“It was a public-private partnership for the public good,” he said. Macchione now looks back on the testing partnership between Helix and San Diego county as novel and successful. Ultimately mass vaccination centers, like the one outside Petco Park, gave thousands of people their COVID-19 shots every day. COVID-19 testing led to COVID-19 tracing to track the virus in the population. Macchione said the arrangement set up with Helix was the foundation of the county’s pandemic health system. KPBS Marc Laurent, Helix's vice president of operations, stands next to a PCR testing machine in the company's lab in San Diego, Calif. When the county and Helix agreed to work together, Laurent said the company hired more than 200 additional people and it began to use a liquid robotic testing system to help meet the demand. Macchione said Helix officials had a different supply chain from the county and they were using different reagents, substances used in chemical analysis, to perform the tests. Lab supplies and chemicals needed to test for the virus were in short supply in 2020. I said, 'Are there any companies doing this?' He mentioned a couple of them and he also mentioned Helix,” Macchione said. “I reached out to my friend Joe Panetta at Biocom. Health department director Nick Macchione said he asked just about everyone he knew how he could solve that testing dilemma. Early on, it was clear that the county’s labs simply couldn’t process enough COVID-19 tests. The county’s Health and Human Services Agency was the first line of defense in San Diego’s war against COVID-19. And that’s a mind boggling number,” Laurent said with a laugh.Īnd a lot of tests coming in the door back then were from San Diego County. “During the pandemic we were running about 30,000 samples a day. The company would eventually receive more than $30 million from the National Institutes of Health to become a so-called "mega lab," to ramp up COVID-19 diagnosis nationwide. Three years ago, the pandemic was gathering steam and Helix would soon be running as fast as it could to meet the demand for testing. From the pandemic to today, it has also been genetically mapping the mutating virus as it has changed from alpha to delta to omicron. Helix is a genomics company that partnered with San Diego County and others in 2020 to provide COVID-19 testing to the public. “So look at the detailed genome of each virus and understand how that virus has evolved and understand what variant it is.” “Then what we would do is to take the samples that were positive, people who actually had COVID, and then we would take them back to the beginning of the process and do what we called viral sequencing,” he said. But a thumbs up or down on a COVID-19 test wasn’t the only thing Helix learned from those samples.
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