Life sciences companies are poised for expansion. While the rapid growth during the pandemic has since normalized, the industry continues to evolve as it adapts to a renewed emphasis on wellness paired with rapid scientific advancements.

Executives in the Lehigh Valley, which sits amid a life sciences supercluster stretching from Massachusetts to North Carolina, recently sat down with Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation (LVEDC) to talk about the dynamic industry and its future as part of the interview series Lehigh Valley Suite Spot.

Here are some excerpts from those conversations:

Carrie Eglinton Manner, CEO of OraSure Technologies

An engineer and veteran health care executive, Carrie Eglinton Manner became the CEO at OraSure Technologies, a 36-year-old Lehigh Valley startup known for rapid diagnostic tests, in 2022. The company, which became publicly traded after a 2000 merger, has grown with a portfolio that includes sample collection and stabilization devices.

A graduate of Ben Franklin Technology Ventures, 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.

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.

JULABO USA President Ralph Juchheim

In the last 30 years, JULABO USA, which is headquartered in the Lehigh Valley, has built a thriving business in the niche market of liquid temperature control equipment. Producing temperatures between -95 and 350 degrees Celsius, JULABO’s units can replicate extreme conditions on the moon or Mars. The company supports a wide range of sectors, including the life sciences.

With its U.S. operation headquartered in Hanover Township, Lehigh County, JULABO traces its history back to Germany in 1926 when Ernst Juchheim, a master engineer of glass instrumentation, invented the world’s first glass contact-thermometer with variable temperature adjustments.

The founder’s grandson – Ralph Juchheim – now leads the company’s business in North America.

How are your devices helping to make breakthroughs in the life sciences industry?

Here’s a good example: temperature control is needed in the production of mRNA vaccines, which became especially critical during the pandemic.

This is the exact reason we were allowed to stay open in the early days of the pandemic. We are essential.

There’s a renewed U.S. focus on the semiconductor industry, which is important to life sciences companies. How does JULABO support the semiconductor industry?

JULABO provides liquid temperature control solutions that ensure high precision, cleanliness, and environmental sustainability in semiconductor and microchip manufacturing. Recent chip shortages have highlighted the critical importance of the semiconductor industry. JULABO USA is helping semiconductor manufacturers domestically meet the growing demand for more chips and the products that rely on them.

Where do you see your industry going in the future?

I see temperature ranges going lower and wider faster with even better accuracies.

When we start exploring other planets, there will be new challenges. As human beings advance into the universe, temperature control technologies will advance as well. We will need to produce temperatures in a laboratory representing those other worlds or space. Without the correct temperature, we don’t exist. Without temperature, you wouldn't have any life anywhere really. It’s as essential to life as carbon.

BioMed Sciences Founder Mark Dillon

BioMed Sciences Founder Mark Dillon has spent the last 36 years building a business in the highly specialized niche of burn and wound treatment. The company makes a dozen products under the brands of Oleeva, Rylon, and Silon. One product, a face mask customized for a woman assaulted with acid, has turned into a symbol for ending violence against women in Colombia.

Bio Med is also expanding into the retail market with scar treatment and anti-aging products such as SeaAllure and developing new technology that could save soldiers wounded on the battlefield.

Dillon, who holds 60 patents, muses the business came to pass because of a professor who inspired his senior thesis that defied the conventional wisdom that silicone and polytetrafluoroethylene don’t mix. He got it to work, patented, and built his business on it.

What was your eureka moment when you knew the business was going to make it?

The first time we put it on a human being was at Lehigh Valley Hospital. We did it on a skin graft donor site where they harvest skin to treat a third-degree burn. Where they harvest the skin from leaves a wound. That's usually a good place to evaluate a new product because you know exactly how that wound is going to heal. It’s well controlled and relatively clean.

The surgeon covered one half of the wound with the product that he normally used, and he covered the other half of the wound with the Silon material.

I came back a couple of days later to see the patient. The patient thought the products were reversed. And he was kind of almost apologetic, saying it kind of hurts a bit but the other stuff is really nice. He had it backwards. That was a bit of a eureka moment when I saw with my own eyes for the first time this is way better than what they were doing.

At that point, I knew that I had something.

Bio Med makes many products for the clinical and retail markets. What part of your business is growing the fastest?

The fastest growing market for us is the cosmetic area, wrinkle treatment. Now, that's a very mature market, it's a very big market. There are very big players in it. We're relatively new to it and are a small player in it, but it's our fastest growing segment.

 What new products are you developing?

It involves antimicrobials -- for example, putting active ingredients into the wound dressing to fight infection or to speed healing. And along the same line putting a drug into the scar management products that would actively reduce scarring. The U.S. military is interested in both of those fields.

What would the military use the product for?

The terminology we use is a field combat dressing. And particularly, what we're interested in is what we call prolonged field care. Someone gets injured, and they may not get to a hospital for three days.

If it's significant burn, they're going to die within 72 hours. So, we need to apply a wound dressing that is going to mimic the function of skin so that, physiologically, the patient is stabilized. But the care also needs to fight infection. If infection sets in, the patient's not going to survive.

What other applications are there for this product?

Another area of interest is in mass casualty events. To put this into context: there are 1,500 hospital beds in the United States in burn units that are designated for burn patients. And they're dispersed over the entire country.

If you had a major disaster -- anything that generated thousands of burn patients -- you overwhelm the system. So, you need a first-responder type of an application to stabilize patients.

You need something that doesn't require specialized training, something really simple.  For example, we can make a roll big enough to cover an adult person because this stuff is so thin. It's lightweight. It's stable. It's the medical equivalent of putting food in Saran Wrap.

Ralph Juchheim: Photo by Donna Fisher Photography on behalf of LVEDC

Carrie Eglinton Manner, Mark Dillon: Photo by LVEDC