Dr Helen Lee, Chairman and CEO of the Diagnostics for the Real World Ltd received her MSc and PhD from University of Oxford and Cornell University, respectively. After post-doctoral training at Churchill Hospital in Oxford, University of Geneva and St Louis Hospital in Paris, she began her career in diagnostics at the Centre National de Transfusion Sanguine in Paris.
She joined Abbott Laboratories as head of an R&D group, which developed one of the most successful products in Abbott — the HTLV-1 blood screening assay. She was promoted to General Manager and focused on developing products based on a novel nucleic acid amplification technology, the Ligase Chain Reaction.
After Abbott, she co-founded a biotech company, which was successfully sold to a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. She then left industry for the University of Cambridge to focus on the development of diagnostic technologies for resource-limited settings. To commercialise the products, she founded Diagnostics for the Real World Ltd in 2002.