was on vacation in North Carolina last June when I decided to take a day and drive to Mako Medical Laboratories, four hours away in Raleigh, to get a look at their COVID testing operation as UNH was trying to finalize the decision on whether building a lab made sense. At the time, New Hampshire’s Department of Health and Human Services was using Mako to do testing in its long-term care facilities, and the thought was that maybe we’d outsource our testing to them, too, when we opened for the school year at the end of August. Mako’s lab was enormous and state-of-the-art, but when I asked them about their testing volume, it was clear that all it would take was four or five universities of our size, testing twice a week, and that would be that — Mako would be at capacity. On the ride back, I called Marian McCord, our senior vice provost for research, economic engagement and outreach, and told her if we wanted to test 13,000 students twice a week the day the fall semester started and get results within a day, we’d never be able to rely on third parties. We were going to have to do it ourselves.
Standing up our own lab was challenging but not complex. We needed it to do one thing — run a reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction test, the so-called “gold standard” molecular diagnostic test for COVID-19 — and we needed it to do it thousands of times every day. I knew how to build a lab; before I came to UNH, I ran a biotech company in North Carolina and was well-versed in the business of science and the science of business. Honestly, the biggest challenges were logistical: understanding the supply chain, figuring out how to identify and track and report results on 4,000 tests per day (the answer, if you’re wondering, is barcodes), knowing what equipment and materials to order before we actually needed them. There were other schools that wanted to stand up their own labs, but by the time they decided to act, it was too late: they couldn’t get the equipment in time, or even at all. It wasn’t that we got lucky. It was that we had the right people with the right skillset in the right place at the right time. It was almost like it was meant to be. There was a team of 50-70 people across UNH who basically stopped doing their day jobs to make sure we got this done. It was UNH at its finest.
UNH has the best testing program in the world. I really mean that. Testing in the volume we do — every student, twice a week — last fall allowed us to identify asymptomatic cases before they led to outbreaks and to maintain uninterrupted operations through the end of the semester. There was literally only one day the entire fall when the infection rate on campus exceeded 1%. We didn’t do everything right, of course, and we took the semester break to refine some processes that will allow us to be even better, but still — an infection rate below 1% is pretty much unheard of. Our students did what we asked of them, Kelly Thomas [the lab’s director and UNH’s Hubbard Professor of Genomics] was dead-on right with every call he made, whether it was about pooled testing or PCR —. People ask and I tell them our campus is the safest place to be in the entire state.
We don’t have a med school. We don’t have a vet school. We don’t have a pharmacy school. We actually did not have a reason to think we should be able to do this except we’re in New Hampshire, and we just do stuff because we know that it needs to be done. And my biochemistry degree from UNH sure didn’t hurt!
