Jeff Mayhew, LabConnect’s Chief Development Officer, took time to speak with BioSpace about the company and the Seattle area. Mayhew is also one of the founders of LabConnect, which was started in 2002 and relocated to Seattle in 2004.
Jeff Mayhew, chief development officer at LabConnect.
A recent report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and CBRE Research identified Seattle—which happens to be the BioSpace Bio Forest Hotbed—as the fastest-growing life science market in the top 10 from 2014 to 2017, with a greater than 17-percent growth.
A lot of attention has been paid to two big deals: the first was a research collaboration between Microsoft and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center spinout Adaptive Biotechnologies to develop a multi-disease diagnostic test; the second was Seattle’s Juno Therapeutics’ acquisition by Celgene Corporation for approximately $9 billion. (Currently, Celgene is being acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb).
But the area’s growth is also related to supporting academic institutions. This includes the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle Children’s, and the University of Washington Medicine.
Another significant company in the Seattle area is LabConnect, essentially a contract research organization (CRO) that focuses on offering central laboratory and support services. In 2017, the company was inducted to the Puget Sound Business Journal’s Hall of Fame for being named for the 10th time to the journal’s 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies list—more times than any other company.
Jeff Mayhew, LabConnect’s Chief Development Officer, took time to speak with BioSpace about the company and the Seattle area. Mayhew is also one of the founders of LabConnect, which was started in 2002 and relocated to Seattle in 2004.
Mayhew notes that although they are a CRO, “we are a laboratory services company, which is how I like to define us. We do focus 100% of our business on supporting clinical trials, so we have a number of different services and products.”
LabConnect started in the industry as a central laboratory, collecting samples from investigator sites around the world and providing logistical support. As the industry has evolved, so has LabConnect, offering, Mayhew says, “project and data management services for our clients to help them execute their trials.” That includes a division that is focused on logistically and analytically complex clinical trials in areas such as immuno-oncology, cell and gene therapies, and rare diseases. “These utilize unique technologies that we have at LabConnect for sample tracking along with a dedicated team of project management specialists trained in these particular types of trials.”
They also have what he calls a functional outsourcing division. “This is in line with our core competencies, that we are providing full-time biospecimen managers and scientific project managers for oversight outsourced to labs for clients who have contracted with us. That’s a rapidly growing area of our business.”
Although a global company now, LabConnect has numerous Seattle and Washington state clients. “Seattle is a very diverse healthcare environment. We have a very strong influence from the University of Washington. There are constantly new spinoffs being developed from research that starts inside the university.” And he points out that the presence of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle has helped make Seattle one of the world’s leading centers for global health, which has attracted international researchers to the area.
“That’s really what it takes to be successful in life sciences,” Mayhew says. “You have to have that combination of people in the area with experience, which helps attract companies and the ability to develop new companies. It really comes down to highly trained people, and diversity, too.”
In Seattle, LabConnect primary houses administration, business development, finance and marketing, and scientific support, with about 25 to 30 staff out of a global total of about 875. Approximately 160 to 170 are located in Johnson City, Tennessee, which is the main operations office. About 70 staffers are home-based outside Seattle and there’s another cluster of 18 to 20 in San Diego. There is also European staff.
“What we’ve done is built a global network of laboratories, approximately 30 labs around the world, that are involved with LabConnect in one way or another,” Mayhew says. “A dozen or so are our regional experts, regional partners, that cover certain geographies, say Eastern Europe, Japan, India, Australia. And we have analytical partners that bring their very specific scientific expertise to our projects as well. So we’re able to match up the network with the specific geographic and analytical needs of our clients. That’s very unique to LabConnect, a great benefit, our ability to customize our support at a very high level.”
One of the hotter areas for the company right now is developing a global sample processing network to support clinical trials that require peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) isolation on a worldwide basis. Within clinical trials, they are used, in part, to predict the immunosuppressive effects of drugs. They are playing an increasing role in models for targeted cancer immunotherapy, as well.
“We’re leveraging the fact that LabConnect has more global points of service than any other central laboratory in the industry. This allows us to process the samples within 24 hours from virtually anyone in the world,” says Mayhew.
Mayhew notes that the company’s fast growth is quite unusual. “It’s really that we’ve always been able to innovate and always been able to capture the needs of the clients, listen to the needs of the clients, and develop mutual services around them. It’s a very nimble organization and it enables us to pivot as the industry changed dramatically from where we started. It’s much more complex these days and much more global than ever before.”
And if they’re able to continue doing so, they’re likely to pick up a couple more Fastest-Growing Awards.
