bring the data back to a central location
and deliver it to our clients.
Now, operating labs like that around the country
or around the world, that can be a really expensive proposition.
How do you handle that?
We have decided, because of the way drug development
is done now, patients from around the world
are required for clinical trials and for filing.
So we have to find labs around the world that are local
because the blood has to find its way to a testing lab
within a certain amount of hours, 24 to 48 hours.
So we find local labs around the world that are close
to the patients, and then we can bring the data back
to a central location back here, for example,
collect the data for the delivery to the client.
OK, great, well, I'd love to learn more about that.
Yeah, let's talk about that now.
Wes, you mentioned that you have laboratories
all around the world.
How do you find these labs to work with?
It starts with a protocol.
Our client will tell us exactly where the patients
have to come from.
That varies from protocol to protocol, from trial to trial.
So we will aggregate a lot of that information
and start to decide what regions of the world
we have to have labs in.
Over the years, all the trials we've done, we now know
the clusters are where the patients typically
will come from for a global trial.
So we have, based on that data, selected seven regions
of the world, for example, Australia, Europe, of course,
North Asia, the US, Latin America.
The labs are selected to be close to the patients,
close to the clinics, so that we make sure we get
those samples back to the lab within 48 hours.
[Greg] Well, how can you be sure that those labs
that you're working with all around the world are
following the protocols that LabConnect needs
in order to make sure those samples
are collected the right way? -No, it's a great question.
I think you have to realize every lab is different.
They're all owned by different people and different companies.
They have different equipment.
We have to make sure that the equipment,
even if the equipment's not exactly the same,
that the test is done the same way, that we can,
the assay, which is what we call it,
is done in a consistent manner so that the data
is collected in a very consistent way,
that the parameters, the data output,
the data format comes to us in a certain way that we can
harmonize the data for our clients.
Well, this seems like a fairly large logistical undertaking,
and I know that you have a nimble approach.
Tell me more about that.
Patients could be anywhere in the world.
We're collecting their blood or their urine
or some biospecimen. It could be a tumor cell.
It could be a biopsy.
That data, that sample has to get to the lab within 48 hours.
We have to be nimble enough to be able to be at the location
where the sample is being drawn and have the courier collect it,
get it to the airline, get it to the aircraft in time.
The aircraft has to be on time, and then we have to have
a courier on the other end to take it to the lab.
That's what we call nimble.
[Greg] There's a lot of moving parts involved.
Now, I know that one of the really important ways that
you make sure that the labs are doing things the way LabConnect
needs them to be done is with the specialized testing kits
that you assemble right here.
And I'd really like to get a look at that happening.
I'm gonna have Julia tell you about that now.
-Let's go. -[Greg] Sounds great.
I just met with Chief Executive Officer Wes Wheeler
to get an overview of what LabConnect does.
Now it's time to get into the nuts and bolts of things
with Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer
Julia Tarasenko.
-Hi, Julia. -Hi.
-Nice to meet you. -Nice to meet you.
So, Julia, in talking to Wes, I realized that one of the most
important parts of making sure that the various labs
follow the LabConnect protocols is the assembly
of the specialized test kits.
And he tells me that you're the person to show me
how that's done. -[Julia] Yeah, absolutely.
The specialized test kit is very important to successful
clinical trials.
So let me tell you and show you how it's done.
Julia, there are a lot of different components here.
How do you determine what goes into a particular test kit?
So test kit is a part of our study design.
So the protocol, the individual protocol,
will determine what kind of kits we use and when.
All kits will be custom.
They will be custom to a visit, and they will be in many cases
custom to the patient.
Every component will be pre-labeled.
So when the site use them, we know which test belongs
to which patient -- so, I will give you an example.
This is one of the tubes we can use.
So it's going to be very important how much blood
we will draw -- even the color of the tube
will be very important and will be protocol specific.
So we can have kits that contain 10 components,
and we can have kits that contain 50 or even more
for highly-specialized oncology trials
in as a part of the personalized medicine development.
OK, well, I know that the way these kits are
then put together is really important to minimize errors
and make sure that the data all comes back to LabConnect
the way that you want it.
So, can I get a look at somebody putting one of
the kits together? -Yeah, absolutely.
Let's have a look.
So this is part of the assembly area for our clinical kits.
But what we also increasingly do here
is what we call companion diagnostic.
That kind of kit determines if the patient is eligible
to take certain drugs.
With the rise of personalized medicine,
the drug that's suitable to you might not work on me.
So these kits help to determine that eligibility.
And here we have April who can help us through the process.
-Hi, April. -Hi.
