Episode 4: Building a high-performing toxicology lab from the ground up with Michelle Spruill (Sagis)

Andrew: [00:00:00] Welcome to our podcast series, Imagine More, Create Solutions, where we talk about all sciences.

For today’s discussion, we’ll be talking to Claire Collins and Michelle Spruill and it will be about laboratory operations, clinical diagnostics, and running a good solid laboratory practice. Now, as a background, IMCS manufactures and provides a key reagent called IMCSzyme RT, This reagent is a beta glucuronidase and a critical component used in urine drug testing.

Michelle, thank you for joining us

Michelle: thank you for having me. my name is Michelle Spruill. I’m the technical supervisor for toxicology at Sagis Diagnostics. I have over 15 years experience in clinical toxicology and prior to Sagis have worked at labs in Louisiana and Texas.

Andrew: And now our director of sales at IMCS.

Claire: Hello, I’m Claire Collins and I have over 20 years experience in the pain care industry. I’ve been at IMCS for nearly 10 years. I’ve interacted with hundreds of different [00:01:00] laboratories from large established laboratories to startup labs.

And I’ve enjoyed helping them with most of their problems over the years. It’s been fun.

Andrew: So Michelle, you’ve got quite a bit of experience as well, 15 years. Can you tell us a bit about that progress over the years?

Michelle: Sure. So I have a master’s in genetics, actually not in toxicology. I have an MT in chemistry, which I got in for a lab in Louisiana.

I’ve started at Ameritox where we were doing four to 5, 000 samples a day. I worked there for five years and I’ve worked at small labs doing roughly 100 samples a day to medium sized labs doing 800 to 1, 000 samples a day. And now here at Sagis, we are steadily growing and bringing in 150 to 200 samples a day.

Andrew: Wow. And Claire, you’ve actually known Michelle [00:02:00] for quite some time, haven’t you?

Claire: I have. Yeah, I don’t know how many years it is, Michelle. Quite a few. Maybe 10?

Michelle: I think maybe over 10.

Claire: Maybe over 10. Right. So we’ve met along the ways at different labs. Michelle always calls me when she goes to a new lab.

Michelle: Claire is always the first phone call I make when I go to a new lab.

Claire: That’s so nice. Michelle you really have a lot more experience than, than you just talked about. You’ve done a lot of different labs and you’re very technically adept so much so that now you’re getting a Your doctoral degree.

Michelle: That is true. So yeah, I guess I have quite a difficult time tooting my own horn. So I have, I have a lot of technical experience. The last three labs I’ve worked at I have built from the ground up. [00:03:00] When I started at Sagis, the room that the toxicology department was in was the room where they stored the biohazard trash.

And I started all the way from cleaning out the room to doing the construction to all of the build out to instrumentation, all of the method development. So this is my baby that I’m working on here now. I’m currently getting my Ph. D. I’m a fifth year Ph. D. candidate at the University of Houston. My Ph. D.

is in Pharmaceutics and it marries really well with what I’m doing here at Sagis. I am doing a lot of Drug delivery and drug delivery a distribution working on ADME at administration distribution metabolism excretion in different animals for breast cancer metastasis for HER2 positive breast cancer mice.

So that marries really well with this toxicology lab. Also, I’d say just we do a lot of pathology work. And [00:04:00] so I have here, Dr. Howard Martin, who works really closely with me on my doctoral degree, and he helps me do all of the histology and things like that.

Claire: Wow. That’s impressive, Michelle. All that with children, too.

With children, too.

Michelle: Two beautiful children.

Claire: That is crazy.

Andrew: So you said you’re in a toxicology. Or pathology group, right? Sagis is more than just toxicology. What sort of services does Sagis

Michelle: offer.

Sagis is the first laboratory that I’ve worked at that was not strictly clinical tox. Sagis has a DERM path, they do podiatry, we do surgical path, we do cytology, and we’re branching into cytogenetics, flow cytometry, and FISH.

