The story behind IGENZ genetic testing laboratory

After experiencing a devastating personal tragedy, MAS Member Paul Oei was inspired to use his scientific knowledge to benefit others. He shares his humble beginnings and what led him to the medical laboratory that’s helping doctors and patients across the country.  

Paul Oei is both a clinical scientist and a businessman who is on a mission to create positive change in genetic testing for New Zealand. In particular, he’s focused on connecting people directly with the services they need and putting more power, control and choice into patients' hands. He’s humble, but also highly ambitious and deeply driven by a sense of purpose, fueled from a past tragedy in his own life.   

But first, the background that led him to become one of the founders of Auckland independent medical laboratory IGENZ. Paul’s family came to New Zealand as refugees from Indonesia in 1969. As he was growing up, their means were modest, and Paul says, “we were left to our own devices”, with days spent fishing in creeks, biking and exploring new places. Studying wasn’t on the top of his priority list, but he was always a problem solver by nature. 

This led Paul to work in the public hospital system for 18 years, establishing his career as a clinical scientist. “I was at Auckland Hospital and the people I worked with were incredible and allowed me to grow my craft,” says Paul, a MAS Member who holds a Founding Fellow of Science with the Royal College of Pathologists Australasia.  

Despite his successes, however, he began to lament the disconnection from the real-world implications of his work. “As scientists, we were isolated and disconnected from the patients themselves. We were operating instead as part of a big machine and, over time, I felt I had lost purpose. My GP wife said I had become ‘institutionalised.’”   

Turning heartbreak into hope 

This sense of disconnection was brought home to him most keenly under incredibly difficult circumstances. When his son Nicholas was 4 years old, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, subsequently passing away aged 9. It was during those early dark days when Nicholas was in hospital that Paul had a conversation that changed him.  

“I was feeling disillusioned, when I had a conversation with another parent and he said that the testing we perform gave him hope for a diagnosis or treatment for his child.” That conversation resonated deeply at the time, and Paul says, “It still helps me make decisions as a professional and in the business today.” 

It took a while, however, before Paul was ready to make a major leap of faith. Three years after Nicholas passed away, and while he was still processing his circumstances, the moment came. “We had a 6-month-old baby and my wife wasn’t working, but she said to me, ‘You can’t keep coming home disillusioned from work every day. You need to do something about it.’ I realised that I had been wanting the system to change but, in the end, the only person you can change is yourself,” says Paul. So he did. He quit his job and set up his own company.  

A medical laboratory that puts patients first 

And so IGENZ was born, an accredited medical laboratory supplying specialised testing services for diagnosis and treatment of cancer. “I wanted to set up the laboratory to specifically look at the rare problems and gaps in the system that doctors needed to solve, and help by providing solutions for them as quickly as possible,” Paul explains. 

IGENZ works with public and private hospitals in New Zealand and overseas, and uses many varieties of genetic technologies to analyse cancer patient samples. They support doctors, such as pathologists, oncologists and surgeons, in making diagnoses and assisting in decisions on therapeutic pathways.  

Fast forward nearly 20 years and the laboratory has grown from 3 to 18 staff. They are now moving into another part of the testing market, having bought a paternity testing company, DNA Diagnostics, from the University of Auckland. Paul says instead of only providing services for those with rare cancers, he hopes to broaden the scope of the lab.  

“The early part of my career was focused on being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, now I would like to help put fences at the top. We want to find ways of detecting things before they happen. In a large health system, with a focus on throughput, we want to give the patient more choices and control over their own health outcomes.” 

The team at IGENZ have built an ethos that every sample from a patient is precious. Paul believes that it is easy for patients to fall through the cracks within the current health system, and though he knows that to change that will be difficult, he’s determined to keep trying. “I’m fortunate and thankful to be able to lead a high-performing board with industry experience, staff and scientists that desire to quickly solve problems, and a laboratory with a culture that responds to patients’ needs.” 

The past 2 decades have been driven by progress, and Paul is still focused on the future, even as he jokingly eyes up his own retirement. “A lot of what we want to achieve will be outside of my time frame,” he says, “but the company’s set up to keep running without me. When I started doing this, cancer was a death march, but now it’s changing. There are more options, more curative processes, and early detection is critical too. So that’s what we’re trying to do.”