INNOVATORS VS COVID 19

Vasco Varela of PETsys Tells Us About Medical PET Detectors and COVID-19

Published

5 days ago

19/11/2020

Kossi Adzo

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Vasco Varela: We are ok, thanks.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded PETsys.

Vasco Varela: After a 10-year research project, the company PETsys was set up to value the research results. I am one of the founders, who are both researchers and Research Institutions related to the project mentioned above.

How does PETsys innovate?

Vasco Varela: We have a complete new electronics readout solution for PET detectors for early cancer detection to save lives.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Vasco Varela: After a first difficult period in April/May, with sales going down to zero, we saw things progressively coming back to normal.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Vasco Varela: We managed to keep all people onboard by doing teleworking combined with scheduled visits to the lab to avoid having too many people simultaneously.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety?

Vasco Varela: We kept ourselves busy adapting to the unexpected.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Vasco Varela: We are trying to get the market’s approval (PET Industry) to adopt our products. We don’t have much competition as ours is a truly innovative product. Presently, we have 10 commercial customers building/testing prototypes based on our products and some other academic groups.