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Friday, June 24, 2016

Idaho Falls company assembling Zika testing kits for U.S. Olympic Team members

The Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics and the Zika virus are in the headlines right now, but if you're looking for a local connection to those stories look no further than Printcraft Press.

Printcraft is the Idaho Falls company building the huge edifice that you can''t help but notice on your right if you're westbound on the Pancheri I-15 overpass. Along with printing, a significant part of its business is putting together medical testing kits. When the U.S. Olympic Team returns from Brazil this summer, the kits they'll be using to test themselves for Zika will have been put together by Printcraft for ARUP Laboratories, a non-profit owned by the University of Utah.

Printcraft CEO Travis Waters said they have been doing medical kits for about 15 years and that it represents about 40 percent of the company's business. ARUP (which stands for (Associated Regional and University Pathologists) approached him earlier this month about 500 Zika kits for the U.S. Olympic athletes.

The kit is fairly generic looking, a white box with red, yellow and black. When it comes to printing, the real challenge with any medical testing kit is getting the barcodes and numerical sequences right. "There is no room for error," Waters said. Quality control checks are done three times before they go out the door.

Although ARUP is a non-profit, Printcraft puts together kits for for-profit companies as well, including DNA paternity testing for Sorenson Genomics.