How Cue Health’s Covid-19 Test Became the Go-To for Business
Scaling is tricky for any firm. But when your small business is primed for Covid-19, development can be as viral as the illness.
That is the situation for Cue Wellbeing, a San Diego-dependent health treatment technology organization that develops moveable diagnostic exams for institutional and at-home use. Founded in 2010, the company’s most important item, a molecular Covid-19 exam, is now the go-to alternative for Google, Salesforce, the NBA, MLB, Netflix, NASA, and other businesses. The solution boasts the pace of fast antigen assessments with the lab-quality precision of PCR checks, the business states, which means it can detect equally symptomatic and asymptomatic scenarios, like the Omicron variant, in just 20 minutes.
Cue’s tests do the job by targeting a location of the nucleocapsid gene (“N gene”) that is very conserved, which the business suggests allows the test’s accuracy to remain unaffected by the mutations in the Covid-19 variants. Cue’s merchandise was also built to be modular and flexible to adapt to future treatment offerings that will perform with the Cue Reader.
Cue’s overnight results was a 10 years in the building. Co-founder and CEO Ayub Khattak was motivated to start off Cue in the course of the H1N1 (swine flu) outbreak in spring of 2009. The CDC estimates that from April 2009 to April 2010, there have been approximately 60.8 million circumstances. Khattak realized that if clients could test themselves utilizing at-property diagnostics, and communicate those success to a medical doctor as a result of an app, individuals could be diagnosed speedier, get good care, and decrease the potential spread of an infection.
“All these people today have been flooding into emergency rooms and urgent cares, the place they’d have to fight 100 other people to be observed and specified a diagnosis,” Khattak remembers. “Individuals need to be equipped to obtain out this facts effortlessly at house, especially all those with out signs or symptoms.”
He was imagining about this dilemma when he met co-founder Clint Sever, a product or service designer and his neighbor in Santa Monica, at the time where by they were the two ending up faculty. Something immediately clicked.
They procured far more than $1 million in seed funding for research and improvement and ongoing to elevate funds over the yrs: $7.5 million in Sequence A in 2014, over $45 million in Series B in 2018, and a $100 million Sequence C in 2020. By the time Covid-19 strike, they were practically completed building the products. Cue had just started off its clinical examine to examination for the flu, which the company was conducting in partnership with the Biomedical Highly developed Investigate and Enhancement Authority (Barda), the U.S. Section of Health and fitness and Human Companies business office responsible for procuring and developing medical countermeasures.
Cue’s Covid-19 test was specified crisis use authorization (EAU) for professional use in June 2020. That calendar year, the corporation generated about $23 million in income, together with $15.4 million from solution gross sales. It then became the initial molecular take a look at to win EAU on March 5, 2021, from the Food and Drug Administration for at-house and over-the-counter use with no a prescription. The business noted preliminary full calendar year 2021 revenue of $613 million to $618 million. Even though the company has not nevertheless publicly described its outlook for 2022, Cue has delivered thousands and thousands of tests to date, which are getting made use of in schools, nursing households, correctional services, hospitals, community health and fitness clinics, and personal organizations.
“Enterprises about the globe are searching for the best methods for their workers, consumers, and associates to get with each other, safely and securely,” Bret Taylor, co-CEO of Salesforce, reported in a press launch about the firm’s partnership with Cue. “Screening is the route ahead, and Safety Cloud (a subset of Salesforce that assists with Covid-19 tests and health and security protocols) permits businesses of all sorts to consider the complexity out of gatherings, and provide people collectively yet again with self-confidence.”
The test’s boosted accuracy and speed appear at a cost. The test reader by yourself is $249, and the checks charge $65. The firm also offers two subscription tiers that array from $39.99 to $74.99 that include 10 or 20 test cartridges, respectively (and savings on extra ones), no cost same- or subsequent-day delivery, and a lower price on the reader system. That compares with the BinaxNOW Covid-19 Antigen Self Test, which fees $23.99, and the Ellume Covid-19 Household Examination, which prices $38.99. Whilst equally as rapidly as Cue’s, other antigen assessments usually are not as exact, and some have been recalled more than the previous yr for untrue positives and inaccurate results.
Ramping up and growing out
Cue went community last September, with a valuation of virtually $2.3 billion. But as the pandemic has waned, not to mention stocks in typical, the company’s industry cap has retreated to a recent $1.22 billion.
Khattak attributes the firm’s accomplishment in aspect to the development of its supply chain, which Cue produced from scratch, a move necessary for the far more integrated solution it wanted to develop. The company experienced to develop a a lot more sophisticated manufacturing and product design, making its very own enzymes and primers and cartridge assembly — procedures he states that are frequently outsourced.
“We developed a total community listed here in the U.S., so that we could have a secured, domestic supply chain,” states Khattak. “We embraced a considerably larger scope than most more youthful companies from the begin, and now it is a substantial gain.” Cue at the moment has around 1,600 workforce and 8 amenities nationally.
Cue was never ever built around a one illness, and continuing achievement will suggest diversifying as the pandemic transitions to an endemic. The world wide Covid-19 diagnostics market place is projected to drop from $20.05 billion in 2021 to $9.20 billion by 2028, according to a study by Fortune Small business Insights. Khattak claims even though Cue will carry on to offer Covid-19 exams, in particular as more variants pop up, the aim is to present an uncomplicated tests answer for a selection of sicknesses. This involves additional items and products and services throughout types these kinds of as respiratory health and fitness, sexual wellbeing, cardiac and metabolic wellbeing, and persistent illness administration.
“Folks have such a dilemma accessing health facts. There are numerous levels of logistics and gatekeeping to get each and every piece of data in one put in serious time,” states Khattak, “and you should be in a position to do that with the most crucial detail you want to know, which is your health.”