So this is a really diverse group that we’re working with. In the past, all the labs I’ve worked at have been strictly clinical [00:05:00] toxicology.

Andrew: Wow. That’s a lot of different services. And over that, you oversee the toxicology side, correct? Yeah. So you mentioned setting up the lab for Sagis, converting a biohazard waste closet or room into a toxicology lab.

So what were some of the challenges in setting that up?

Michelle: So I think you know, you mentioned my husband actually, and we have always worked together in the past and he has always been the administrative person and I have been the scientist. So that was really a challenge for me. This is the first time we have not worked together and I’ve had to take on the administrative role and do the, the construction and, you know, be more of a manager for the people.

So that was much more difficult than I anticipated, but I am finding that I really enjoy it.

Andrew: What are some of the challenges that you face in the toxicology

Michelle: space? Well, at Sagis we [00:06:00] have compliance as our number one aspect.

We are compliant first business second, which is really refreshing in the toxicology space. It’s really not the norm for toxicology lab. So we did an extensive eight to nine month validation on all of our testing here in the lab. We worked on stability, we worked on robustness, we worked on accuracy, precision.

So we really put everything to the test before we brought in patient samples to make sure that we would be the best quality lab around. And I, we have gone through CAP inspection, CLIA inspection and the New York inspection and the toxicology department at Sagis has received zero citations across the board.

So we are really focused on compliance, quality and Accuracy, but as a challenge, one of the most challenging things can be reagents going on backorder you know, solvents going on backorder, [00:07:00] running out of water has happened in the past. And that’s always been one of the things you just have to make sure that inventory is maintained, that quality is maintained, and you know, your instruments, you want them to be the best possible instrument, so you have to take care of them like they’re your babies so that they run properly.

So among all of

Andrew: those things that you mentioned, reagents, inventory, the quality of reagents, making sure that some of those reagents do not go in back order. I mean, those add to some of the complexity of running the lab, but what do you find most stressful? About running the lab.

Michelle: You know, I think keeping up with managing the inventory and making sure that everything is at the proper levels that we need it to be.

That can be pretty stressful. And then making sure that compliance gets done every single day by every single person. Because if you slack on one day, then it builds and it’s a snowball effect. And you want to make sure that you’re doing high quality every day. So to [00:08:00] maintain that level, it can be rather challenging and sometimes a little bit stressful.

Andrew: You mentioned early on that Claire is one of the first persons that you contact when you go to a new lab. Why is that?

Michelle: Oh, absolutely. In every lab that I have validated a method, the first thing I do is call Claire and say, I would like to bring Imex enzyme into this laboratory because nine times out of 10, they’re using something different.

And the prep time is twice as long and the chromatography is. It looks like instead of a beautiful Gaussian peak, it looks like a ghost is staring at you from the screen.

It just really needs a lot of work. And if you can clean up the prep first, you know, garbage in, garbage out. So if you get a clean, beautiful prep going, then you’re going to have some beautiful data.

Claire: Well, thank you, Michelle. That’s awesome. Have you tested other enzymes? It sounds like you have [00:09:00] already.

You’ve done it.

Michelle: I have tested a few other enzymes. I have not found anything with the quality of IMCS, the reproducibility, the ease of validation. I have not found anything that works quite like IMCS enzyme

Claire: does.

Yeah, it’s, it’s been just a game changer in the toxicology industry.

You know, I know comparison study with other enzymes is quite involved, isn’t it? It’s

Michelle: really extensive because you want to know that you’re getting proper hydrolysis. And that’s sometimes really hard to duplicate if you don’t have patient samples to test it on, so to mimic a patient sample is really

Claire: difficult.

