Can you tell us briefly about your career?
My first job after leaving university was in commercial sales for DuPont. I spent 15 years with the company in different sales, product management and marketing roles within life sciences and was involved in commercialising a number of new technologies including DNA sequencers. In 1996, I moved to ICN Pharmaceuticals where I spent three years as the UK sales director for northern Europe before joining Anachem as bioscience business unit director. I spent five years at Anachem and became managing director; however, it was a UK-based role and after a very enjoyable time there I wanted to change direction and get back into the international arena.
I was approached by Fisher Scientific just over four years ago when the company was looking for a managing director for what was at the time its ABgene business. The role was to grow the ABgene business faster internationally with a particular focus on North America. Subsequently, Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific merged, with the result that the ABgene portfolio was brought under the Thermo Scientific brand.
About 18 months ago I took up the position of managing director at our Runcorn manufacturing and R&D site to oversee its expansion and the development of the new multi-million pound facility. By moving managers within the different areas of the company, Thermo Fisher Scientific is able to leverage best practices and demonstrate its commitment to develop our management to assume greater responsibility as the business grows.
At Thermo Fisher Scientific, we are creating a single unmatched resource for our pathology customers. We have basically brought together well-known brands such as Shandon, Microm, Lab Vision, Richard-Allen and Raymond A Lamb to enable our customers to enjoy the benefits of an enhanced product range. We are aiming to provide our customers with a distinct range of advantages both in the product- and service-based pathology market.
What is your role within Thermo Fisher Scientific?
I’ve recently been appointed VP of commercial operations for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia Pacific region. The role is fundamentally about growing our international business faster and generating a larger presence in key sectors of the anatomical pathology marketplace. Clearly, the focus is on continually improving our customer experience by having a more local management structure. We have identified a number of key emerging markets where we are looking to build on our strengths in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region. My role will specifically focus on the major markets in mainland Europe, Russia, China and India.
Please tell us about the objectives of Thermo Fisher Scientific’s anatomical pathology offering?
The primary objective of our anatomical pathology offering is to recognise and understand that there is a patient awaiting a diagnosis. For this reason, we like to bring customers in to the company to talk to us and to help us make certain that we are getting things right. Our focus is on achieving the correct diagnosis and the importance of the end result is paramount to us when we are developing new products.
Safety is also a key objective for the company, not just in relation to the patient who is awaiting diagnosis but also for the laboratory personnel who are using our solutions. Laboratory workers want to know that they are safe at work and we want to provide instrumentation that exceeds all expectations in relation to occupational health.
As a company, we also want to shorten the cycle to when the next wave of new products are brought to market. The way that we are doing this is by doubling our investment in R&D and transferring the production of much of our instrumentation to the new state-of the-art facility in Runcorn. Essentially, we are creating a manufacturing centre of excellence for the industry.
How will Thermo Fisher Scientific’s latest acquisitions benefit its customers?
Using the acquisition of Raymond A Lamb as an example, the purchase of the company’s innovative labelling and tracking systems allows us to link the workflow across the different product segments. We are now able to supply an inclusive workflow solution to our customers, helping them to become more efficient and more accurate, and making their work safer through what amounts to automatic quality assurance and documentation.
What do you think have been the most notable changes for your customers in the anatomical pathology market over the past 10 years?
I think the big change in the pathology market from the customer’s perspective has been a decrease in the number of trained histopathologists and scientists in the laboratory. We are helping to make experienced laboratory personnel even better while also ensuring that newer recruits to the industry can easily create higher-quality samples. The whole drive in laboratories to be as efficient as possible with Lean workflow solutions also key drivers.
From the company’s point of view, we need to be much more than just suppliers of instruments or consumables. It is really about understanding our customers’ workflows and understanding how we can make things more efficient. At the same time, we need to make things much more flexible because of the nature of the work that laboratories undertake. It is the demographics of the laboratories themselves that are changing and suppliers need to be much more engaged in supporting the customer.
What are the main challenges currently facing pathologists in the field and how is Thermo Fisher Scientific helping them?
