ARCpoint Labs, a Greenville-based national third-party provider and administrator of diagnostic testing for individuals and companies, is using its unique model to bring a variety of necessary testing to communities during the pandemic.
Founded by Felix Mirando, ARCpoint Labs has been around for a while in some shape since the late 1990s. In 2006, Mirando began to create franchises and the current form of the company materialized, says ARCpoint Labs President John Constantine. The company currently has nearly 100 franchises across the country.
Constantine says Mirando understood that “ARCpoint could be really uniquely positioned to kind of be a middle ground between independent drug testing collection sites and the big national ‘500-pound gorilla’ companies like [Quest Pharmaceutical] and Labcorp.”
With a previous knowledge of franchising, Mirando decided he could combine this national presence with the customer service found at a locally owned small business, Constantine says.
“We don’t see a lot of competition in this space,” he says,” primarily because even if it was proprietary information it’s just really, really hard to replicate without a ton of experience in the industry.”
The company does essentially whatever diagnostic test is needed: drug testing, alcohol testing, background checks and increasingly, health care testing. ARCpoint Labs can test thyroid functions and conduct ancestry type testing. If you can imagine it, Constantine says, then they can probably test it. That’s what’s come in handy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The whole idea that we want to make sure that diagnostic testing, which makes up the lion’s share of data that physicians use in order to determine your level of health, are easy to access and aren’t super expensive for consumers that want to just get access to those tests directly,” explains Constantine.
The company’s network is vast. Constantine says due to their relationships with research scientists, ARCpoint Labs is usually one step ahead of new testing and new technologies that are coming out.
One of those tests comes from a former colleague of Constantine’s, Dr. Josh Gunn of Ethos Laboratories. The two worked together over a decade ago fighting the opioid crisis.
The test from Ethos Laboratories, Tru-Immune, evaluates the COVID-19 protective immunity in a person after the individual has had the disease. Constantine says these tests could be used to test a vaccine’s effectiveness and help understand the length of immunity afterward.
“Unlike other tests currently on the market, Tru-Immune detects the presence and magnitude of neutralizing antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus [COVID-19] that could prevent future infection,” ARCpoint said in a release announcing taking the tests to market.
The test is only meant for those who have already contracted the novel coronavirus. More types of tests are on the horizon for the company as well.
“We do them all because we’re able to pull them into our network. That’s kind of fun that we’re based here in South Carolina, right? Big things coming out of a really small town and in this part of the world.”
