University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) faculty entrepreneur Dr. Lisa Jennings, Founder and CEO of
CirQuest Labs, is growing her private company by leaps and bounds. The company has tripled its staff in the past 18 months, and Jennings expects to hire as many as 25 more people over the next two to three years.
CirQuest, which provides clinical trial and lab-testing services, experienced 200 percent growth in its business last year, and Jennings expects at least 25 percent growth over each of the next five years.
"We've brought in more PhDs to the company, and they've come in with various areas of expertise, such as hematology or tumor cell biology," says Jennings.
In January, CirQuest expanded its services beyond cardiovascular disease and immunohematology and now also offers oncology research and development and extensive companion testing in the clinical oncology field.
"We are expanding our services so that as the industry needs more specialized testing, we move along with them and their drug development pipeline," Jennings says.
CirQuest also recently expanded its capabilities and quality systems in biospecimen science.
Jennings worked with
Memphis Bioworks Foundation to start up CirQuest during the rough economic days of 2008.
"I saw a need in the private sector, and I could see how my company could help to understand how new drugs act and how they could be monitored in order to understand whether we've targeted the right patient population and perhaps be a part of devising some companion testing that might provide some sort of monitoring of the drugs," says Jennings.
To accommodate the recent surge in business, Jennings is identifying possibilities for moving to a larger 7,000-square-foot to 10,000-square-foot space. Currently CirQuest operates in a 3,200-square-foot space.
By Michael Waddell
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