Editor’s Note: Lehigh Valley Suite Spot is an interview series featuring Lehigh Valley executives from a wide range of industries and company sizes.
As an engineer, OraSure Technologies CEO Carrie Eglinton Manner understands the mathematical relationships that underpin the technology essential to our lives.
As a veteran health care executive, Eglinton Manner knows that strong, working relationships drive those scientific breakthroughs.
From unlocking genetic drivers of disease to advocating for breastfeeding resources at the office, Eglinton Manner has built her career on forging common ground with colleagues of diverse backgrounds and expertise to find solutions that impact lives in a meaningful way.
“I am always looking for the common thread, the shared experiences. That's the theme throughout my career,” Eglinton Manner said. “While, in some ways it could feel like we were blazing trails, what I was always looking for was the commonalities: shared experiences, common challenges.”
The daughter of a math teacher and public utility executive, Eglinton Manner developed a deep love of science at an early age. She was one of a handful of women in her graduating mechanical engineering class at the University of Notre Dame. Eglinton Manner entered the corporate workforce at GE HealthCare where she fell in love with how science and technology can improve lives. She spent her first decade in sales and marketing and the second leading businesses, including an oncology clinical diagnostic services lab.
After 20 years at GE, she joined Quest Diagnostics, where she became a part of business leadership with a focus on precision health. Along the way, she strove to improve the workplace for women and parents, as well as diverse employees, at both GE and Quest Diagnostics through affinity groups and mentoring.
In 2022, Eglinton Manner was recruited to lead OraSure Technologies, a 36-year-old Lehigh Valley startup known for rapid diagnostic tests. The company, which became publicly traded after a 2000 merger, has grown with a portfolio that includes sample collection and stabilization devices.
“OraSure felt like the convergence of my own experience,” Eglinton Manner said. “My first 20 years was in healthcare manufacturing, and my second five and a half years in diagnostics services. OraSure does both.”
A graduate of Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania, OraSure is celebrated for its easy-to-use HIV, HCV, and Ebola testing. During the pandemic, its COVID-19 tests were distributed on a larger scale. The company rapidly scaled up, opening in the Lehigh Valley last fall a new facility that can produce more than 100 million rapid tests a year.
That investment impacted the business balance sheet. In her first year in office, Eglinton Manner has worked to turnaround profits: strengthening the company’s financial foundation and resetting the business to focus on core growth from existing portfolios.
OraSure‘s headquarters, along with manufacturing and distribution facilities, are anchored in the Lehigh Valley, where it has been recognized as one of the area’s top workplaces, and more than 400 of its approximately 700 employees are located.
OraSure is among the region’s 750 manufacturers leading the Lehigh Valley’s economy, producing $8.4 billion of economic output in 2021. Its opening of the state-of the-art facility in Bethlehem Township was among the 46 projects that pushed the Lehigh Valley to rank No. 2 among U.S. regions its size in terms of development announced or completed in 2022.
Eglinton Manner recently sat down with Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp. (LVEDC) to share more about industry trends and where OraSure is heading.
You describe precision health as the future of the health care industry. Can you give us an example from your career as to the impact?
The best part of working in healthcare is the daily potential to help positively impact people’s lives. One of the incredible breakthroughs at Quest Diagnostics was a newborn diagnostics test that screened more than 1,700 different genetic causes of newborn conditions, such as developmental delay, that can result in an admission to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
Families of babies with health issues often encounter very long and costly diagnostic journeys in trying to figure out what's going on. Those delays in care also mean that you can miss key windows to potentially intervene, treat, or even cure a baby’s health challenges.
The advanced diagnostic test that Quest launched enabled quick and affordable newborn screening, providing insights within days, and a fraction of the cost, versus what had previously taken weeks, months, years, or was never performed. The difference in having an answer starts with peace of mind, and, in the best case, it means the potential to start the right therapy now and completely improve a baby’s outcome for life.
What are the critical occupations to your industry, and can you find that talent in the Lehigh Valley?
The beauty is the Lehigh Valley is rich with the talent we need for science and technology – from PhDs to undergrads. That really is helping us drive our innovation, from manufacturing to every function in-between.