So this is an example of our clinical trial kits.
Each kit is laid out in the order of the draw
for ease of use at the sites.
So when a clinician receives this, they can actually see
they go tube by tube right down the line
and then they put it back in the same order.
So when it comes into the lab for processing,
it's exactly laid out like this. -Exactly.
How many kits does a facility like this produce?
So a facility like this produces about
30,000 kits per month, with well over 300,000 kits
a year made globally.
[Greg] That is really impressive.
Well, April, thank you very much.
So, Julia, I guess at this point,
the next thing for me to see is the lab itself
so I can see a kit come back in and head into processing.
Can we do that?
Absolutely. Follow me.
All right. Thank you, April.
[April] Thank you.
So this is our sample processing area, and this is
where we prepare our samples before we send them out to
our partner labs for subsequent testing.
And Dr. Zarin here will walk us
through the process of what's happening here.
-Dr. Zarin, nice to meet you. -Nice to meet you.
So tell me a little bit about this portion of the facility.
So a lot of the samples that are collected
during clinical trials have a stability
of roughly 24 to 48 hours.
However, sometimes that stability is as low six hours.
So here we receive samples within that critical timeframe
for stability, and we isolate either white blood cells
through peripheral blood mononuclear cell extraction
or circulating tumor DNA or genomic DNA, and we extract
those isolates and freeze them during that critical
time period where we can then further send those out
into third-party labs where they will analyze those cells
and that DNA for further interpretation.
That is really impressive. Thank you very much, Dr. Zarin.
Julia, what else do you have for me?
We have sample receiving now, so follow me.
Dr. Zarin, thank you very much.
Take care.
[Greg] So, Julia, we're in the receiving
and accession area.
And what we're looking at here, this is a part of your new
sustainability effort. Tell me about this.
So, just to put it in perspective, we accession
we're receiving accession about 100,000 biospecimens per month.
And as an industry, they're all arriving
in the styrofoam boxes like this.
This helps us to keep an insulation, which means
the sample stays within the right temperature.
What we have been doing is replacing styrofoam completely
with this fully biodegradable and recyclable packaging made
entirely out of paper.
So, as you can see here, the insulation is made entirely
of the pressed paper.
[Greg] And this is gonna be as efficient as the styrofoam?
Yeah, absolutely.
And we have manufacturing data to support that,
and we have taken it one step further.
And we tested this packaging in a real-world condition,
and the results come back extremely strong.
And basically, at the end of its life, this box will become
another box? -[Julia] Correct.
It will be fully recycled and becomes another box.
-Julia, thank you very much, and thank you -Yeah.
for spending the time with us. -Of course.
My pleasure. Thank you so much.
With Julia, we saw the ins and outs of what it takes
to put together a customized lab kit.
Now, we're going to learn about logistics
and route optimization with Chief Technology Officer,
Charles Castano. Hey, Charles.
Hi, Greg. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, too.
So, Charles, tell me, why is LabConnect a lab like no other?
Great question, Greg.
So, LabConnect is transforming the clinical trial space.
And the thing that makes us different from any company
out there is that we can work
across any lab partners worldwide.
And what this means is that depending on whether you are
in Africa, in Asia, in the US, we can actually take your data,
ingest it, and create a data set that you can read through
our client portal from that perspective.
At the core of this transformation
is what we call LabConnector.
And what it does is it allows us to harmonize the information
from the data test results that we receive
from across the world into consistent data
that we can provide to our clients.
So, essentially, you're decentralizing
the traditional model, but that's
unifying you globally? -Yeah, absolutely.
At the same time, I think what's important is that we try
as much as possible to be as close as possible
to where the patients are.
And I think that's the core value of what LabConnect
can offer, which is to work with companies everywhere
in the world, as close as possible to the patients,
so we can do clinical trials at any place in the world.
Well, that seems to present some pretty sizable
logistical challenges to work around the globe like that.
There's a lot of challenges, but with our technology that
we call SampleGistics, with HAWK-Eye technology,
we can address that question. Let me show you how.
-Please do. -Yeah.
Now we're talking.
Well, Charles, I really want to take a deep dive
on this technology.
Tell me more about SampleGistics.
Absolutely.
I'm so excited about our SampleGistics
with HAWK-Eye technology.
So what it is, it's actually comprised of
three different technologies that we've put together
into one solution.
One part of it is about a mobile app that we provide to
our site collection partners to make sure that they have a way
of inputting information on the sample
that they've collected on a mobile device.
It allows us to make sure there's no human error
in terms of writing.
What they can do is take a picture and type in
information on a mobile app so that information is provided
to us simultaneously. The second one is about RFID.
