A COVID-19 Testing Lab Launches at UC Berkeley with the Salesforce Platform and Third Wave Analytics
Imagine taking a dormant university laboratory and turning it into a state-of-the-art COVID-19 testing facility in weeks, powered by the Salesforce platform and AppExchange partner, Third Wave Analytics. This real-life transformation ensured accurate, HIPAA-compliant COVID-19 testing. Because of this technology, and the power of people working together, patients quickly learn if they’re positive or negative for COVID-19.
Chris Gawronski, VP of the commercial organization at Third Wave Analytics, has been training for this moment his entire life. His organization is filled with scientists and experts in the life sciences field, coupled with those fully vested in technology, development and innovation. Over the past five years, Gawronski has worked closely with customers and his product, Lockbox LIMS, enabling Third Wave to engage with and learn from members of the life sciences community.
We talked to Chris about Salesforce, his technology, and what Berkeley and International Gemological Institute (IGI) sought to do during COVID-19.
With today’s climate, what are some of the challenges you’re seeing in the life sciences space?
Chris Gawronski: COVID-19 tests have various regulatory obligations, and you need a system that can deliver against those requirements. Historically, those systems were incredibly expensive, complex, and not very configurable. To combat this and help customers, we built Lockbox LIMS on the Salesforce platform. It is customizable for your workflow, whether you’re doing clinical testing like COVID-19, industrial testing, quality control, or general life sciences research.
This was the case for the IGI at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to COVID-19, their labs did not have a cloud-based laboratory information management system, and they weren’t using Salesforce.
Let’s dive into the story. Tell us about UC Berkeley, IGI, and their mission during COVID-19.
Gawronski: The IGI was planning a COVID-19 testing facility and recruited the director of UC Berkeley’s NGS core laboratory to help set it up. To manage this lab, the team decided to move forward with our Lockbox LIMS product. I remember the text message from the NGS core director on the evening of Sunday, March 15th. At that point, many of the research organizations were closed down. But UC Berkeley was going to remain open to work on COVID-19 testing.
Yes, many labs closed if there weren’t essential projects in place. Why did they want you to manage LIMS for their testing lab? What did the text say?
Gawronski: Jennifer Doudna is a biochemist and professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an inventor of CRISPR, a technique used to edit genes within organisms. She is the founder of the IGI.
When COVID-19 happened, Doudna, a visionary dedicated to her community, saw an opportunity. With all of these resources, all of this equipment, and all of this brainpower readily available, Doudna and IGI set up a COVID-19 testing lab at UC Berkeley. And so, on March 15th, the text from Berkeley said, “We want to do this. Are you in?” And we said, “Absolutely.”
Three weeks later, UC Berkeley tested its first patients.
Implementing an end-to-end clinical lab testing platform in that timeline would have been simply impossible, we believe, without Third Wave and Salesforce.
How did your technology and Salesforce do this?
Gawronski: Third Wave supports the life sciences industry with a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) that helps lab workers with their day-to-day, such as tracking samples, running experiments, collecting data, and supporting the cycle from test request to report. Working with UC Berkeley and IGI, we tackle COVID-19 head on with the platform.
Another part of the story involves ThermoFisher, a multi-billion-dollar company that released a testing kit to detect COVID-19. They wrote a small piece of software, released under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), that took results from a specific testing instrument, and interrogated and analyzed the data to give patients a positive or negative result. In order to scale with IGI’s laboratory process, as well as move it to the cloud, we reproduced the call making on the platform. We spoke with ThermoFisher R&D and mirrored the logic inside of Salesforce, and inside of Lockbox, to take the results and make the call. I couldn’t think of a more powerful, non-code way to accomplish that. I just don’t know how else it would be done so quickly.
Not only did the technology stack up, but it worked fast. I’m sure this means a lot to customers.
Gawronski: Jennifer Doudna had a vision of leveraging the brightest minds and the resources available to quickly come up with the capability of testing COVID-19. They were battling so many challenges from reagents, supplies, and facilities, to safety for the lab, to finding a healthcare provider to get this test out there. All of these work streams were running in parallel and all had to converge. What it meant for the customer, in this case IGI and UC Berkeley, was being able to operate on this incredibly fast time frame.
And for the patients, the volume and speed of tests is life-changing. They’ll quickly get the relief of knowing they haven’t tested positive. Or if, unfortunately, they are positive, they are made aware of that in enough time to get direct care, be quarantined, and protect loved ones.
What would you say to a customer in a similar situation, where they need to act quickly both from a vision and technology standpoint?
Gawronski: You can feel entirely safe and comfortable with the magic of Salesforce behind you. Often times, we introduce customers to the intersection of Salesforce and healthcare life sciences, and they’re intrigued. Once they are up and running with the platform, they are believers.
If you have that trepidation, and you’re open to learning and discovering, we’re here to show you the way.
Coming out of this major COVID-19 testing project, how are you feeling?
Gawronski: First, my family and loved ones are healthy and my heart goes out to those struggling with the virus. I also want to mention and thank the many great individuals that contributed to this effort. And lastly, we’re proud to be involved. It meant we were trusted. It meant we were able to deliver. That is truly satisfying. And most satisfying is the impact we had on this COVID-19 story.
Thank you, Chris, for your time and for sharing a story that brings a bit of sunshine to a difficult situation. If you’re as inspired as I am by this story, check out more stories and apps on AppExchange COVID-19 Resources for Businesses.