I think pathologists are experiencing challenges with a large number of fragmented supply channels in the marketplace. At Thermo Fisher Scientific, we are continually assessing how we can make the purchasing process of our products and services easier and more efficient. Our customers also have lots of individual components that they have to optimise so they want a solution that will link all of this technology and simplify their workflows.
In addition, I think more day-to-day challenges, such as the need to avoid downtime to ensure high productivity, are becoming increasingly important. When buying Thermo Scientific products, our customers need to know that they are going to receive a high level of after-sales service. They want to be sure that their instruments are maintained correctly, that they have been trained how to use them correctly and that they are going to have ongoing preventative and maintenance agreements to support them.
What new products does Thermo Fisher Scientific offer in its extended range?
Thermo Fisher Scientific is continually expanding its portfolio and we have a very exciting pipeline of new products in anatomical pathology. Our latest introductions are the Thermo Scientific PrintMate automated cassette printing system and Thermo Scientific SlideMate on-demand slide printer. We know a lot of people in the field still label samples manually, resulting in a huge potential for error. We are trying to make safety a priority and are helping our customers to recognise the importance of this to the patient.
These new solutions ensure that when a sample is taken into the laboratory and processed, it is the correct sample that comes out at the other end. The sample can then be archived and retrieved without any risk of deterioration of the label, offering complete confidence to the customer and the patient that the correct sample has been identified. The solutions also enable our customers to benefit from having records that prove that samples have been through these workflow processes without any allowance for error or mix up.
Another new product is the Thermo Scientific ClearVue – an automated coverslipping machine. The coverslipping machine ensures that each slide is uniform in both the placement of the coverslip and the depth of the mountant, significantly improving procedures in histopathology, cytology and immunohistochemistry.
Furthermore, with our new cold disinfection feature, we are bringing the only state-of-the-art, three-minute disinfection process into the cryostat – a breakthrough in occupational health.
How do you see anatomical pathology technology developing in the near future?
I think information management and connectivity with the laboratory information management system (LIMS) is becoming increasingly important. Thermo Fisher Scientific has a wealth of experience in LIMS and we’re now looking at how we can link our labelling and tracking technologies, instrument platforms and our consumables with our clients’ LIMS. We are currently working with each of the major providers in all of the major territories to ascertain our compatibility with their systems.
Thermo Fisher Scientific is innovating with market-changing introductions. One such innovation about to be introduced for our latest Thermo Scientific cryostats is cold disinfection. This feature offers instant disinfection of the entire cold cryo-chamber in just three minutes, enabling biomedical scientists to have complete confidence in hygiene and safety with no loss of time and no interruption to the workflow.
Every year, laboratory personnel are exposed to potential occupational infections. Cold disinfection offers our customers a fast and effective solution to optimise the occupational health of their laboratory workers by undertaking disinfection 100 times faster than existing routines. As working with hazardous materials is part of laboratory work, it is our goal to minimise any health risks for our customers when working with a Thermo Fisher Scientific product.
To ensure that we continue to offer our customers advancements in technology, we have doubled our investments and we have a year-on-year commitment to have a significant increase in R&D expenditure as well as acquisition of technology.
What benefits does Thermo Fisher Scientific offer to pathology customers?
Our customers want to know that they can buy with confidence and have the after-sales support that they need. They want to buy the product that makes their workflow easier and makes them more successful, while also being assured that they will be supported by us over the long term. The real message we want to get across is that a key part of this structure that we have put into place is about our after-sales technical services. We want to move people’s expectations from a repair-and-fix model to a preventative approach. The huge investment we have put into our new facility in Runcorn, Cheshire, will also benefit our customers by offering them greater product innovations in the future. In addition, we are building a large customer training area and a large applications laboratory where we will be working to optimise protocols with customers as well as on our own internal developments.
What is Thermo Fisher Scientific’s near-term focus?
Thermo Fisher Scientific aims to strengthen its position in the major European markets and invest to ensure that we capture all the growth in markets such as China, India and Russia, with innovative patient-focused products that will be supported by a strong technical services team.