I agree with you, Michelle. And so when Andrew comes up with these new FAST enzymes that I love, we always do beta, I insist on it, that we do beta testing at a real [00:10:00] toxicology lab with real patient samples. So we can stress test. Our enzyme before it even goes on the market. So that we can find out before we release the product if there’s any problems with it or any areas that we need to address. And that has really been one of the successes of this enzyme once you use it.

It’s really robust. People don’t understand that there are different types of glucuronide bonds and some are harder to break than others.

I’m sure you know about that, Michelle. So,

Michelle: yeah several of the drugs that our providers prescribe for their patients form glucuronides. So, that’s one thing that a lot of our doctors don’t realize about patient testing, is that there is some prep that has to go into that because of that glucuronide formation.

And while the doctor is the expert in his field, you know, they don’t often know a whole lot about urine [00:11:00] testing. So this is something that we have to explain to them that we want to make sure their sample is prepped and that we’re getting accurate hydrolysis on their samples to get, to avoid false negatives.

Drugs like codeine, oxymorphone, hydromorphone, these all can form glucuronides in the body. For those who don’t know, you consume the pill, you’re taking oxymorphone, it goes through your metabolism, and in that process… It binds to a glucuronide in your system and it’s excreted through the urine as oxymorphone glucuronide.

So what IMCS does that’s really wonderful is that it cleaves that bond and eliminates the glucuronide from the urine and allows the laboratory to only test the oxymorphone. But Most of the time with the other enzymes, you can only get a good recovery on just oxymorphone at really high levels, and what you want to be able to do is get the low levels of oxymorphone in the urine with that [00:12:00] cleavage on the glucuronide, or else you’re going to have a lot of false negatives in the urine.

Yes, that is a problem. Andrew, do you mind talking a little bit about inhibitors that are found in urine? This is a relatively new subject that most toxicologists are not familiar with.

Andrew: Yeah, so, inhibitors, I mean, the way we define it, not in the enzymology space, is anything that reduces the efficiency of the enzyme.

So, urea is a common chemical, it’s a byproduct of protein, and it’s excreted in urine. And that actually is used quite often to denature or unfold proteins. Enzymes are proteins. So, too much urea in the urine could result in… inhibition or reduction of enzyme efficiencies. So that was one that we found.

And there are other chemicals that are found in human [00:13:00] urine that actually acts as a damper or this inhibition and reduces the enzyme efficiencies. So we’ve actually shown that the pre mixed enzyme that’s made with Brachyspira pilosicoli or sourced from Brachyspira pilosicoli, that enzyme is quite sensitive to these chemicals found in urine and its efficiency drops pretty rapidly with the concentration of urine. Whereas, you know, our enzyme we’ve actually tested it is less inclined to be inhibited by such chemicals, a little bit more robust. And I think that’s why Michelle, as well as several of our customers are seeing this robustness across the board and consistent results.

Claire: So with Real patient urine testing, these chemicals that are in the urine can create false negatives, is what you’re saying. Correct. [00:14:00] That’s really an important detail.

Michelle: It is a really interesting detail. So, what you’re saying is the urea unfolds the enzymes? And that negatively affects the performance of the hydrolysis.

Andrew: Correct.

Claire: So there’s another aspect of robust testing and I and I consider this when you’re validating an enzyme to use in your lab, you want to test it that it’s robust. So you don’t want to be in the middle of testing thousands of samples and realize that you have to retest them because your enzyme didn’t work or something didn’t work in your method. Also, something else you need to factor in is that there are many glucuronidated substrates in urine, beyond the ones that are just being analyzed by the lab. Enzymes must hydrolyze other metabolites that you’re not looking for. That are glucuronidated we see some [00:15:00] enzyme companies that tout that they can get recoveries up to 2,500 nanograms per ml.

That’s just a problem because most pain care samples will have a lot more than that in the urine. Have you seen this, Michelle? I mean, what’s normal for confirmation testing? How much glucuronides do you see? So.

Michelle: Most pain care patients, you know, their levels are really high and the drug and urine levels are really high.

