By Lori Sichterman

An Interview with Beth Champ, Manager, Strategic Marketing Planning
In 1971, Diagnostic Products Corp (DPC) was started by a chemist in a small office on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. In 1972, Sigi Ziering became involved with the company and 2 years later, with his wife, Marilyn, bought out the original owner. The couple became DPC’s CEO and vice president, Marketing, respectively. In time, their sons Michael and Ira joined the close-knit management team. Michael is now president and CEO, and Ira is senior vice president, Business and Legal. With the integrity of a small business, DPC maintains a domestic sales force and an extensive network of subsidiaries and distributors in more than 100 countries. It has manufacturing sites in Los Angeles, New Jersey, and the United Kingdom, and has grown in its 33 years to include more than 2,200 employees. Since 1988, DPC has been a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.

Clinical Lab Products recently spoke with Beth Champ, DPC manager, strategic marketing planning, about issues such as increased work flow in today’s laboratories and how DPC plans to continue to provide problem-solving technology.

CLP: What is DPC’s target market?
Beth Champ: We deal with laboratories of all sizes. These include large reference labs, urology and IVF clinics, and of course hospitals. We also target physician office laboratories with our smaller instruments as well as vet labs with our veterinary reagents. As a worldwide provider, nearly 70% of our business is done outside the United States.

CLP: What kinds of products does DPC offer?
BC: We are focused on immunoassay products, systems, and reagents—anything that helps our customers to better perform immunoassay testing, from cardiac and tumor markers to infectious diseases and allergy. With our IMMULITE technology, DPC has been able to offer important third-generation assays, including those for TSH and PSA, and recently, on the IMMULITE 2000, allergen-specific IgE (3gAllergy). The 3gAllergy has transformed allergy testing into a viable, cost-effective business for even the small laboratory. We also provide extensions for immunoassays, such as our SPERMALITE™ SQA-V for routine semen analysis and the SMS (sample management system), which we consider to be enabling technologies that make immunoassay easier. With more than 75 assays and more than 300 specific allergens and allergy panels in the United States, DPC has the broadest menu on the market.

CLP: Specifically, what is IMMULITE® technology and how does DPC’s most recent technology, the IMMULITE 1000, benefit the laboratory?
BC: Immulite is a technology platform that provides a fully random access system for accomplishing immunoassay testing, using chemiluminescent detection. What makes the system special for us is that all the technology that has gone into the system was done entirely in-house. We are very proud of the fact that we are a vertically integrated company in that we do everything from making our own antibody products, to designing and manufacturing instruments and systems like the IMMULITE family.

With regards to the IMMULITE 1000, laboratories benefit from its small size and consolidated footprint. Our test menu can be run on one platform in order to meet a laboratory’s immunoassay testing needs. This kind of centralization is key to productivity for labs. Additionally, the IMMULITE 1000 features Windows-based software, making it easy-to-use and simple for lab technicians who are being trained on the equipment. The system features Stat capabilities in the form of the IMMULITE 1000 Turbo, which allows cardiacs to be done rapidly. For convenience, the IMMULITE 1000 is a mobile unit. It can be placed on a cart and taken anywhere in a facility, such as an emergency room, a physician’s office laboratory, or a surgical theater.

The IMMULITE 2000 has work flow–enhancing features that laboratories need for workstation consolidation and productivity. Designed specifically to optimize efficiency in medium- and high-volume laboratories, it offers primary tube sampling, automatic reflex testing and onboard dilutions. The system performs routine and esoteric testing with advanced software and an expanding menu that includes 3gAllergy.

Within the next couple of months, DPC will release the next evolution in our system family, the IMMULITE 2500. It employs what we call Logic Driven Incubation. With this type of technology, our scientists and engineers can use any kind of incubation time for the assays that are run on the system. This means that DPC has developed a system that adapts to assays instead of requiring the assay to adapt to the system. Our customers will now get a perfectly optimized assay in terms of speed and quality rather than an assay that has been forced into a certain system. This new technology will allow us to offer STAT cardiac assays on the same platform with routine immunoassays.

