We were delighted to attend the International Congress of Human Genetics in February; our first venture into the South African market proved to be a great success for dynamic duo Simon Peck, Executive Vice President and Jonny Douglas, VP Sales & Marketing.

Please see below a brief overview of the foray into this exciting new market by Jonny and our findings from the event:

“This was such an exciting opportunity for Simon and I; South Africa has been as yet unexplored by Genial and we were hopeful to build a significant relationship with the market.

The conference itself proved to be very fruitful for Genial; we made some great new connections, discovered some fantastic potential customers and learned a lot about South Africa’s Genetics market. We engaged with several vendors, from private South African laboratories to biobanking organisations, and also both large and small scale automation providers experiencing interfacing requirements interested in using our integration engine to link their instruments to other software solutions.

Our Pedigree Drawing package also proved very popular over the course of the conference, and we held some very interesting conversations with many Genetics Counsellors in attendance.

We learned that lots of the South African counsellors are either using an open access pedigree tool or still drawing the pedigrees by hand! We want to help by providing a fully supported and searchable pedigree tool. Genial’s pedigree drawing tool will solve concerns about the open access solution disappearing off the map without warning and allow users to dive into the data so they can analyse modes of inheritance through family relationships. This feels like a great opportunity to provide a service to an entire region and make a real difference to the valuable clinical work.

Genetics in South Africa is largely arranged into a similar structure as we see elsewhere; housed within public hospitals, universities and in private genetic testing labs. We learned that funding can be a challenge, especially in the public space. The noticeable difference is in the lab information systems in use, which often do not fully support the specialist work of the genetic disciplines.  

Genial are excited to further the relationships we made and find real solutions to the problems that our colleagues in the genetics world face. This is a totally new market for Genial and will come with its challenges as with any new market exploration but we are confident and positive about this new connection and look forward to working with the terrific teams that we met.”

If you’d like to learn more about any of Genial’s marketing-leading products, iPassport, iGene or Pedigree Draw, then please get in touch with one of our experts and find out how we can make your lab life easier!