So there is more than 2, 500 nanograms per mil of glucuronidated metabolites in the urine. And you have to consider a lot of these pain care patients are taking more than just one medication. So these are people who are in chronic pain. They’re, they’re really suffering and their doctor is doing the best working with them, trying to maintain and manage those pain levels. So they may be on codeine morphine. They may also be on some, [00:16:00] oxazepams or, you know buprenorphine and all of those substances, all of those medications get glucuronidated when you ingest them. So there is going to be a lot more than 2500 ng/ml, glucuronidated substances in the urine that you want to make sure that it’s all of that cleaved properly so that you’re not getting, like I said earlier, if you have really high levels of urine, or even really low levels, you may end up with a false negative.

If all of the cleavage isn’t happening.

Claire: Right. Um, when in the lab, I would often see results, you know, with an opiate up over 10, 000 nanograms per ml and also a benzo up around 5, 000 nanograms per ml. It was routine to see that in a pain care patient’s urine. So yeah, that’s another thing that you have to test for robustness.

And that has been done with IMCSzyme.

Andrew: So the concentrations, we talked about two different [00:17:00] concentrations, one on the very high end, it should be tested above 2, 500. And this is typically an aggregate. So if you do it in human urine, they naturally have other metabolites, endotoxins or exogenous materials.

that are glucuronidated. So it will challenge that enzyme on its own, right? With these other glucuronidated targets that you might not even be looking for. But of course you want to fortify with additional glucuronidated controls. That’s one end of it on the high end. And then you also want to look at the low end.

I think, Michelle, you talked about avoiding false negatives just to make sure that, you know, maybe 25 your cutoff range, and the efficiency is only 80 percent or 85 percent and you’re hitting maybe 40 nanogram recoveries. How do you overcome those kind of questions or those efficiency questions?

Michelle: Well, you know, I think when we’ve overcome those, it has [00:18:00] been in our enzyme comparison studies.

So looking at IMCS compared to other enzymes we challenge those enzymes at low levels mid levels and really high levels to make sure that the recovery is where it should be. So the best way that we can overcome that and try to mimic that in the lab is, is spike a glucuronidated substance at a low level.

And then compare that recovery across the board with different enzymes. And every time that I have done that, IMCS comes out on top. That has the most recovery and that leads to the least amount of false negatives in the urine.

Andrew: There’s still quite a bit to learn about this glucuronidated substrate hydrolysis. There’s still quite a bit to study in this field.

In the toxicology space, are there any particular analytes that are more prevalent? I guess you’re in the Texas space, so that’s more recurring. Fentanyl used to be something now there’s, I forget, the horse tranquilizer.

Michelle: [00:19:00] Xylazine is coming up. Xylazine, yeah. You know that it’s really regional. Right now we’re testing only in Texas, but I can tell you there is a difference in my patient samples that come from the East Texas area versus the Houston area.

So if we’re talking illicit use, there’s different illicits that show up more prevalently in East Texas than in Houston. If we’re talking medications, You know, doctors are trying to get away from constantly prescribing oxys and hydros and things like that they want really to manage with less potent prescription.

So I’m seeing more tramadol, methadones, buprenorphine, those are becoming more popular prescriptions than they were in the past.

Andrew: Interesting.

Now, are you only in the toxicology space, or do you do something beyond just the toxicology at Sagis? Well,

Michelle: I kind of wear a lot of hats here at [00:20:00] Sagis. Interesting fact, I’ve done some other build outs in the area that you know, and I really have to give credit to Shay for that, my husband, because he really is behind the scenes.

Telling me now do this next, but I’ve, I’ve done a couple other buildouts when COVID hit, you know, that was really rough for everybody. Doctors weren’t testing all the appointments went to a zoom. So no one was coming in to see any, any of the doctors. There were no samples. So when we started COVID testing here at Sagis, and I was involved in installing that instrument, validating that instrument, and doing that patient testing, I also handle a lot of compliance here.

