The Alderley Park Discovery Podcast: COVID testing and the Lighthouse Lab

Alderley Park’s Mereside campus is at the forefront of the UK’s COVID-19 testing plans, playing a key role in the national Lighthouse Lab programme.

Forming part of the biggest network of diagnostic facilities in British history, setting up the Alderley Park Lighthouse Lab at a time of national emergency required close collaboration with the NHS and wider scientific community.

In the first episode of the Alderley Park Discovery Podcast, Alderley Park’s managing director Dr Kath Mackay speaks with pharmaphorum’s Dominic Tyer about the challenges of rapidly building capacity to test thousands of patients a day for coronavirus at the Alderley Park Lighthouse Lab.

Kath talks about the importance of collaborations to bring the lab online, and explains how the Alderley Park Lighthouse Lab fits into the UK’s wider national plan to tackle COVID-19.

She also looks at why Alderley Park was chosen as one of the first sites for a Lighthouse Lab, what combination of experts and mix of skills were required and what lessons in innovation can be drawn from the creation of the Lighthouse Labs at a time of international crisis.

The Alderley Park Discovery Podcast, produced in partnership with pharmaphorum, presents perspectives on UK and global bioscience innovation trends, with input from key experts including managing director and leader of Bruntwood SciTech’s Alderley Park Dr Kath Mackay.

Alderley Park, a development by Bruntwood SciTech, is the UK’s largest single-site life science campus and offers bioscience facilities for R&D-focussed life science companies at every stage of their lifecycle, from start-up to global corporate.

Episode one of the Alderley Park Discovery Podcast is available in the player below, where you can listen to it, download it to your computer or find – and subscribe to the series and other pharmaphorum podcasts – in iTunes, Spotify, acast, PodBean and Stitcher.