Meet our partner - EastDiagnostics

With a major in Politics and Communications from the University of Belgrade, EastDiagnostics CEO Milos Sakan first worked almost twenty years in media and marketing before he made the switch to EastDiagnostics. A switch he did not regret, as the now 12-year young company experienced fast growth in the past 3 years and rose to the challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We interviewed him a week before the Conference on Microbiology and asked Milos first: what can we know EastDiagnostics of? Milos: “We made our name as a both dominant supplier and the bearer of the solutions when pandemic started. Molecular diagnostics market wasn’t so developed in the region before all this happened, and we were the ones that provided the right solutions. Especially working local authorities in Serbia, where we our expertise and our knowledge and with our good team helped establish around twenty PCR laboratories in less than six months. So, this is where we proved that we can answer really challenging questions and tests.”

Why does EastDiagnostics sponsor the FEMS Conference on Microbiology 2022? Milos: “This is the biggest local event after the pandemic when people will be allowed to be present in person. It’s also an international event. We want to give our full backing to all the scientists and all the experts that were doing such a tremendous job these past two and a half years during the pandemic. Now, they can focus on more important things like thinking of what the future is holding. We want to support them and we also want to introduce to some technologies that can and should be grasped fairly quickly. (…) I can promise that it will have a really interactive and interesting booth, maybe the instruments will not be there but there will be plenty of stuff to be seen.”

When asked what societal challenges EastDiagnostics provides solutions for, Milos responds they are best known for their experience in molecular diagnostics. “We have seven molecular microbiologists working within the company which is a big treasure for us, and one of the owners is also a molecular biologist, so we have a well based technology in that line of field. Through the years we are developing our presence in other laboratory businesses. Currently our flagship business is a partnership with Pacific Bioscience (PacBio) which is a next generation sequencing (NGS) giant. We are covering a large territory in distributing via PacBio, so we want to use this kind of events or other platforms where we can promote NGS. It is important for us to know where technology is going, because if something next devastating happens like this pandemic, we should be prepared to act accordingly. We will use the conference to promote PacBio and we pride ourselves that the first sequel to NGS instrument was installed here in Belgrade, Serbia. This was the first of its kind in Southeast Europe. We want to show especially to microbiologists that there is a new technology worth seeing and not only that, they can use it really soon. While some other NGS companies are more present in this area, the products that our partner PacBio is representing are far more applicable and more useful to the microbiologists all around the world. We hope to appeal to all the forward thinking experts to start to explore this technology and use it.”