Abingdon Health, with U.S. headquarters in Madison, eyes fast-growing rapid test market

Caption: Chris Yates, president of Abingdon Health USA Inc. Photo courtesy of Abingdon Health. 

Abingdon Health, a company in the United Kingdom that makes rapid diagnostic tests, chose Madison as the site for its U.S. headquarters this spring.

Abingdon is a contract development and manufacturing organization with a focus on lateral flow tests. Its products include self-tests for pregnancy, COVID-19 and urinary tract infection.

The company has a location at University Research Park, where it’s planning a facility similar to the one it runs in York, England. Abingdon also helps customers secure Food and Drug Administration approvals. It plans to expand that team in the U.S. too.

“It’s an exciting time for us,” Chris Yates, president of Abingdon Health USA Inc., told Wisconsin Health News.

Edited excerpts from the interview are below.

WHN: Why did you come to Madison?

Yates: From a macro level, the U.S. is the largest diagnostic market globally. The lateral flow market is about a $23 to $24 billion market globally. The U.S. accounts for about 40 percent of that. We have some great U.S. customers already. We’ve been working with U.S. customers for a significant number of years, from our base in York. We wanted to build a presence in the U.S. to allow us to service those customers in the same time zones and a bit closer to their headquarters. We decided to build our facility in Madison to allow us to do the contract development work and also significant elements of the contract manufacturing work in the U.S.

We chose Madison for a whole host of reasons. Firstly, the Midwest and Madison have some great life science companies. It’s got a fantastic ecosystem of existing businesses. It’s got a great university within the state that does a lot of work in life sciences, and a highly skilled labor force. And it’s also culturally similar to York, which is in the north of England. We very much build partnerships and long-term relationships. We definitely get that feeling from being in Madison and Wisconsin in general, that that’s absolutely the way that companies and people operate as well. Finally, from a quality of life point, it’s a great place to live and work. That’s important when you’re trying to recruit staff and build an organization.

WHN: What will your operations in Madison look like?

Yates: We’ve got office facilities to enable us to have, for example, business development people within the site. We’ve got a laboratory there that allows us to do the contract development work, and also facilities within that laboratory that allow us to do assembly and kitting of lateral flow products. It’s a starting point for us. We’re already looking at exploring other space within the University Research Park to allow us to do larger scale manufacturing.

What we’ve been really encouraged by is the welcome we received from the community here in Madison, but also the interest in collaborating and working with us on projects. We’ve already got some projects that we’re getting up and running. We’ve got a really healthy pipeline of opportunities to work with U.S. partners to develop innovative tests as well. We’re starting with a focus on contract development, but ultimately, those developments need to transition into manufacturing. So we’re looking to provide that full service.

WHN: What projects are you working on?

Yates: I can’t go into specifics on the actual projects themselves, because we’re under (non-disclosure agreements), but I can give you some feel for what we do in lateral flow.

A lot of the work we do is in the clinical side. That’s both self-testing and point-of-care testing. We’re doing a lot of work in infectious disease, for example. That can be areas such as sexually transmitted diseases. Obviously, there was a lot of work around COVID. But there’s also some emerging pathogen or pandemic threats as well, such as avian flu.

The second area is animal health and plant pathogen testing. Given Wisconsin’s strong agritech credentials, that is an area where we definitely see opportunity. One of the projects that we’re looking to bring in is an animal health test. We also work in other areas, such as environmental testing.

WHN: As we transition from the pandemic, will there be a decline in the rapid test market?

Yates: It’s a really exciting time for the lateral flow market, post-pandemic. I refer to it as the lateral flow market 2.0. What you’ve effectively got is a market growing at high single digits — a $23 billion market that is growing at 8 to 10 percent.

There was a lot of COVID testing happening during the period from 2021 to 2023, but what you’re seeing now is, whilst that COVID test falls away, it’s being replaced by a whole range of other different tests. The market is growing. Within the market, the product mix is changing quite significantly as well. What that means for us is there’s effectively a lot of innovation and new products coming to market.

The other thing that’s going to drive growth going forward is innovation. We saw a lot of innovation during COVID in terms of lateral flow technology, and a lot of (venture capital) investment in this area as well. What you are now seeing is that some of that investment and innovation is coming through to fruition … The combination of that changing product mix, investment from venture capital and innovation is going to drive the market.

There is also a much greater acceptance of lateral flow testing. We’ve all done lateral flow tests. Pretty much everybody knows how to do a lateral flow test. Those barriers to adoption are gone. Everybody’s keen on managing their own health and being empowered to manage their own health. I think lateral flow technology absolutely fits and can definitely be part of that.

This article first appeared in the Wisconsin Health News daily email newsletter. Sign up for your free trial here.