The Latest Medtech Should Not Be a Privilege

Good technology that never reaches the patient is not a solution. It is a delayed promise.

A few years ago, I sat down to develop a new strategy for Ginolis. I had Simon Sinek's "Start with Why" in my head. Not as a concept. As a discipline. The question was not what we make or how we make it. It was why we exist at all.

The answer, when I stopped circling it, was simple. The latest medtech innovations should not be a privilege. Every person, in every clinic, should be able to access them at a reasonable cost. A fight worth being part of.

One example makes the stakes concrete.

A landmark Lancet study from the GRAM Project projects that antimicrobial resistance could be linked to 169 million deaths between 2025 and 2050. By 2050, 1.91 million people are projected to die directly from antibiotic-resistant infections in a single year. AMR is on track to kill more people globally than cancer.

One of the most effective tools against this is a fast, accurate diagnosis. Identifying the right bacterial infection today often requires a three-day lab incubation. A microfluidics-based point-of-care rapid test delivers the same answer in under 30 minutes. Right where the patient is.

The right antibiotic, the first time. Fewer unnecessary prescriptions. Less resistance built up across the system.

But for that test to reach every clinic, every village, every patient, the technology has to be manufacturable at scale, at a reasonable cost. The science being correct is not enough. The device has to be producible.

Ginolis supplies laboratory and manufacturing automation solutions to medtech customers, with a particular focus on microfluidics. Not the name on the device a patient sees. But part of what makes it possible for that device to exist at a price the world can afford.

That is the work.

Kauko Väinämö is CEO of Ginolis