Meet The Family-Owned Company That Invented Swabs For Covid Tests
Swabs for Covid testing made Copan CEO Stefania Triva a billionaire. However, regardless of numerous buyout provides, she’s snubbing the dealmakers and holding the corporate firmly within the household.
On a foggy early January day within the northern Italian metropolis of Brescia, which was hit onerous by the primary wave of Covid-19 in 2020, Stefania Triva, 57, units out two swabs aspect by aspect on her desk. One is an everyday cotton Q-tip, the opposite a particular “flocked” swab, studded with tiny artificial fibers that resemble cut up ends.
That particular swab—made by her household’s 43-year-old firm, Copan—is the important thing factor in tons of of thousands and thousands of Covid-19 PCR checks at present being plunged into noses all over the world. Sitting in entrance of a giant red-and-yellow summary portray and a corkboard full of images of her three kids, Triva delves into the delicate variations that make her flocked swabs the gold normal.
“In a cotton swab, the fibers are twisted across the stick, making a cage that traps the pattern,” she says, pointing to the thickly wound Q-tip. “However it solely releases 20% of that pattern. In a flocked swab, because of the mechanics of how the fibers are hooked up to the stick, you could have the alternative: 80% is launched.”
These swabs—invented by Copan in 2003 and the topic of ongoing litigation with its main rival, Maine-based Puritan Medical Merchandise—have helped drive the corporate’s huge progress; it manufactured 415 million of them in 2020, greater than double the 2019 quantity.
After ramping up manufacturing, Copan now has the capability to provide 1 billion a yr. Internet revenue practically quintupled in 2020, to $79 million, on income of $372 million. It blew previous that determine in 2021, with gross sales rising to $445 million. (Internet revenue was not but obtainable at press time.) A full 84% of Copan’s gross sales come from flocked swabs, which have been utilized in not less than a billion molecular checks performed in physician’s places of work and clinics all over the world because the starting of the pandemic. (That determine doesn’t embody swabs for fast checks or at-home kits, a tiny fraction of Copan’s enterprise.)
“We love being free, eclectic and quick, realizing that we generally must take calculated dangers.”
That success has elevated Triva, who holds a 48% stake in Copan, into the billionaire ranks, value an estimated $1.2 billion. 5 different members of the family personal the remainder of the agency, which Forbes values at one other $1.3 billion.
Copan’s runaway success has attracted the eye of a number of funding funds—Triva received’t identify them—however the daughter of the corporate’s founder has no intention of promoting. “We obtain provides virtually every single day,” she admits. Confirms her nephew and Copan’s 32-year-old inheritor obvious, Giorgio Triva: “We’re at a dimension just like different corporations being sought out by these funds.”
However regardless of the SPAC growth and the proliferation of IPOs each at residence and overseas—together with the New York Inventory Alternate itemizing in July of Stevanato Group, one other Italian family-owned agency that obtained a Covid enhance because of its vials for vaccines—she doesn’t plan to faucet the general public markets.
“If you’re a public firm . . . it constrains your technique and resolution making,” she says. “We’re financially stable and impartial, and this enables us to develop with out looking for exterior funding.”
The expansion of the previous two years means Copan can proceed increasing whereas holding possession firmly throughout the household. “We love being free, eclectic and quick, realizing that we generally must take calculated dangers,” Triva says.
Meaning investing in a future past the pandemic. Along with medical checks, the agency additionally makes specialised swabs utilized in amassing forensic DNA from crime scenes. Purchasers run the gamut from Scotland Yard to the French Gendarmerie, which used Copan-made swabs to assist determine the perpetrators of the 2015 Paris terrorist assaults. A microswab Copan and the Gendarmerie developed collectively allows authorities to investigate DNA from any bodily fluid—and even simply fingerprints—in underneath two hours.
Past swabs, Copan already has a high-tech, and sure extra profitable, product to supply: an entire suite of machines and software program that automates a lot of lab processing, from routine urine checks to advanced bacterial infections. Lab automation, with $5 billion a yr in income, is probably a a lot greater market than swabs.
“We’ve made some improvements in automation which have revolutionized microbiology,” Triva says, glancing over the huge warehouses and factories exterior the window of her workplace.
Copan was based within the northern Italian metropolis of Mantua in 1979 by Triva’s father, Giorgio Triva. It initially distributed solely lab merchandise others made, equivalent to take a look at tubes. The corporate started making swabs in 1982, the identical yr Stefania’s older brother Daniele, a chemical engineer, joined the household agency as basic supervisor.
Buoyed by robust product gross sales—together with assortment cups for blood evaluation machines that gained a foothold in Japan—Copan expanded abroad, opening a subsidiary in California in 1995. Three years later it moved to its present location in Brescia, a serious manufacturing hub.
