Renowned rheumatologist, Professor George Omondi Oyoo, recently made an impromptu visit to Dr Kalebi Labs (DKL).
In a post after the surprise visit, Ahmed Kalebi said it came a week after he paid a courtesy call at Prof. Oyoo’s clinic on May 28, during which he had promised to visit the facility.
Kalebi noted that the veteran physician arrived unannounced at DKL on a Thursday afternoon following Eid celebrations, much to the surprise of the laboratory’s leadership.
“I had been told he might not make it, so I was genuinely surprised when my PA alerted me that he was waiting in the lounge.
“I immediately dropped everything I was doing and had the great honour and privilege of personally taking him on a guided tour of the entire facility,” he narrated.
During the visit, Professor Oyoo listened with keen interest in every aspect of the operation, asking detailed questions and engaging in in-depth discussions about the laboratory’s systems and services.
Several times during the visit, he remarked that DKL was the largest and most sophisticated laboratory he had ever seen, expressing admiration for both its scale and technological advancement.
“He marvelled at the scale, sophistication, breadth of services, and the innovative distributive model we have built,” Kalebi stated.
Kalebi also recounted sharing with Professor Oyoo the journey behind the establishment of the homegrown laboratory.
According to Kalebi, the journey traces back to a conversation in 2023 during a family’s sabbatical with Dr Allan Pamba, then at Roche and now leading Roche UK and Ireland.
“Allan’s belief in the vision sparked a powerful chain reaction. Roche took an extraordinary leap of faith, partnering with us to pioneer multiple first-in-Sub-Saharan-Africa technologies,” he narrated.
Kalebi stated that the confidence became the foundation that attracted other world-leading partners, including Sysmex, Thermo Fisher Scientific, BD, Euroimmun, Beckman Coulter and others.
Professor Oyoo was fascinated with the labs’ Euroimmun ChLIA and Immunoblot platforms for autoimmune and connective tissue disease diagnostics, our sub-one-hour turnaround times on the Roche platform, and the rapidly growing role of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in rheumatology and precision medicine.
The visit also provided an opportunity for extensive discussions on strengthening rheumatology diagnostics in Kenya. Topics included improving local testing pathways through faster in-country diagnostics, expanding patient access to advanced testing, and exploring collaborative research opportunities using real-world patient data.
“Those conversations were deeply insightful. As one of my teachers and a pioneer widely regarded as the Father of Rheumatology in Kenya, it was a true privilege to host Prof. Oyoo at our state-of-the-art homegrown laboratory,” Kalebi added.
