FORTY years ago this month Randox Laboratories Limited was founded by Dr Peter FitzGerald.

Appropriately, 40 runners will face the four and a quarter mile marathon that is the feature of this week’s Aintree racing festival.

Those four decades have seen the company become a global leader, their pioneering work and innovative approach setting them at the centre of the diagnostic world. Today, we also know them as the sponsors of the world’s most famous horse race, the Aintree Grand National.

At 5.15pm an estimated 500 to 600 million people will watch the Randox Grand National in over 140 countries. With a prize-fund of £1 million, it will certainly be a race to remember, doubtless giving us yet another fairytale story of heroism and history. I cannot recall a Grand National win that did not have some element of magic about it.

The fact that Tiger Roll failed to turn up and attempt to emulate the immortal Red Rum in last year’s renewal threatened to take the gloss away from the race and, hey presto, Rachael Blackmore and Minella Times produce a result that catapulted the coverage on to the front page of every paper, and made the news in pockets of the world where racing is barely acknowledged, or is even unknown.

Household word

A year before that historic victory for Team de Bromhead and Blackmore, the name Randox became a household word, though not in the way that a marketing department would have planned. The world was plunged into crisis with the emergence of Covid-19, a pandemic that was to have, and continues to have, an impact on all of our lives.

The unprecedented spread of the deadly virus required a response that would be on a scale never anticipated, and the health authorities had to look for private companies to provide testing levels at a magnitude never previously experienced. Thankfully, for all our sakes, Randox was not to be found wanting.

When Randox was announced in 2017 as the new sponsor of the Grand National, it was quite a deviation from what had become the norm. After all, it was the first time since 1984 that the race hadn’t been sponsored by an alcoholic beverage brand.

Not only that, the fact that the company was an Irish-headquartered one went over the head of many. This year the company has committed to another five-year term as sponsor, a welcome endorsement of the race.

Sufficiently different

How did this partnership come about? This week Peter FitzGerald told me about the thinking behind sponsoring the iconic race, promoted by a suggestion from the husband of the then chairman of Aintree, the late Rose Patterson, that Randox should consider tendering for the sponsorship. “I thought about it and said, okay, we will put an offer in. It just struck me as sufficiently different, a bit left-field. Obviously I knew the race well, and that’s simply how it happened,” he said.

The first running of the race with the Randox banner was won by One For Arthur, trained in Scotland by Lucinda Russell. The third female to train the winner of the race, Lucinda Russell was crediting Scotland with just its second success in the 30-fence marathon.

Then it was to become the stuff of dreams, with Michael O’Leary’s Tiger Roll landing the first of two victories in the race. The marketing department at Randox must still be pinching themselves to have found a winner who might have challenged the dominant role played for half a century by the great Red Rum. Even in the off-season, the speculation about Tiger Roll kept the race and the sponsor’s name to the forefront.

Movie script

No staging in 2020, due to the pandemic, was perhaps somewhat ironic given the work that Randox was to carry out during this turbulent time. However, the return of the race last year, albeit with no crowds to cheer in the winner, was most welcome, and the result was one that had all the makings of a movie script.

Peter FitzGerald continued: “The concept of sponsoring was to get the Randox name out. Four or 5% of tests in the world are made by Randox, but who knew that? Who are Randox? That was the question we wanted them to have, so we could try to start to explain it.

“It is hard to know in marketing and branding whether the money is wasted. We feel things are accumulative and it is very important to get the health message out. I think the Grand National has helped us. It takes time to get your message heard.”

PETER FitzGerald’s love of horses is in his blood, and today he, with the devoted involvement of his sister Nicola and her husband Marc Coppez, has some 60 equines of all ages in his ownership.

“We are keen on breeding and we believe we have some great quality. My late father was DC of the Pony Club and from early days we would have had horses around, I wasn’t particularly active; Nicola was a very, very good rider. I did ride a wee bit, and then later I hunted and played polo.

“I was very fond of polo; I really enjoyed it. You get really attached to the horses. I felt I always bonded with them. I actually really enjoyed the stick and balling, more so than the games, because you were out in the field in the evenings and you zoned out. I do miss that.

“I haven’t ridden for nearly three years. I had an accident, not a bad one, and then got very busy when the pandemic struck, and so I stopped everything really.”

At the Goffs UK Sale held ahead of the first Grand National sponsored by Randox, Royal Rendezvous was sold by Virginia Considine and Fiona Magee for £130,000 to Highflyer Bloodstock, bought on behalf of Peter FitzGerald. The son of King’s Theatre, winner of a point-to-point at the third attempt, was sent to be trained by Willie Mullins. Under his care Royal Rendezvous has won twice his purchase price, being successful on eight of his 15 outings.

As you read this Royal Rendezvous will hopefully have navigated his way around Aintree in the Randox Topham Handicap Chase, over the Grand National fences, and who knows what the future holds after that. Last year the now 10-year-old went one better when winning the Galway Plate, a great success that can only fuel hopes and dreams for the future, especially with the stream of homebred horses in the system.

