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TWST: Would you give us a brief historical sketch of the company and a
picture of the things you are doing at the present time?
Mr. Faherty: Bio-Reference Laboratories got into the laboratory business
around 1986. It had a prior business and acquired a laboratory in late
1986, and started doing laboratory work in 1987. At that time, the lab
was doing about $300,000 a year of business. They promptly lost a big
customer and ended up doing $200,000 the first year. This year, we
expect to do just short of $200 million. So in 20 years, it has grown
about a thousandfold. So that's how the company started. In the New York
area, Bio-Reference Laboratories is a full-service physician office
laboratory. What that means is that we go to doctors' offices every day
and we pick up samples of blood, tissue, urine ' whatever the type of
sample is ' bring it back to the laboratory, run the tests on the
sample, and then we send the results back to the doctor. Now, in the New
York area, we are full-service and there is no test a doctor cannot
order. In virtually all cases, we do the tests ourselves, but in some
rare cases where they might order something that we don't do, we bring
it in here to the lab, we send it to some place else, a reference
laboratory, to get it done. That area really is the New York
metropolitan area and extending around to the contiguous counties in
lower New York and down throughout the state of New Jersey. In addition
to that though, Bio-Reference is more than just a regional laboratory,
or super-regional as we like to call it since we extend over several
states. It is also a national laboratory, particularly in the areas of
hematopathology, correctional health care and informatics.
Hematopathology is the diagnosis of lymphomas, leukemias, and
myelodysplastic syndromes, which are otherwise known as blood borne
diseases. We also are a national lab when it comes to correctional
medical services and correctional health care from the laboratory point
of view. We do that throughout the country. The oncology or
hematopathology business that we do throughout the country is under our
specialty laboratory called GenPath, and the name that people in Texas,
Missouri, New Mexico, or Illinois would know us by is GenPath. The New
York area knows us primarily as Bio-Reference, but those specialty
businesses would also be done through GenPath as well. We do the
laboratory work for some of the major correctional healthcare companies.
There is a company called American Services Group, which has a division
called PHS and they are one of the largest prison health care companies
in the country. They bid on contracts and provide healthcare services
throughout the country. We do a lot of the laboratory work for prisons
that they have throughout the country. The other very large prison
healthcare company is Correctional Medical Services out of St. Louis,
Missouri, and we are the primary laboratory for them as well. So we have
the largest piece of prison healthcare business in the country. When it
comes to hematopathology, there are several larger laboratories doing
the work. LabCorp has recently acquired US Labs and Esoterics Labs, and
they do the same kind of work that we do. Genzyme, the pharmaceutical
company, has a laboratory division, which acquired Impath out of their
bankruptcy proceedings and they do the same kind of work. Probably
between the three of us, we have got the bulk of the hematopathology
that is sent to commercial laboratories throughout the country.
Tickers included in this excerpt: BRLI
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The
Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does
not make stock recommendations.
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