15 Jan COVID-19 continues to transform Madison-area biotech companies
Gentueri, which has been making swabs used in COVID-19 tests, moved in September to a facility in Verona. Photo: GENTUERI
Gentueri, which had four employees a year ago and mostly produced swabs for sexual assault kits, in March started making nasal swabs for COVID-19 testing.
The company, founded in 2012, has more than 35 workers today and in September moved from southeast Madison to a facility in Verona that is four times larger.
Gentueri has sold COVID-19 testing kits to state health departments and is now working with UW-Madison on vials with matrix barcodes to ensure the chain of custody is secure on student testing samples.
“Anybody who knows an accountant? We’re looking,” Gentueri CEO Randy Nagy said Thursday during a BioFoward Wisconsin webinar about the response of the state’s biohealth industry to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Six Madison-area companies, including well-known Exact Sciences and Promega, provided updates on how the pandemic has transformed their businesses.
Gilson, a life sciences lab tools company in Middleton, sells automated pipettes and other equipment used by companies making COVID-19 vaccines, said Melissa Martowicz, product manager.
“We had to make sure these (machines) got some TLC when the coronavirus hit,” Martowicz said.
Gilson’s equipment is also part of Shield T3, a system being used at UW-Madison for COVID-19 saliva testing in a mobile lab that was developed by the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.