Ron Zwanziger (born 1954) is an American businessman.[1] He is best known for founding and leading the diagnostic test manufacturer Alere.
Zwanziger was born in Israel in 1954 and raised on the island of Cyprus after 1956.[2][3]
He earned an engineering degree from Imperial College London in 1975 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1981.[4][2]
Along with three business school classmates, Zwanziger co-founded Medisense Inc., a maker of glucose meters used in diabetes home care, in 1981.[3][5][2] He was CEO until 1991.[2]
Originally, the company worked on 13 disparate biotechnology ideas, hoping one or another would pay off.[3] By 1984, the company had narrowed its focus to one of the projects, which concerned electrochemical biosensors.[a][3]
In 1987, Medisense introduced the ExacTech, which was the first electrochemical biosensor-based glucose meter for home use.[6] This technology required less blood to obtain a reading, and by 2008 was used in a majority of the 6 billion home blood glucose tests being performed annually.[6] In his textbook on electrochemistry, Alan Bond of Monash University suggests that the commercial success of electrochemical home glucose monitoring "predominantly can be attributed to the introduction of the ExacTech system."[7]
Medisense was acquired by Abbott Laboratories in 1996 for $876 million.[8]
Zwanziger founded Alere Inc. (then called Selfcare Inc.),[9][4] a diagnostic test manufacturer, in 1991.[2] He was CEO until 2014.[10][11][12]
Alere's diabetes unit was sold to Johnson and Johnson (LifeScan) in 2001 for $1.3 billion.[13][9] With the 2001 acquisition of the subsidiary Unipath from Unilever, Alere became the leading manufacturer of ovulation and pregnancy tests.[3] Alere acquired Biosite Inc. in a $1.7 billion hostile takeover in 2007.[14] By 2012, Alere was the largest manufacturer in the HIV testing space, according to the nonprofit Population Services International.[15]
Abbott acquired Alere in 2017 for $5.3 billion.[16][9]
Along with longtime partners[3] Drs. David Scott and Jerry McAleer, Zwanziger co-founded the diagnostic test manufacturer LumiraDx in 2014.[17] He was CEO until November 2023, when all three founders resigned amid "financial difficulties" at the company.[18] On December 29, 2023, LumiraDx reached a $350 million agreement to sell its key assets to Roche Diagnostics.[19]
LumiraDx produces several rapid diagnostic tests which are read by a single brick-sized device at the point of care. A 2021 presentation by Bill Gates hailed the LumiraDx platform as "amazing" and "cheaper and smaller than the diagnostic devices that came before."[20] A 2021 meta-analysis of 133 studies showed that LumiraDx's COVID-19 rapid antigen test had the highest sensitivity among 61 products.[21]