Behind large windows, in a sterile environment, production technicians measure and re-dose the reagent which makes it possible to identify, within one hour, the British, Brazilian and South African variants on strains positive for Covid 19. The young woman An ID-Solutions company, based in Grabels (Hérault), on February 4 launched screening tools for hospitals and analysis laboratories.
"To date, we are the first and the only ones to have obtained an exemption from the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM) to offer a kit capable of identifying the genetic signature of the different variants", indicates Lise Grewis, the Director General , engineer in molecular biology and co-founder of ID-Solutions in 2016, with three other researchers or engineers.
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Last December, when rumors roared in scientific circles that variants were appearing, the start-up built up a large stock of raw materials, namely enzymes, probes, primers and other tubes.
"We worked night and day on the sequencing of these different variants to respond to the Franco-French strategy of massive screening of these evolutions of the virus", explains the general manager.
Not to mention the requests issued since by Morocco, Lebanon, England, Germany and Bulgaria.
Each week, ID-Solutions produces enough to screen 300,000 samples from a capacity of one million tubes.
A turnover in 2020 of 50 million euros
To obtain ministerial approval, the company benefited from the scientific and industrial backing of Innovie, a long-standing partner of the start-up, in particular to meet the urgent need for PCR tests which suddenly appeared in March 2020. “We had to this time the know-how.
So we got together to produce, here in France near Montpellier.
Everything is done here and by hand, ”insists Lise Grewis.
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With the epidemic, the redeployment of the start-up was radical and the take-off vertical.
It went from eight to 30 employees in a few weeks.
While it had invoiced 75,000 euros for oncology tests in 2019, its turnover in 2020 exceeded ... 50 million euros in PCR tests.
But the leaders of the scientific nugget are already looking further: in a few months, they hope, it will be the return to the initial roadmap: that of oncology tests.
Because cancer, too, continues on its way.