The seed of Dr Raul Destura’s continued medical breakthroughs may be traced to the inspiration he got as a young man watching Dustin Hoffman in the movie "Outbreak"
When he was a student of microbiology at the University of Sto Tomas, Dr Raul Destura, lead inventor of the local COVID-19 test kit, said he liked the movie Outbreak so much that he dreamt of being the character Dustin Hoffman portrayed—a microbiologist in the middle of an Ebola virus pandemic, leading an exciting life, complete with commandeering a helicopter to find the carrier of the virus. He pursued this dream, moving on toward a medical degree with specialisation in internal medicine at the De la Salle University College of Medicine and then at the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital for his training in infectious diseases. He was on his way to being Dustin Hoffman.
“Little did I know I would be spending most of my time in the laboratory,” Destura tells us in this exclusive phone interview from the Philippine Genome Centre at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman, Quezon City.
Before the end of December, the doctor recalls, there were already some observations of weird respiratory diseases reported in China. Then, the Chinese authorities released the whole genome sequence of the virus to the public, for everyone to be able to prepare. “This triggered my confidence that my team can come up with a test kit,” he adds. “In the diagnostic world, if you know the genome sequence, you can design diagnostic tests.” With this information, other countries started creating their own test kits. Off the bat, Destura names China, Singapore, and the Philippines with their own test kits in the region.
Last February, Destura took what he calls “a leap of faith” and went ahead to place an order of raw materials needed to make the test kits, even before approval. “I had to order them in advance. What if the test kit gets approved and then we cannot deliver because we haven’t ordered the raw materials yet?” he explains. Good that he did too. What used to be a four-day delivery took all of four to six weeks waiting time due to the bulk of orders from other countries.