SYNLAB, a member of the HealthTech community: medicine in the future will be personalised

SYNLAB Eesti is a member of the Tehnopol HealthTech community and the largest medical laboratory in Estonia, with origins going back as far as 1995. The mission of SYNLAB is to provide people with holistic medical diagnostics solutions to assess their health status.

The history of the company started when the medical laboratory HTI Laboriteenuste AS was founded in Tallinn and then in 1999 when the Quattromed medical molecular diagnostics laboratory started up in Tartu. After they merged in 2006 they expanded their activities across the whole of Estonia and into foreign markets. The company was bought in 2013 by SYNLAB, one of the leading providers of laboratory services in Europe.

The main work of SYNLAB Eesti is providing laboratory services for family doctors and private doctors, hospitals, healthcare centres, and other medical institutions, and it has been doing this for decades since HTI Laboriteenuste first started operations. “One of our advantages is that we are part of the international SYNLAB Group, through which we can give the Estonian medical sector access to unique laboratory research facilities. This means we can learn from the experience of other countries and apply the best practice in Estonia”, said head of business development at SYNLAB Kaspar Ratnik. The company stands out from the competition because of its broad and well considered selection of services for private clients and the Minu SYNLAB self-service environment.

Helping to keep people healthy

“SYNLAB Eesti has been an important partner to the state in several large projects in recent years, helping to look after and promote the health of people in Estonia. When the Covid-19 pandemic started in 2020, we mobilised quickly and made testing facilities available during very worrying times”, explained Ratnik, noting there were many other similar examples. SYNLAB has also supported the team of the National Institute for Health Development (NIHD) over several decades and has helped boost the scope of and participation in health screenings. Its innovative solution allows a woman being screened for cervical cancer to take the HPV test at home herself and then send it to the laboratory. A pilot based on the same principle is right now being run for screening men for prostate cancer, initially in Tallinn and Tartu. It lets them book an appointment quite simply and conveniently for a time to have their blood taken at the SYNLAB testing centre.

Medicine in the future will concentrate on the personal

The SYNLAB Eesti team believes that the future will be exciting and full of challenges. “Greater attention is certain to be paid to personalised medicine and genetic research”, said Ratnik. Medical tests and analysis of all types give personalised information on people’s health, but once a diagnosis has been made the treatment of a disease often follows standardised rules that set out which medicine needs to be taken and how much of it. However, not everybody reacts to the same medicine and the same dose in the same way, as genetic differences can also play a part. Which medicine suits a person’s characteristics most exactly and will give the best results can be decided with a pharmacogenetic study.

How aware people are of their health and how much responsibility they take for it will be increasingly important in the move towards making the population healthier. The selection of services for private clients and the self-service environment offered by SYNLAB Eesti make it simple for people to check their health indicators and to understand them better.

Ratnik noted that the healthcare sector is of course not going to be left unaffected by the artificial intelligence revolution. “Artificial intelligence will in future start to provide support for medical decision making and will find patterns and trends in health behaviour and health data that can be used to identify serious changes in health indicators as early as possible and support medical staff in their everyday work”, he said with conviction.

Joining Technopol will help create new opportunities for cooperation

Joining the Technopol HealthTech community gives SYNLAB Eesti excellent opportunities for cooperation and for making contacts. “This is the largest group of innovative and creative people working in this area in Estonia, and we believe that we belong with them. Joint discussions and brainstorming will help us to move forward faster and more decisively in a changing world. Making important new contacts will lead to exciting opportunities for cooperation and the refreshing experience of being part of the community will allow us to work better as a team towards our goals”, explained Ratnik.

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