TCNJ

31 WINTER 2022 W hen Greg Porreca was earning his PhD, he worked in a lab with an entrepreneurial advisor. Together they took many projects — focused on genetic testing — right from lab to industry. "From that point, I got pretty excited about working in industry versus being an academic scientist," he says. Porreca quickly made a name for himself in business, co-founding a company that would provide genetic testing for in vitro fertilization patients. When the company was acquired, he took the knowledge he had gained from the experience and developed another company, Molecular Loop, a group that provides kits that allow labs to do genetic testing around issues like reproduc- tivity and inherited cancer. The broad technology behind the business is DNA sequencing — reading the gene sequence of a patient or a virus. But typically, labs don't need to see the whole genome sequence to do their work, just specific areas, which scientists can isolate by using specific reagents or compounds. "Our kit allows the laboratory to isolate just the regions that they're interested in," says Porreca. "So, if we're working with a lab that's doing inherited cancer, we would sell them a kit that has the reagents that they need to isolate the cancer genes. Or if it's a lab that's doing reproductive testing, there would be a different set of reagents in there to isolate out the genes that are relevant to that." Molecular Loop was doing good business, but then the pandemic disrupted their progress. Suddenly every one of his lab clients were focused on COVID testing. "We said, 'You know what? We think we can adapt our technology to do variant monitoring,'" says Porreca. Molecular Loop spent the better part of 2020 rethinking their technology to help in the fight against COVID-19. By early 2021, they were ready to shop their COVID testing kits around to a few big labs, including Labcorp, a major player in the testing scene. "Over a period of a few months, we fine-tuned it with them," says Porreca. "They decided that all of the variant monitoring work they were doing for the Centers for Disease Greg Porreca '02 isolates pockets of genes to find virus variants. knew that the data was going to come back at 95% effective at preventing COVID-19," says DePierro. "It could have just as easily said 35%." While other vaccine manufacturers shared efficacy results soon after, in this case, it wasn't all about competition. It was about creating a solution to a worldwide problem in record time. As he watched people in line for COVID vaccines as 2020 wound down, all those hours and forethought paid off. "Wow," he recalls thinking. "My team helped make that happen." " [Labcorp] decided that all of the variant monitoring work they were doing for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be done using our kits."

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