Daniele Triva took over after his father’s demise in 2000, and Copan’s fortunes modified eternally when he pioneered the now-ubiquitous flocked swabs in 2003. Whereas out purchasing for a winter coat, Daniele seen how the nylon fiber strips on garments hangers caught intently to the material, and he questioned if it could possibly be replicated in swabs. He challenged his technicians to design a swab with adhesive fibers that might act like a sponge and launch extra pattern materials than an everyday Q-tip might—promising them free pizza in the event that they succeeded.
They did, and the brand new know-how they produced revolutionized diagnostics, making it simpler to conduct routine checks for viruses and bacterial infections alike. “Earlier than flocked swabs, they used aluminum wires to take nasal samples,” says Triva, grimacing.
Over the following decade, Copan expanded its California plant and opened an workplace in Shanghai. It started investing in automation in 2007, making proprietary machines known as “walk-away specimen processors,” which robotically course of hundreds of samples a day, 24/7.
Beginning in 2012, Copan grew to become embroiled in a patent infringement battle with its largest competitor, Puritan Medical Merchandise, after the American agency began producing its personal flocked swabs. Copan alleges Puritan is violating a number of of its patents. The authorized battle has raged for a decade and exhibits no indicators of abating, with victories and defeats registered in courts from Maine to Germany and Sweden.
“They’ve at all times been our ‘unlawful’ competitor,” Triva says. The continuing lawsuit in opposition to Puritan within the U.S. District Courtroom for the District of Maine was stayed in Might 2020 to permit the 2 corporations to focus full-time on making swabs in the course of the pandemic; the litigation has since resumed. Puritan denies the allegations however declined to remark for this text.
A heartbreaking growth occurred in 2014, when Daniele died at 54 after a seven-month battle with most cancers. Stefania, who began working on the firm proper out of school and had been director of high quality assurance and regulatory affairs, stepped up.
“It was a really tragic interval . . . however I by no means thought of giving up,” she says, taking a second to breathe. “The one doubt I had was about our potential to go on, as a result of my brother was an important chief. So I met with all our longtime staff and issued a name to arms. I instructed them, ‘We are able to solely do that collectively.’ ”
Beneath her management, Copan hasn’t stopped shifting. The corporate established a brand new engineering facility close to its headquarters in 2016 and later opened new places of work and factories in Japan, Australia and Puerto Rico. However nothing ready Triva, or the corporate, for the virulent wave of Covid-19 that washed over Italy in early 2020. The primary case within the nation was identified on February 20 within the small city of Codogno, about 50 miles southwest of Brescia—naturally, with a Copan-made flocked swab.
Going through a nationwide emergency, Copan positioned its staff on nonstop seven-day shifts to fulfill the Italian authorities’s demand for testing swabs. It additionally ramped up manufacturing to offer much-needed provides to the US, with U.S. Air Power planes touchdown in Brescia late that March and into April to choose up a complete of 4 million swabs.
“Brescia was massacred by Covid-19, however our staff have been at all times there,” Triva says, recalling a interval when the town of 200,000 and the encompassing province have been recording dozens of Covid-related deaths a day. “All you might hear was ambulance sirens, however they stored working, even on weekends and holidays.”
The corporate employed tons of of latest staff to maintain up with the extraordinary surge in demand. It additionally obtained two grants for $10 million apiece in 2020, one from Apple’s Superior Manufacturing Fund to construct a brand new California plant, the opposite from the U.S. Division of Protection to extend manufacturing at its Puerto Rico manufacturing unit.
It additionally doubled down on robotics, launching a machine known as UniVerse that automates the preparation of samples for medical checks—for Covid-19 but additionally different infectious illnesses together with tuberculosis—releasing up overworked lab technicians to concentrate on much less menial duties.
Copan’s newest innovation is a machine that cuts analysis time by 80% for infections attributable to antibiotic-resistant micro organism. Constructed-in synthetic intelligence helps preserve the system operating easily. Checks might be accomplished in roughly 4 hours, and adverse samples are robotically despatched to the trash.
Already the technique appears to be working: Copan WASP, the agency’s automation division, recorded $54 million in income within the first 9 months of 2021, up 39% over the earlier yr and exceeding its haul for all of 2020; it now makes up practically a fifth of general gross sales, the corporate says.
Triva credit her staff, and her brother’s legacy, with that success: “[Daniele] sowed an entrepreneurial tradition,” she says, “not simply to me, however to the entire firm.” And so long as she’s in cost, that custom, and Copan itself, will stay all within the household.
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