QuantuMDx Group's CEO Receives OBE For Services To Health Innovation
Newcastle, UK, January 3rd, 2014. QuantuMDx Group’s CEO and Co-Founder Elaine Warburton has been honoured in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list 2014.
Elaine will become Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition for her services to health innovation over the last 25 years. In particular, for her work driving innovation within the field of rapid DNA based diagnostics at QuantuMDx, which will help address the humanitarian health burdens of infectious diseases and cancer.
Elaine said “Receiving an OBE is such an amazing honour and recognition of one’s efforts is immensely humbling.
Since a young age, it has always been my desire to play a role in shaping healthcare so that it delivers the very best technologies and services to anyone irrespective of where they live in the world. When my aunt married into Lord William Beveridge’s family, I read his research papers on his vision of ‘equal access to healthcare and justice for all’ that were subsequently to provide the infrastructure for Britain’s National Health Service and Welfare State founded in 1948. This had a profound effect on me and I realized that in order to achieve health equality the rule book had to not only be re-written, re-designed but also future-proofed.
Whilst I have had my fair share of knocks and scrapes over the years, which have given me greater insights into successfully commercializing technologies, I have always been blessed with highly supportive and loving family and friends and wonderful colleagues, particularly within QuantuMDx, who not only share my vision but are highly inventive, hard working, full of fun and an absolute joy to work with.”
About Elaine Warburton (BSc (Hons), RGN, ACA)
From a child watching her mother’s courageous battle against breast and ovarian cancer, Elaine Warburton, 50, has devoted her life to working within the health sector both in developed and developing nations, seeking to drive the uptake of new technologies and services to underwrite early diagnosis of disease and thus improve a person’s quality of life and the chances of survival. Her career has taken her across the globe from laboratories and clinics in Europe, USA, Singapore and Africa, to nursing, to managing hospitals in England and even a stint at KPMG as a chartered accountant reorganizing the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and gaining valuable insights into the banking, media, manufacturing and airline industry sectors.
However she became continually frustrated at the sheer length of time it took to adopt new technologies and her inherent entrepreneurial skills drove her to leave secure, well paid jobs and put her ‘money where her mouth was’. Elaine has set up three start-ups each addressing major health issues – Back Pain, Early Diagnosis of Cancer using genetic medicine and novel screening technologies and finally, in 2008, QuantuMDx Group which is delivering a handheld laboratory for rapid complex diagnosis within 15 minutes at the patient’s side - her proudest achievement.
Elaine is married to QuantuMDx’s CFO Julian (48) and has teenage sons, James (15) and Robbie (13). The whole family are cricket and field hockey enthusiasts.
About QuantuMDx Group
QuantuMDx Group is one of the most exciting biotechs to emerge from the UK and is developing a low cost, simple-to-use, handheld laboratory for 15-minute diagnosis of disease at the patient’s side, for commercialisation in 2015. The robust device, which reads and sequences DNA and converts it into binary code using a tiny computer chip, is ideally suited to help address the humanitarian health burden by offering molecular diagnostics at a fraction of the price of traditional testing.
Rapidly & accurately detecting and monitoring emerging drug resistance of infectious diseases such as malaria, TB and HIV will enable health professionals to immediately prescribe the most effective drug against that disease. Once the device has passed regulatory approval, it will be available in developed countries for infectious disease testing and rapid cancer profiling and, in time, be available over-the-counter at pharmacies.
Headquartered at The International Centre for Life in Newcastle, UK with subsidiaries in the USA (Chattanooga) and Asia (A*Star’s Genome Institute of Singapore), QuantuMDx was co-founded by Elaine Warburton, inventor and CSO Jonathan O’Halloran and CFO Julian Warburton. Fellow Board members include CMO Professor Sir John Burn, COO Dr Sam Whitehouse and President of QuantuMDx USA Paul Fitzpatrick. Prof Sanjeev Krishna chairs the Infectious Disease Advisory Committee.
QuantuMDx has received numerous awards for innovation and is the recipient of a number of large grants from The UK’s Technology Strategy Board (TB diagnostic), The Biomedical Catalyst Fund (tumour profiler), NHS NIHR’s Invention for Innovation Program (DNA sequencer) and the European Union (“NanoMal” - malaria diagnostic).
www.quantumdx.com
Media Enquiries: Richard Hayhurst
Tel: +44 (0) 7711821527
Email: Richard@richardhayhurstassociates.com
General enquiries: Maggie Love
Tel: +44 (0) 870 803 1234
Email: Maggie.love@quantumdx.com
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