So, outside of the toxicology lab, I help the other departments maintain their compliance. You know, whenever they need anything, I step in and say, yeah, what can I do? How can I help? So, I. I really like that aspect of this job that it’s [00:21:00] not only toxicology that I’m able to bring, branch out and help in different areas wherever they might be.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s a lot of different hats. So how long have you been with Sagis? I think you said it in the beginning.

Michelle: I have been with Sagis for five and a half years. It’s been very exciting. So Sagis is located in Houston. I don’t think I said that previously, but this has been a very exciting journey for me.

I started working with Dr. Howard Martin in Louisiana. Actually, he was lab director of one of my labs there. So the labs in Louisiana were already set up. Everything was ready to go. Testing was already being done and, you know, I came in and was hired as a technical supervisor and asked, How can you make this more efficient?

So I called Claire and I said, Hey, they are using some Really not great enzyme here, but it’s a two hour hydrolysis and a water bath at 60 degrees Celsius. And, you know, we can do better. So I called Claire and she would come and visit me [00:22:00] and she’d bring some samples and we, we would do a proof of concept, you know, let’s switch over to IMCS and see what the chromatography looks like.

And, and that’s where I met Dr. Martin working on projects like that. And he and I actually went through a really rough CLIA inspection together. It was in a lab where we weren’t involved in a lot of the compliance in the beginning. And so he and I brought the lab up to CLIA standards. So it was It was really challenging.

It was a full year working with CLIA going back and forth coming out of an IJ situation, which as you know, that’s never fun. If you, if you don’t know what IJ means, that’s an imminent jeopardy situation. So we had to bring the lab up from that. We worked on validation. We worked on compliance.

We worked on quality assurance control plans. And Claire was a big part of that also because she helped, you know, Walk me through getting the clean enzyme and the best possible sample [00:23:00] prep and then when Dr. Martin decided he wanted to start toxicology, he gave me a call and I said, Absolutely, I’m in.

So this is my first time starting a lab by myself from ground zero.

Andrew: And he is now or he is also your advisor for the PhD degree, right? He

Michelle: is on my dissertation committee. Yes, my primary investigator is at University of Houston. Her name is Dr. Xinli Liu, but Dr. Martin is on my dissertation committee, and he’s been phenomenal helping me through the process.

Andrew: That’s wonderful. That’s a great setup there.

Claire: Michelle, I remember when you were going through the CLIA problems, and it was just awful. But you handled it amazingly. And that was something that a lot of labs that I go into don’t realize that when CLIA comes in to inspect you, they [00:24:00] could really shut you down if you don’t have a lot of good documentation and validation.

So I see it. So many times in the labs that I visit where people aren’t sure what they’re doing. So kudos to you for what you did.

Michelle: Thank you very much. Yeah. And you know, it takes a lot, take the strong support system. So I was very lucky to have, you know, very great vendors that I could call on also to help when we needed help.

So, and, you know, thank you to Claire for that. Because That was a really

Claire: awful. I know, I remember talking to you often about that. Yeah. So, well, that’s one of the things about IMCS that we like to help our customers and it’s not just about enzyme because all of our sales reps are technical sales reps.

They’ve been, they’ve worked in toxicology labs, so they know [00:25:00] what Happens in a tox lab and they know how to advise our customers and I will often get on calls with customers to help them troubleshoot and it has nothing to do with our enzyme. It’s usually something with their, their mass spec run and we actually help advise them and get them help.

Michelle: You know, that’s another great thing about the enzyme is it’s you know, I said earlier garbage in garbage out, but this is a case of you put something clean into the sample, you’re going to get a clean result out. Another thing that we do at Sagis that is unique to most toxicology labs is we perform a solid phase extraction on all of our urine samples.

