THERE IS A NEW LEADER at Bio-Reference Laboratories, Inc., now owned by OPKO Health, Inc., of Miami, Florida. Last week, Gregory Henderson, MD, PhD, was named as President of BRLI.
Henderson takes over from Marc Grodman, MD, who resigned after serving as Chairman, President, and CEO of Bio-Reference Laboratories since 1981, a company he founded that same year.
OPKO Health acquired BRLI in August 2015, in a deal valued at $1.47 billion. BRLI is the nation’s third largest full-service clinical laboratory. This deal attracted attention on Wall Street because OPKO, a multinational biopharmaceutical and diagnostics company, was making a major investment to enter the clinical diagnostics business.
Vice Chair of outreach
Before being named BRLI’s president, Henderson was Vice Chairman of Pathology Outreach and Affiliate Laboratory Affairs for Mount Sinai Health Network in New York. MSHN runs one of the largest hospital-based laboratory outreach programs in the United States.
A practicing pathologist with more than 20 years of experience, Henderson previously founded NextWave Diagnostic Laboratory, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Pacific Pathology Partners, in Seattle. He has since sold both clinical lab companies.
Grodman made an indelible mark on the clinical laboratory industry. He grew BRLI from a company generating less than $60 million in revenue in 1999 to one that became the third-largest publicly-traded clinical lab company in the United States. Last year, BRLI generated $832 million in revenue. Most of the growth that BRLI achieved under Grodman was through conventional sales and marketing and not through acquisitions.
One impressive metric to note is the BRLI’s revenue-per-accession of approximately $87 is almost double that of other public lab companies, in part because BRLI under Grodman developed molecular and esoteric tests that clinicians found to be useful.
A practicing internal medicine physician, Grodman sees patients as an Assistant Attending Physician at Presbyterian Hospital, in New York, and serves on the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Grodman received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and an MD degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1977. From 1980 to 1983, he attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was a primary care clinical fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital.