An RFID allows us to actually track exactly where the sample
is in the network.
So what happens is that that sample travels
from a LabConnect site to the site collection,
back to LabConnect, and then to a lab partner.
The RFID allows us to determine and detect if the sample tube
has actually arrived at our facility,
as an example, right?
And then the third one is courier integration.
And what we do is we work with many companies' courier partners
out there to make sure that we're able to gather
information from them on notification that allows us
to determine if there's a problem with a specific sample
or a route from that perspective.
So basically, you're turning your lab partners,
everybody at LabConnect, and even your couriers
into one system where they're all working together
to make sure that the samples show up
when they're still viable, because they're --
that window is so critical, making sure that it gets to
where it's supposed to be. -Exactly.
-And that's what we're doing. -Excellent.
Well, now, as we look to the future and what this
technology might bring as we move ahead,
everybody talks about AI.
And it's a big word that means a lot of different things
to a lot of different people. -It is, yeah.
How do you see that being integrated
into a system like this?
We do a lot of AI applications and agentic AIs
across the company.
But let me give an example of its application
on SampleGistics.
So one example of this is route optimization.
And what that means is that, as you know,
you I travel, right?
Sometimes there's a problem with weather patterns
or sometimes even like political situations, right?
What we're able to do is overlay that information
of weather patterns with the courier notifications
and it allows us to create what I call "Next Best Action."
It provides our team members with information
that allows them to determine what's the next best route
if a specific route has a problem or issue.
So when it comes to that critical stabilization period
where a sample has to get to a particular place in time,
this is and aid in doing that. -Absolutely.
And I guess this is one of the things
that makes LabConnect... -A lab like no other.
Charles, thank you very much. This has been great.
Thank you very much, Greg.
[Greg] Back at Inventionland, Wes Wheeler, LabConnect's CEO,
is meeting up with George Davison to discuss
lab testing innovations in tomorrow's world.
Hey, Wes, welcome to Inventionland.
George, great to be here. Thanks very much.
Well, I was waiting for you to get here 'cause Greg
was telling me all about this great technology you guys
are working on.
I was hoping you could expand on that for me today.
Yeah, I think of us as a tech company,
not just a lab company.
So we are a company that doesn't own labs,
but we do pretty much everything else required
in a clinical trial.
So we'd make the kits, we set up the systems,
we collect the blood, we bring the blood back
to our partner labs, and then we process
that testing data so we can turn that into a technical file
for our clients to file for new drug medicines.
We also track the movement of the samples
from all over the world into our partner labs in real time.
And how are you doing that?
How are you tracking all of this through the physical world?
We found an RFID technology that's working, we're gonna put
an RFID tag on every tube, and tubes are
how we collect the blood.
So every tube will have an RFID tag, and every time
that tag hits a reader, we'll know exactly where it is.
That makes sense.
So because there's labs all over the world
that you're working with, somehow or another,
you must have invented a system that ties everything together.
So think of us, again, as a tech company,
connecting all the dots.
So all the systems we have, whether it's collecting data,
collecting information, collecting sample locations,
locations in the freezers when we store them,
all that data will be connected together in one total system.
Many different systems, but connected together
in one digital format.
Well, you know, Wes, it sounds a little like the technology is
moving in the direction of kind of like a rideshare company
or a B&B. -Yeah, very much so.
So we don't own the labs. We don't need to own the labs.
We partner with the labs.
We're located next to the labs, but we don't have to own them.
Very similar to a B&B or a ride share company
where they don't own the fleet, they don't own the rooms,
but they own the client and they own the data.
Very similar to what we're doing.
We own the patients in terms of how they're recruited
for a clinical trial.
And of course, we own the data that comes out
of the blood testing that we do with our partner labs.
That makes sense.
And so if I'm looking out into the future,
I mean, it sounds to me like by tying all this together
with this system, you're gonna speed up the process
of making this happen, which is quite an invention,
but won't it also add
to all the other pharmaceutical companies
that need your services --
it's like adding to the invention process itself
for new medicines.
Clinical trials are getting a lot more complicated now,
so the more that we can digitize and tech enable
the movement of blood samples and testing data,
the faster we can get those testing data into the file
for approval of the new medicine.
Well, thanks for making a better way for all of us.
Thank you for having me today.
Well, everybody, that's another edition
of "Tomorrow's World Today." We'll see you next time.
So how about we check out one of our innovation labs?
-We'll do that. -All right.
Yeah, we just started building these new labs.
[George] And remember, tomorrow's world is where inspiration
and creation drive innovation and production.
See you next time.