So we are getting as much of the noise out as possible, but with IMCS enzyme, it’s not adding any additional noise like another enzyme would. So because we do a solid phase extraction and we’re using the highest quality products, we can extend our column life. So our columns are marketed to last 500 to a thousand [00:26:00] injections.

And in 2022, we averaged over 7, 000 injections on it on a chromatography column. So we are really able to push The instrument and maintain high quality at that

Claire: level. Well, that’s excellent. That’s actually saving money, right? And saving time because to change a column just shuts down.

Michelle: And, you know, changing a column is not as simple as take it off and put it back on, because you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right amount of dead volume when you screw it back in.

You want to make sure that you’ve got it screwed on tight enough so you don’t get a leak. And you want to make sure that. It works when you get it on there because sometimes it’s on backwards or the packing is bad and so you want to avoid that process as much as possible.

Andrew: Absolutely. That’s a, that’s a detail that most people kind of assume that it’s going to work fine, right?

Just changing of a column, very [00:27:00] simple procedure, but when you’re running hundreds and thousands of samples every time you have to switch out a column, you have to make sure your retention times are the same. Peak shapes are the same. The chromatography, the packing could be different. I mean, there’s so many things that could just go wrong.

But if you could extend that run instead of 500 injections, you’re doing 7,000, that’s a tremendous improvement.

Michelle: Yeah, it makes a big difference. And you’re right, it is a small detail that’s frequently overlooked and you wanna make sure that you are maintaining the instrument also. So you want the instrument to be cleaned daily.

You wanna have weekly cleaning procedures, so, The cleaner the instrument stays, the cleaner the sample stays, the more longevity you’re going to get out of

Claire: the laboratory. Yeah, and the easier it is to read the chromatography. Yeah, you don’t have to read both. Yeah, that takes a lot of time.

Andrew: Michelle, you mentioned garbage in garbage out. What about [00:28:00] buffers? These enzyme hydrolysis buffers right now, the IMCSzyme RT provides an acetate buffer, which is volatile and mass spec friendly. Previously we were using sort of a phosphate mix, but we’ve heard a lot of challenges with the phosphate or these other salts that are not too volatile.

So in that same, same mentality of. Garbage in, garbage out. If you have these non volatile salts, tris or EDTA, sodium chloride, these are non volatile salts, but they can be present in some of these other buffers. Whereas IMCSzyme RT has acetate. Have you seen such differences and impact on your chromatography or your mass spec?

Michelle: I’m glad you asked because those buffers are really important for chromatography. So we were talking about sample columns and how important it is to extend the life of your sample column. The buffer really affects the column and the amount of time that your analytes [00:29:00] of interest will stay on the column.

So a lot of times in your solvents, you’ll add an additive something, you know, five millimolar, 2. 5 millimolar to adjust the pH of your solvents to get your analytes of interest to elute. within your retention time windows. If the buffer is affecting the pH of the sample, then that’s going to affect the elution time of your analytes of interest.

And it’s going to affect the affinity to the columns. Also, if you have some erroneous salts that are in your buffer, then that’s going to block your binding to those C18 packed columns. So you want to make sure that you are able to get everything to hang on to your columns when you want it to, and to fly off your columns when you want it to.

And that buffer makes a big difference.

Claire: So… One thing that we didn’t talk about is affinity.

So, this is something new I just learned, is that different enzymes have different, various [00:30:00] amounts of affinity or attraction to the glucuronide bond. So, IMCSzyme has a high affinity. So, when you have a low, Amount of glucuronides in the urine. So when you have, you know, say 50 right at the cutoff 50 or 60 nanograms per ml.

So the enzyme has to actually look for that glucuronide bond. And if it has a high affinity, the It has an easy time to hydrolyze the small amount of glucuronides that are in there.

And with some premixed enzymes, they don’t have that affinity. So what you see is at low levels, you see false negatives increasingly because they’re missing that affinity.

Andrew: Yeah, so the enzyme has two different functions, right? One, it needs to grab on to the substrate.

