Ron Zwanziger (born 1954) is an American businessman. [1] He is best known for founding and leading the diagnostic test manufacturer Alere.
Zwanziger was born in Israel in 1954 and raised on the island of Cyprus after 1956. [2] [3]
He earned an engineering degree from Imperial College London in 1975 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1981. [4] [2]
Along with three business school classmates, Zwanziger co-founded Medisense Inc., a maker of glucose meters used in diabetes home care, in 1981. [3] [5] [2] He was CEO until 1991. [2]
Originally, the company worked on 13 disparate biotechnology ideas, hoping one or another would pay off. [3] By 1984, the company had narrowed its focus to one of the projects, which concerned electrochemical biosensors. [lower-alpha 1] [3]
In 1987, Medisense introduced the ExacTech, which was the first electrochemical biosensor-based glucose meter for home use. [6] This technology required less blood to obtain a reading, and by 2008 was used in a majority of the 6 billion home blood glucose tests being performed annually. [6] In his textbook on electrochemistry, Alan Bond of Monash University suggests that the commercial success of electrochemical home glucose monitoring "predominantly can be attributed to the introduction of the ExacTech system." [7]
Medisense was acquired by Abbott Laboratories in 1996 for $876 million. [8]
Zwanziger founded Alere Inc. (then called Selfcare Inc.), [9] [4] a diagnostic test manufacturer, in 1991. [2] He was CEO until 2014. [10] [11] [12]
Alere's diabetes unit was sold to Johnson and Johnson (LifeScan) in 2001 for $1.3 billion. [13] [9] With the 2001 acquisition of the subsidiary Unipath from Unilever, Alere became the leading manufacturer of ovulation and pregnancy tests. [3] Alere acquired Biosite Inc. in a $1.7 billion hostile takeover in 2007. [14] By 2012, Alere was the largest manufacturer in the HIV testing space, according to the nonprofit Population Services International. [15]
Along with longtime partners [3] Drs. David Scott and Jerry McAleer, Zwanziger co-founded the diagnostic test manufacturer LumiraDx in 2014. [17] He was CEO until November 2023, when all three founders resigned amid "financial difficulties" at the company. [18] On December 29, 2023, LumiraDx reached a $350 million agreement to sell its key assets to Roche Diagnostics. [19]
LumiraDx produces several rapid diagnostic tests which are read by a single brick-sized device at the point of care. A 2021 presentation by Bill Gates hailed the LumiraDx platform as "amazing" and "cheaper and smaller than the diagnostic devices that came before." [20] A 2021 meta-analysis of 133 studies showed that LumiraDx's COVID-19 rapid antigen test had the highest sensitivity among 61 products. [21]
Agilent Technologies, Inc. is a global company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, that provides instruments, software, services, and consumables for laboratories. Agilent was established in 1999 as a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard. The resulting IPO of Agilent stock was the largest in the history of Silicon Valley at the time. From 1999 to 2014, the company produced optics, semiconductors, EDA software and test and measurement equipment for electronics; that division was spun off to form Keysight. Since then, the company has continued to expand into pharmaceutical, diagnostics & clinical, and academia & government (research) markets.
A biosensor is an analytical device, used for the detection of a chemical substance, that combines a biological component with a physicochemical detector. The sensitive biological element, e.g. tissue, microorganisms, organelles, cell receptors, enzymes, antibodies, nucleic acids, etc., is a biologically derived material or biomimetic component that interacts with, binds with, or recognizes the analyte under study. The biologically sensitive elements can also be created by biological engineering. The transducer or the detector element, which transforms one signal into another one, works in a physicochemical way: optical, piezoelectric, electrochemical, electrochemiluminescence etc., resulting from the interaction of the analyte with the biological element, to easily measure and quantify. The biosensor reader device connects with the associated electronics or signal processors that are primarily responsible for the display of the results in a user-friendly way. This sometimes accounts for the most expensive part of the sensor device, however it is possible to generate a user friendly display that includes transducer and sensitive element. The readers are usually custom-designed and manufactured to suit the different working principles of biosensors.
Abbott Laboratories is an American multinational medical devices and health care company with headquarters in Green Oaks, Illinois, United States. The company was founded by Chicago physician Wallace Calvin Abbott in 1888 to formulate known drugs; today, it sells medical devices, diagnostics, branded generic medicines and nutritional products. It split off its research-based pharmaceuticals business into AbbVie in 2013.
F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, commonly known as Roche, is a Swiss multinational holding healthcare company that operates worldwide under two divisions: Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics. Its holding company, Roche Holding AG, has shares listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. The company headquarters are located in Basel. Roche is the fifth-largest pharmaceutical company in the world by revenue and the leading provider of cancer treatments globally. In 2023, the company’s seat in Forbes Global 2000 was 76.
Medtronic plc is an Irish medical device company. The company's operational and executive headquarters are in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and its legal headquarters are in Ireland due to its acquisition of Irish-based Covidien in 2015. While it primarily operates in the United States, it operates in more than 150 countries and employs over 90,000 people. It develops and manufactures healthcare technologies and therapies.