Added interest

Even more exciting is the fact that Peter will have an added interest in today’s Randox Grand National – and have a chance of taking home some of the prizemoney. Agusta Gold, ridden by the jockey in form Danny Mullins, lines up with an outside chance in the race, but she showed on her last run at Down Royal that she is possibly getting back to form. Ignore her at your peril!

Another horse for the future is Madmansgame, one of two runners Peter had at Cheltenham this year, along with the four-year-old filly Feigh. Also keep an eye out for Hauturiere before the season’s end. All mentioned horses are in the care of Willie Mullins.

“Irish bloodstock is famous throughout the world. It is one of our great success stories,” comments Peter, and this is surely one of the drivers for his involvement. After all, Peter does nothing in half measures.

Four decades of excellence

RANDOX was formed in 1982 by Peter FitzGerald in the aftermath of doing a BSc in London, born out of a belief that the only way he could carry out long-term medical research was to start his own company.

“It was a weird sort of notion at the time, but I came back to create the company in Northern Ireland. I went to Queen’s University in 1976 and did my postdoc, but then I had no money and I had to find a way of funding the formation of a company. So I worked for others for a while.

“The whole point of the company is to try to improve healthcare. It’s a medical research organisation, but we have to commercialise that because you have to make profit to fund the research and development. The problem working in universities is that you are on short-term projects, while biological research is very long-term.

“So I felt the only way to do this research was to get a company to generate profits and put that back into R&D. A lot of the stuff we started wasn’t tested in any other parts of the world. Since 1992 we have spent close to £350 million, but there is a lot more to do. Our raison d’être is to improve human healthcare.

Improvement

“We feel this is the age of health. There’s vast room for improvement and our markets are global. We are in counties Antrim and Donegal [some 3,500 employees], and while we always have to go where the market it, our headquarters are in Ireland.

“The name Randox comes from a townland where I lived. I didn’t want the family name in it, but it had to have a name which you could say in different languages. It had to be memorable, and sound kind of scientific, even though it’s not.”

Preparation is key to success

SITTING with Peter FitzGerald and listening to how he and his team reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic is truly fascinating. It was a time of great stress for certain. Peter tells the story.

“Well it’s been intense. We responded very fast and we tested some of the first cases in Ireland and Britain. We just moved with great speed. We ordered materials before governments did; we already had tests for Covid, but not that particular strain.

“My son came back from Brazil and he told me the Chinese president had apologised to the world. I think that was about January 29th and I thought there was something strange here. So I rang our R&D managers and got them in. We started work on a Sunday morning and we had a test done in 14 days. Then we had to go through all the regulatory aspects which took a bit longer.

“We had all the packaging, all the infrastructure and there was nobody else in Britain or Ireland who could actually do what we did. Then we got approvals. The British government was desperately looking for people to test. We scaled up very, very rapidly and we invested around £100 million in the whole thing.

Advantages

“Being in Northern Ireland is not always the most advantageous of places. Sometimes it’s an advantage, and sometimes it’s a negative. Our horses are Irish, rugby players are Irish, but in Covid testing we were deemed a devolved region, and initially there was probably resistance in sending some of the tests out of England. There were logistical issues as well.

“So we set labs up in England, we developed special technology so we could semi-automate the labs (one in Warrington and one in Dunstable) and this meant we were closer to customers. We found that logistical systems in getting samples anywhere was a big problem, so we set up our own system.”

What was key in being able to react so fast? Peter explains: “We are a private organisation, and a strength is we can make decisions fast and people are pulling all in the same direction. Our team responded very, very well. Some 37% of all people in Britain or Ireland were tested by Randox, and we had a very high percentage of the public testing as well.

Making calculations

“We had to make a lot of decisions; we couldn’t get guidance. No government or airline could tell us what number of tests we would be expected to execute in 2021. So we had to make our own calculations. Millions of people could not have travelled throughout the past summer if we hadn’t bought materials forward. We had to anticipate a great deal. People might think we were just sitting here counting money, but you have to invest and you have to take risk.

“Governments are saying we have to live with Covid; that’s correct. We are still testing, but we never thought testing would last as long to be quite honest. There’s one good thing about the whole situation - it’s accelerated the understanding of the immune system. Trying to understand how vaccines work and the journey of the virus, that’s actually a very good thing. This will help with many other conditions like autoimmune disease.

“The second good thing is that it’s making people more aware of the importance of testing. While testing sounds a very simple thing, developing a diagnostic test is five times more complicated than developing a vaccine. It’s a very, very complicated process. As a world we don’t have enough good diagnostic tests, so some of the money made from Covid we are investing in trying to accelerate the development of new tests.

“With some of that money we are setting up the Randox Institute of Personalised Health, doing more medical research in trying to understand the immune system. We’ve bought a place in London and that’s what we are going to be doing. At the same time we need to accelerate into the marketplace the tests we have. We’ve about 40 clinics, a quarter in Ireland.

“In a sense there’s a silver lining to the cloud. We think it could be a very good time for improving human healthcare, not just at Randox.