So kind of like the analogy with the ball in the pool. So if there’s [00:31:00] a very strong swimmer that swimmer is able to reach the ball faster. So that’s kind of analogous to that affinity, the ability to capture and really grab onto that substrate faster.

So IMCSzyme uh, we Selected it for that high affinity so that when you get to low concentrations, it will find those tar pits and hydrolyze.

And then the second aspect of the enzyme is the actual turnover. So the ability to cleave that bond the energy required to cleave it is also a very favorable feature of IMCSzyme RT. Hence, That’s why we do everything at room temperature, and it’s so efficient that even if you increase the temperature or your incubation times beyond the 15 minutes at the specified ratios, it really doesn’t add any more benefit to it.

So that’s IMCSzyme RT.

Now, I remember you mentioned SAGIS is more than toxicology, you do offer those pathology [00:32:00] services, but the balance between toxicology and pathology, I think it was heavily weighted, SAGIS is actually a pathology focused laboratory, right?

But now you’re growing the toxicology concurrently with the pathology services, which is fantastic.

Michelle: For our toxicology department, we offer over 76 drugs, including their metabolite in urine drug testing.

We do a screen to reflex for most of our providers. So we do a full screen on the drug and on the urine sample and then a confirmation to follow. But You know, one of our highest priorities, like I’ve said before, is compliance and quality at Sagis, we offer a 24 to 48 hour turnaround time for our urine samples for really across the board, we offer a 24 to 48 hour turnaround time.

We have turned into a 24 hour laboratory and we are receiving samples nationwide. So I [00:33:00] think Sagis has a lot of growth potential. And if anyone is interested, there is a link to our website. Also, if you want to see the full testing that we offer.

So, we currently are receiving about 2, 500 pathology samples a day. And, you know, toxicology is about 10 percent of the business here at Sagis. So it’s, it’s working on controlled growth because like, you know, with toxicology, you cannot just explode.

That will be just a nightmare for your compliance. And there’s only so many samples you can load onto a mass spec every night. And mass specs are extremely delicate, expensive pieces of equipment. So you want to make sure that you have the samples available before you make your next mass spec purchase, your next half a million dollar purchase.

And I’d love to have you both come down and see the laboratory. We’ve got the best setup that I’ve ever seen. There’s temperature controls, [00:34:00] humidity controls everything is clean. It’s organized. It’s, it’s not like any lab you’ve ever been in for toxicology or for pathology that matter.

Claire: I’d love to see your lab. I’ll be right down. I’ll do

Andrew: the same. I’ll visit.

Michelle: Yeah. Yeah I think sagis has a lot of potential and we’ve got some great people in charge that are growing the business. I’m very excited to be able to grow both personally and professionally at Sagis.

Claire: That’s fantastic, Michelle. I didn’t realize your lab was that big. That is wonderful.

Michelle: Yeah, it is. It’s, it’s pretty big. You know, toxicology is a small Part of it, but I’m still very lucky to be here. It’s a great company to work for.

Claire: Fantastic. You sound like you have a very high quality lab and anyone sending their specimens to your lab can be [00:35:00] assured that they’re getting the accurate results.

Andrew: Well, Michelle, thank you so much for all your details and the discussions. There’s a lot of information here, and especially around running a toxicology lab, being a supervisor and wearing multiple hats. Are there any forward looking statements that you’d like to leave the audience? What do you think the future lab will hold, or what’s the future looking like for toxicology?

Michelle: Andrew, I think the future for toxicology at Sagis is looking very good. That with controlled growth and high compliance, I think Sagis Toxicology has a bright future ahead of it. I think we will be branching out into other states soon. I’m looking forward to seeing the company grow.

Claire: But Michelle, thank you so much. You did a really great job.

Michelle: Thank you so much. This was really fun. That

Andrew: was fun here too. Thank you so much. We’ll definitely go down to Houston and check out your lab.