LIVE WEBINAR:
Overcoming Supply Chain Issues During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Date:  Wednesday, April 21st, 2021
Time:  11 am ET, 8 am PT, 4 pm GMT

Join BioIVT for our joint webinar with MAWI DNA Technologies, Overcoming Supply Chain Issues During the COVID-19 Pandemic.  As a premier supplier of biological samples, we look forward to showcasing both ours and MAWI’s capabilities, during our virtual event.

During this webinar, you will learn:

• How Mawi DNA Technologies developed their iSWAB-Microbiome-EL (Extraction-Less) solution
• How their iSWAB-Microbiome-EL decreases labor, cost and time for COVID-19 testing
• How BioIVT supported over 400 clients with COVID-19 related specimens, across a range of inclusion/exclusion criteria

Speaker: Despoina Lymperopoulou, Ph.D., Senior Scientist @ Mawi DNA Technologies 

Presentation: Overriding the fragility of biotech’s global supply chains during the COVID-19 crisis

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every part of our wellbeing, specifically supply chain at almost every level. The scientific community’s marching orders were “testing, testing, testing”, which has overwhelmed the regulatory agencies and supply chain for lab reagents and consumables. The pressure this pandemic has put on our supply chain has exposed how vulnerable our current testing workflows are as well as how much obscene labs’ carbon footprint is. Labs struggle to procure swabs, collection and transport devices, extraction reagents, pipette tips, and all sorts of lab consumables that are essential for our testing protocols. As labs are striving to be part of the solution and bring more innovation to alleviate such issues, Mawi DNA Technologies has been put on task. We identified that the viral RNA extraction is one of the most time consuming and lab consumables requiring step and thus, finding a way to override it was critical. Our iSWAB-Microbiome-EL (Extraction-Less) has allowed the validation of sensitive COVID-19 qPCR and LAMP assays without the need of RNA extraction, significantly decreasing the labor, the cost, and the time needed. Developing such technology allows for swab and/or saliva-based collection, room temperature stabilization and transport of samples, but also optimizes molecular assay workflows by shortening turnaround time while being environmentally friendly.

Speaker: Cathie G. Miller, PhD, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Personalized Medicine @ BioIVT

Presentation: Rising to the COVID-19 Challenges 

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated advancements in diagnostic, therapeutic, and vaccine development. As a leading provider of biospecimens, BioIVT supported these studies by leaning on our experience and knowledge in biospecimen procurement, donor outreach, IRB-approved collection / processing protocols, and data and sample validation. We will review a case study of BioIVT’s rapid establishment of new collection networks to provide much needed COVID-19 samples to researchers throughout the world.

SPEAKERS

Speaker: Despoina Lymperopoulou, Ph.D., Senior Scientist @ Mawi DNA Technologies 

Despoina joined Mawi DNA Technologies as a Senior Scientist in January 2021. She has over 10 years of experience in Environmental Genomics and Microbiology. She has extensive hands-on experience with molecular biology laboratory techniques, microbiome-sequencing and data analyses. She holds a Ph.D. in Biology from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens and a M.Sc. degree in Microbial Biotechnology from the same university in a joint thesis program with the University of Warwick. She did her postdoctoral training at the Florida A&M University, the Old Dominion University and the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted research as a Research Specialist until she joined Boost Biomes in January 2019. At Boost, Despoina set up NGS Sequencing capabilities and the bioinformatics pipeline. She Also served as the instructor of UC Berkeley’s QB3’s Computational Genomics and Research Laboratory’s workshop on the analysis of amplicon sequencing data from 2015-2018 and she was awarded for her DOE – Joint Genome Institute Microbial/Metagenome Proposal as a co-PI in 2017.

Speaker: Cathie G. Miller, PhD, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Personalized Medicine @ BioIVT

After beginning her research career at the University of Michigan, Dr. Miller received her PhD at the University of Louisville School of Medicine before completing her post-doctoral fellowship at the Wistar Institute and the University of Pennsylvania. With a career that spans over 20 years at the bench, as well as a Director and a Global Product Manager, all involving the use of biospecimens in the fields of cancer, immunology and virology, Dr. Miller now oversees the personalized medicine product portfolio at BioIVT.