The founding director of the Lighthouse labs network said that two years of mass Covid testing paved the way for a revolution in how we diagnose other diseases.
Prof Chris Molloy said in his first interview since the beginning of the Pandemic that people's familiarity with using swabs for Covid tests meant that they could also discover and monitor their risk of other conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease.
The government ended free Covid tests for most people on April 1st as part of a strategy that has seen much of the Covid system dismantled.
The national research studies and England's NHS test and trace system relied on seven Lighthouse labs to process most of the 207m free tests done in the UK during the Pandemic.
After the previous public health laboratory system had faced a series of cuts, Molloy led the team setting up the network.
More than 1,000 scientists and technicians are looking for other jobs after most of them were shut down. One of the things we hoped was to be able to create a foundation for the UK diagnostics sector was not happening.
Thousands of high-quality staff who have been trained in high-quality science are now being used across the nation.
There is an opportunity to create another legacy for the Lighthouse labs and the testing system.
He said that having lab capacity and smart diagnostics could help tackle chronic ill-health. One in three adults in the UK have a long-term condition such as heart failure or diabetes, and having two chronic health problems in middle age may double the risk of dementia.
People in their 30s, 40s and 50s are the ideal age to address multi-morbidities and diseases associated with aging.
This isn't Beveridge 1.0, which was the establishment delivering for the populace. This is Beveridge 2.0, where the populace can engage in their own health and use smart diagnostics in the home or the high street to start to understand their own health at a time when you actually may be able to do something to steer away from long-term disease, rather than just
William Beveridge published a report in 1942 that offered a vision of hope during war, and he urged ministers and others to do the same in the future.
He said that the government, academia, the NHS and the private sector all shared a new purpose. We have to make sure those walls don't get rebuilt.
When I started the Lighthouse network, people assumed their answer would be yes before they asked the question. Everyone in the community is covered by the sector of the community. The military was helping to move 400 pieces of capital equipment around the nation to be able to centre them on the sites that we chose.
Universities and small companies wrote good luck messages on the back of instruments they gave to us. How inspiring is that?
The sense of purpose created by Covid could be applied to other areas. I think the government is able to keep the purpose alive. The government has a role. Medical research charities have a lot of work to do.
In health and healthcare, testing and medicines discovery are global businesses. What we develop here and prove here can be sold around the world for the sake of health in the UK and the world.
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