Ten years ago, I slipped in through a side door to the office block that rings Times Square in Newcastle, next to the Life Science Centre near the city’s central station, and spoke to Jonathan O’Halloran, the co-founder and chief scientific officer of QuantuMDx, a Newcastle-based biotech startup.
I was there to write a story on QuantuMDx’s killer product, a Star Trek-like tricorder that would take blood or saliva samples and provide instantaneous results to diagnostic tests. The Q-POC, as it was called, was a revolutionary technology.
I think about that reporting trip a lot a decade on, having come through a pandemic where I regularly dropped saliva onto a PCR test for Covid-19, and having seen the North East biotech scene go from strength to strength. (QuantuMDx is still going; it raised £15m in funding in 2021, and in 2023 developed a diagnostic device to detect tuberculosis.)...