OKC startup lab offers at-home COVID-19 test
The Journal Record * October 15, 2020
As of Oct. 13, Oklahoma had 101,493 COVID-19 cases, and the state Health Department reported 1,309 new infections on Tuesday. The 760 statewide hospitalizations as of Monday set a new record in the state.
Many new patients transferred to Oklahoma City for treatment, where ICU beds were in short supply, were from rural areas where people wearing masks "are laughed at,” Heather Yazdanipour, a regional director of the Regional Medical Response System, told the Oklahoma City Council on Tuesday.
Oklahoma’s rural areas are being specifically hit with new virus cases. In fact, nationwide, rural and low-population areas face a lack of medical resources compared to their metropolitan counterparts.
In the United States, 128 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, nine of them in 2020.
Wheeler Labs of Oklahoma City thinks it may have an answer to the growing need for testing in both rural and urban Oklahoma areas.
Wheeler Labs, headed by Dr. Jesse McCool, launched Oklahoma’s first non-invasive, direct-to-patient, at-home COVID-19 test this week. The lab creates COVID tests that can be mailed directly to patients’ homes for self-testing.
“As the number of new cases, positivity rates and suffering continue to climb in our part of the country, we felt compelled to act. Since there are challenges in finding rapid testing options, especially in rural parts of the state, we wanted to make the testing process easy, fast and accessible without sacrificing accuracy,” said Dr. McCool.
According to a study by Population Health Management published on Sept. 9, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act an initial $10 billion to rural hospitals to offset lost revenue, $225 million to improve testing, and $150 million to help treat COVID-19 cases.
However, many rural testing sites and hospitals still have to send COVID test samples to larger metropolitan hospitals or labs for in-house testing.
“This highlights the need for point-of-service testing or quick-response testing ability in order to coordinate communication of testing results quickly so that patients and providers can respond appropriately,” the report, which was funded in part by Penn State's Huck Institute of Life Sciences and Social Science Research Institute, said.
Dr. McCool hopes Wheeler Lab’s homes testing technology will be able to meet that challenge that rural areas face.
“We came up with an innovative way to get our lab up and running as quickly as possible. Basically what we offer is a do-it-yourself, unsupervised sample collection. Our laboratory tests for the presence of the virus, using what the CDC recommends is the gold standard test, which is the molecular test,” said Dr. McCool.
“So now our laboratory is 100% rfocused on testing saliva samples that are collected using our mail-at-home kit. The patient sends that test to our lab and we run them through our testing to detect presence or absence of COVID.”
McCool previously led Oklahoma’s largest biologics manufacturing company after moving to Oklahoma from Boston in 2013 to help build out the emerging biotech industry in Oklahoma City.
“We only started this in August, and it only took us about 45 days to get our lab up and running. So the actual method is a validated method. It is authorized by FDA and was developed and validated by a diagnostic laboratory in the New York city area,” McCool said.
Wheeler Labs partnered with Phosphorus Diagnostics for the tech transfer of their method and their process for remote testing. By using the tech already developed by Phosphorus Diagnostics, the tests are FDA-authorized under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) authority, which allows FDA to help strengthen the nation’s public health protections against threats by facilitating the availability and use of technologies needed during public health emergencies. .
“We weren't interested in creating something brand new, so we took an industry best practice approach and just used that as a template and brought it down here to the city,” McCool said.
Wheeler Labs finalized its seed round of funding led by Echo Investment Capital and is now offering its tests to three key markets. The first market is the at-home testing arena, and patients can order the DIY tests directly from Wheeler Labs.
“Another type of customer is more of an enterprise customer where we do bulk orders with companies, like an HR director trying to manage the return to work a little bit better,” McCool said. “We are working with several large companies in the Oklahoma City metro area right now.”
Individual and rural clinics are the third market for Wheeler Labs.
“So there's a lot of testing clinics that have popped up around the state, and there are shortages in testing personnel. We can augment that infrastructure and the offerings that clinics already have in place. So right now, we are really trying to get the word out about Wheeler, trying to get the word out about our lab and the high accuracy and the fast turnaround times.”
Right now, Wheeler Labs can run 500 tests a day, but expects to increase that number to 1,000 tests a day. Because of the anticipated growth, Wheeler expects an increase to 25 employees.
Many of those employees come from the oil and gas industry, McCool said.
“One of our missions in addition to helping support the management of the COVID-19 pandemic is to put more Oklahomans to work and really try to get our state economy back on track,” McCool said.
“Our mission is to also provide an opportunity for people in different industries to get some new skills. One of the things that we are doing is purposefully training folks from the oil and gas industry to work in the lab and computer diagnostics space.”
Wheeler Labs is a start-up clinical laboratory developing high-complexity testing services. With an initial focus on meeting a critical healthcare need in Oklahoma, Wheeler plans to expand its offerings with medical genetic testing for patients and physicians seeking to diagnose genetic disease.
Wheeler-Labs.com.