We’re thrilled that there are such good universities here. It’s a huge part of OraSure’s strength, both our history and where we're going. We have local people with global expertise.
Keeping talent is essential to company success. While at GE, you joined and then co-led the Women’s Network, which among other things, helped support near-site day care and a breastfeeding room. Why should those types of programs be important to employers?
One of my biggest revelations in working in the Women's Network at GE is that you lose women in the workplace around big life events: marriage, childbirth, caregiving for their parents. Figuring out ways to keep the connection through those life events is really important. At OraSure, we have expanded our maternity leave to support new mothers and parents, including those who adopt … and remain committed to a flexible work environment to best support our employees’ needs.
You have experience with mentoring programs through your leadership with both GE’s and Quest’s employee affinity groups. What did you learn?
What I believe about mentoring is that structure only goes so far, and then you have to give people tools and let relationships naturally develop. People just don't necessarily click when you assign them together, so we created mentoring roundtable groups. For a year, we'd have a group of people meet with a leader monthly. And then relationships evolved out of that, turning into one-on-one mentoring with either that leader or someone else.
Most places don’t have structured mentoring, so if you can muster the courage, my advice is to pick your mentor. If you’re shy, then ask someone else for an introduction. In any case, once you have a mentor’s attention, tell them why you chose them, request 15 minutes, and if they're worth their salt, they will say yes. If not, they weren't right for you anyway, so choose someone else and take another shot.
Finally, never expect a mentor to set up time with you or lead the conversation. You always need to be prepared, including having questions or topics you want to cover.
What were OraSure’s challenges when you got here in June 2022 and how have they evolved?
The biggest challenge was that through the COVID investment, the business had become unprofitable. Priority one was to turn around that profitability and strengthen the financial foundation from which to grow. What we've been doing the last year is improving profitability, re-building our cash balance, and on that base, we are now focusing on expanding our core from our existing portfolios such that we can accelerate profitable growth.
What impact has that had in the Lehigh Valley operations?
In the case of the Lehigh Valley, we have continued investing. In our core, which is where we're shifting to pivot and grow, we need to ensure that our cost structure is aligned with the revenue and the opportunity that we have, while simultaneously building a premier location in the Lehigh Valley.
Our new OraSure facility on Opus Way in Bethlehem Township is 139,000 square feet of state-of-the-art manufacturing – a super factory. It’s an opportunity for us to bring even more of the manufacturing we do globally here.
What is OraSure’s culture like?
OraSure has an entrepreneurialism that requires creativity, innovation, and collaboration because it's just us. There's no 50,000-person company sitting behind us ready to help. We have to go fast. We have to understand our customers’ needs and, most importantly, deliver for them. We’re all playing our part and really contributing in a meaningful way. So that is a huge highlight of being here and having these entrepreneurial roots.
OraSure’s successes in HIV, HCV, Ebola, and COVID testing have been well-documented. Tell us something we may not know about OraSure.
While our Diagnostics team is based here in the Lehigh Valley, we also have a Molecular Solutions team who is innovating in DNA and RNA to deliver on the promises of precision health. If you think about precision health as the key to the future, we unlock this through both our diagnostic testing as well as our molecular sample collection capabilities and sequencing services. Our OraSure strengths are fundamental enablers to the future of where precision health is going.
In sample collection, an example is our ability to collect non-invasive patient samples, like saliva, a cheek swab, or a skin sample, and to store them at room temperature for extended periods of time before they’re analyzed. We also have fecal sample collection kits that can be used for microbiome analysis and a urine sample collection device that could potentially be utilized for cancer biomarkers, as well as for non-invasive STD or STI identification.
We have huge potential in our capabilities today, and in what we are developing, to increasingly serve this paradigm shift of effortlessly connecting healthcare to people where they want to be served with insights that unlock precision health and all of the better treatment that comes with that.
Where do you see the future of diagnostics going?
Diagnostics will be increasingly flexible, accessible, and affordable. From a manufacturing perspective, that looks like multiple platforms that are low cost and applicable across a variety of test types. We are incredibly well positioned not just for leadership today, but for leadership tomorrow and the day after tomorrow because we've got the workforce and the facilities right here in the Lehigh Valley where we can continue to build upon that.