CLP: What is DPC’s RealTime Service™ and how does it benefit laboratories?
BC: RealTime Service provides security and peace of mind for our customers. It’s a way for laboratories to use Internet technology to be in constant contact with our service and support teams. With RealTime Service, instruments in the field are constantly being securely monitored via the Internet. Our service and support teams are now able to make the transition from being a reactive group that is called upon when there is a problem, to a proactive group that can say to a lab, “There may be a problem a month from now; let us help you before it happens.”

For the customer, this is an amazing innovation and benefit. RealTime Service means less downtime for them. For example, customers don’t have to call us to schedule service or maintenance for their equipment. Our service team keeps track of and services potential problems before they reach a point where the system may go down. In the event that a customer does schedule maintenance, it can be done at their convenience because the RealTime Service system enables flexibility by acknowledging, ahead of time, the service needs of a customer’s particular piece of equipment.

RealTime Service is helping DPC reach its goal of providing customers with a worry-free instrument. The feedback we’ve gotten in response to this service has been overwhelmingly positive. Laboratory professionals can’t believe they lived without it. The service simply relieves most of the headaches and hassles associated with equipment maintenance, which is one of our goals of providing innovations to better the immunoassay laboratory. This year, DPC will expand its innovative service solutions by introducing RealTime Solutions. This new software package has even greater functionality, with the addition of quality control monitoring, peer group analysis, and consumables monitoring.

CLP: How does DPC differ from its competitors?
BC: From our customers’ perspective, we are one of the few companies in the market that is totally dedicated to immunoassay. This is a benefit because it enables us to remain focused and determined when meeting our customers’ specific immunoassay needs. This kind of focus has allowed for our broad menu of assays and our broad range of system choices. We have the capability to provide immunoassay systems to any laboratory, regardless of its size or location. I think this kind of flexibility is what makes us different from other test supply companies.

From our employees’ perspective, we are a large, fast-growing company that feels more like a family than a corporation. Because DPC was founded by a close-knit family, there continues to be a strong sense of commitment to quality and integrity among employees. We have a strong management team with a clear vision of where the company is going. Our goal is to make the next customer even happier than the one before.

CLP: The company states that 10% of its total sales go toward research and development of new assays and technologies. What have been the benefits of such devotion to research?
BC: The dedication we have to research and development ensures that, as a company, we are on the forefront of innovation. It keeps us ahead of the technology curve and allows us to solve customer problems in unique ways. Our dedication ensures that we can continue to be in control of every aspect of technology that is coming out of DPC, thus ensuring the quality and reliability of our products. Research and development is very much a part of who we are because we stand so firmly behind the products we make. We have to have this kind of dedication to innovation and support for the R&D groups because they are what drive our company forward.

CLP: How is DPC meeting new market demands?
BC: Workloads have increased dramatically over the last couple of years while the labor shortage continues. Centralizing testing disciplines on one platform is an example of the type of innovations DPC has developed in response to our customers’ needs. The ability to do 50 to 70 assays, many with unique and vital clinical applications, on one platform is phenomenal because many laboratories don’t have the resources or capabilities to have more than one system in place to handle the increase in work flow.

Our products are also becoming more flexible and integrable for use with existing laboratory processes. This is in response to the fact that many labs don’t have the funds or staff needed to invest in a completely new system or new work-flow design.

DPC identifies customer issues and then works to drive innovations in order to develop solutions to those problems.

CLP: Where does DPC see the industry heading?
BC: There is more work and less qualified labor. Because of this, we are moving toward smaller, faster, more efficient systems. The industry may also see some innovative ways to help diagnostics become more clinically relevant. This aspect of development is being driven by the large aging population worldwide. Diagnostics are being relied on more and more to provide a better quality of life for this segment of the world’s population.

Above all, I believe innovative service and support products will become more important in our industry. Costs are being reduced, and the demands on the labor force are increasing. Laboratories need to have reliable systems and assays. This means facilities have to have first-class service and support. I believe the industry will undergo a new kind of partnership between manufacturers of systems and reagents and laboratories and physicians who do diagnostic testing, so that borders will become almost seamless.