Quest Diagnostics Incorporated is an American clinical laboratory. A Fortune 500 company, Quest operates in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Brazil. Quest also maintains collaborative agreements with various hospitals and clinics across the globe.
A glucose meter, also referred to as a "glucometer", is a medical device for determining the approximate concentration of glucose in the blood. It can also be a strip of glucose paper dipped into a substance and measured to the glucose chart. It is a key element of glucose testing, including home blood glucose monitoring (HBGM) performed by people with diabetes mellitus or hypoglycemia. A small drop of blood, obtained from slightly piercing a fingertip with a lancet, is placed on a disposable test strip that the meter reads and uses to calculate the blood glucose level. The meter then displays the level in units of mg/dL or mmol/L.
Danaher Corporation is an American globally diversified conglomerate founded by brothers Steven and Mitchell Rales in 1984. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the company designs, manufactures, and markets medical, industrial, and commercial products and services. It has primarily grown by acquisitions, and historically has tried to maintain a very low public profile. Danaher was one of the first companies in North America to adopt the Kaizen principles to manufacturing, which is a lean manufacturing Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement and elimination of waste.
IDEXX Laboratories, Inc. is an American multinational corporation engaged in the development, manufacture, and distribution of products and services for the companion animal veterinary, livestock and poultry, water testing, and dairy markets. Incorporated in 1983 by David Evans Shaw, the company is headquartered in Westbrook, Maine, and in Hoofddorp, Netherlands for its EMEA divisions.
LifeScan, Inc. is a diagnostic systems manufacturer with products focusing on the diabetes market, specifically blood glucose monitoring systems.
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is an American supplier of analytical instruments, life sciences solutions, specialty diagnostics, laboratory, pharmaceutical and biotechnology services. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, Thermo Fisher was formed through the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific in 2006. Thermo Fisher Scientific has acquired other reagent, consumable, instrumentation, and service providers, including Life Technologies Corporation (2013), Alfa Aesar (2015), Affymetrix (2016), FEI Company (2016), BD Advanced Bioprocessing (2018), and PPD (2021).
Ortho Clinical Diagnostics was an in vitro diagnostics company that made products and diagnostic equipment for blood testing. Ortho served two primary industries in the medical field: clinical laboratories, by producing platforms and assays that test for a variety of diseases, conditions, and substances; and immunohematology, by providing the means to ensure blood transfusion recipients receive appropriate and compatible blood.
Johnson and Johnson acquired Eastman Kodak's Clinical Diagnostics Division in 1994, which was then merged with Ortho Diagnostic Systems in 1997. QuidelOrtho's global corporate offices are in Raritan, New Jersey, while their global research and development center is in Rochester, New York.
Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, more commonly known as Labcorp, is an American healthcare company headquartered in Burlington, North Carolina. It operates one of the largest clinical laboratory networks in the world, with a United States network of 36 primary laboratories. Before a merger with National Health Laboratory in 1995, the company operated under the name Roche BioMedical. Labcorp performs its largest volume of specialty testing at its Center for Esoteric Testing in Burlington, North Carolina, where the company is headquartered. As of 2018, Labcorp processes 2.5 million lab tests weekly.
Radiometer is a Danish multinational company which develops, manufactures and markets solutions for blood sampling, blood gas analysis, transcutaneous monitoring, immunoassay testing and the related IT management systems. The company was founded in 1935 in Copenhagen, Denmark by Børge Aagaard Nielsen and Carl Schrøder. It has over 3,200 employees and direct representation in more than 32 countries. Corporate headquarters remain in Copenhagen.
Adam Heller is an Israeli American scientist and engineer. He is Chief Science Officer of SynAgile Corp. of Wilson, Wyoming, consults to Abbott Diabetes Care of Alameda, California, and is Ernest Cockrell Sr. Chair Emeritus of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. His 1973 paper with James J. Auborn established the feasibility of high energy density, high-voltage, non-rechargeable lithium batteries. Their 3.6-volt lithium thionyl chloride and 3.7-volt lithium sulfuryl chloride batteries remain in use in applications requiring very high energy density and a shelf life of 20 years or more.
QuidelOrtho Corporation is a major American manufacturer of diagnostic healthcare products that are sold worldwide.
Alere Inc. was a global manufacturer of rapid point-of-care diagnostic tests. The company was founded in 1991 and was headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. As of January 2017, the company had a market capitalization of $3.47 billion with an enterprise value of $5.9 billion. The company was formerly known as Inverness Medical Innovations, Inc. and changed its name to Alere Inc. in 2010.
Bigfoot Biomedical Inc. is a medical technology start-up headquartered in Milpitas, California, founded by a team of people with personal connections to type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
Swiss Precision Diagnostics GmbH is a Swiss medical diagnostic company, that produces Clearblue-branded pregnancy testing equipment.
A continuous glucose monitor (CGM) is a device used for monitoring blood glucose on a continual basis instead of monitoring glucose levels periodically by drawing a drop of blood from a finger. This is known as continuous glucose monitoring. CGMs are used by people who treat their diabetes with insulin, for example people with type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, or other types of diabetes, such as gestational diabetes.
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