The packages start to arrive at Health Diagnostic Laboratory Inc. at about 7:30 a.m. daily.
Thousands of blood samples from physicians' offices across the country come to the HDL labs in the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park. There are so many, the company has its own FedEx mailing code.
"We run about 60,000 tests a day," said Tonya Mallory, HDL's president and chief executive officer. "We have been growing at a rate of about 5 percent a week for the last 23 months."
HDL provides diagnostic testing and services that help physicians improve patient treatment through a personalized health plan. The company's tests provide early detection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and fatty liver disease. HDL also provides health counseling for patients to reduce those risks.
Opened in 2009 with just a handful of employees, HDL has seen phenomenal growth. It now provides testing for physicians and medical practices in 45 states. It employs about 425 people, and is still adding jobs.
Mallory said the company's revenue is projected to reach about $250 million this year.
"I have never seen a company grow as quickly and with the kind of dynamic growth and success that (HDL) has had," said Robert T. Skunda, president and chief executive officer of the park.
Skunda said the company has tapped into a market helping doctors and other health care professionals provide counseling for their patients.
"That is really what HDL is doing," he said. "They are not only providing test results, but they are really an adjunct to the health care provider, helping the physician and patient both monitor and improve their progress."
In November, the company announced plans for a $68.5 million, two-phase expansion in 2012 and 2013 that will demolish two buildings along Jackson and North Fifth streets in the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park — BioTech 3 and BioTech 5 — and replace them with two six-story buildings. Those buildings will connect with HDL's existing home in the three-story BioTech 8 on North Fifth Street.
And in December, Health Diagnostic Laboratory announced it was giving $2.2 million to the Science Museum of Virginia, marking the largest corporate gift in the museum's history. The gift will fund the development of a major new exhibit gallery called "Improving Grounds."
"It has been crazy fun," said Mallory, 46, who worked for more than 20 years in the laboratory industry before starting HDL.
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Her fascination with science and medicine started early.
"I have always been intrigued and interested in treating patients," said Mallory, who grew up in the Doswell area of northern Hanover County. Her father was a welder for Philip Morris, and her mother was an accounting clerk for Bear Island Paper Co.
Mallory entered Virginia Commonwealth University as a pre-med student, focusing her studies on biology, but medical school wasn't in the cards.
"I had to pay for college by myself, and the year I was finishing undergraduate I had intended to continue to go to med school," she said.
But at the time in the late 1980s, with HMOs gaining ground, Mallory thought the nation was "heading towards socialized medicine."
"I would have to continue to take out loans to continue on to med school, and if we went to a socialized medical system, I thought I would not be able to pay back my loans in less than 100 years," she said.
So Mallory completed a graduate degree with honors in forensic science, intent on working in the emerging field of DNA fingerprinting.
But state job cuts nixed that idea, too, so Mallory took a job in 1990 with Wako Chemicals USA Inc., a Japanese-owned company with operations on Bellwood Road in Chesterfield County. The company is a global provider of laboratory chemicals and clinical diagnostic reagents.
"I expected then I would be there at most a few months until I found another job," Mallory said. "I was there about 16 years."
Mallory held a variety of roles with Wako. "I crammed 100 years of experience into those 16 years," she said, while also starting and raising a family in Richmond during that time. She and her husband, Scott, have two sons, ages 18 and 14.
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Working in the clinical laboratory industry, she also met some of the people who later joined her in co-founding and managing HDL.
Among them was G. Russell Warnick, a Montana native with more than 40 years of experience working in laboratories, starting when he was a captain in the Army's medical service corps in the 1970s, working in a military laboratory in California.
He later worked at the University of Washington, doing pioneering work in cholesterol testing, before starting his own lab, Pacific Biometrics Inc., from which he retired.
After a few years of retirement, "I was getting bored," Warnick said. So he took a job as a vice president at Berkeley HeartLab in San Francisco, which was using a menu of tests to identify health-risk factors in patients.
However, as a vice president in charge of laboratory operations, one of Warnick's major concerns was geography.
The lab "was sitting right on the San Andreas fault," he said. "So I went to the management and convinced them that we should have a second lab somewhere in the country as a backup."
The eventual choice for that lab was the Richmond area, Warnick said, because of the region's "good universities and good supply of trained professionals and scientists and technicians, and also its relatively low costs."
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Mallory had become well-known in the industry through her work with Wako Chemicals and through professional and trade groups, such as the National Association for Clinical Chemistry. So Warnick recruited her to Berkeley HeartLab with plans that she would eventually run the new lab in Richmond.
Mallory spent more than two years commuting from Richmond to San Francisco working for Berkeley HeartLab, and waiting for the time when the new lab would be built.
That time never came. Instead, Berkeley HeartLab was acquired, and the new owners scratched plans for the backup lab and started to cut management jobs.
After that, "long term, it did not make sense for me, and I did not need to be commuting anymore," Mallory said.
So in 2008, she hatched plans to start a lab of her own in Richmond.
"I decided I would give myself six months to start the company, or get a job," she said. "So my husband and I bet the farm, so to speak, to get the new company started."
Skunda, the biotechnology park CEO, had known Mallory for many years, and urged her to open the business in the park.
"The best way to describe her would be laser-focused on building this company and executing its business strategy, and she has just hit it out of the ballpark," he said.
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Mallory opened HDL in July 2009. She was joined by three co-founders who now have major management roles in the company.
Among them is Warnick, now the company's chief scientific officer.
The chief medical officer and laboratory director is Joe McConnell, a Michigan native who earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and master's and doctoral degrees in clinical chemistry at Cleveland State University. He later taught at Indiana State University before joining the Mayo Clinic, a premier hospital and medical research institution in Minnesota.
McConnell's laboratory at the Mayo Clinic had set up a diagnostics program similar to what HDL offers.
"The difficulty was, we were not reaching a large population," he said. "We were helping a lot of people, but they were those people who could afford it."
Joining HDL brought "the opportunity to be able to reach everybody," McConnell said.
"It was a huge decision for me to move from an institution of prestige like the Mayo Clinic," McConnell said. "But I really saw that we had an opportunity with HDL, and it is coming to fruition much faster than I expected; I don't think any us realized that it would grow this fast."
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HDL has invested heavily in technology and automation to bring down the cost of the testing it now provides for thousands of physicians across the country.
In part, that technology focus has come through bringing on board a technology guru, Satya Rangarajan, who was born in India, grew up in South America and came to the United States to study computer science, earning a master's degree.
A Richmond-area resident for about 15 years, Rangarajan worked in information-technology management for many years before starting up venture-capital firm Enlightened Capital, which he wanted to use for promoting socially responsible businesses and causes.
Mallory approached him about becoming an investor in HDL. "She pitched it to me," Rangarajan said. "For two hours, I heard her passionately talk about saving lives. That is one of the core things about the company. It has got a mission to make a difference in people's lives."
Though Rangarajan said he was prepared to write a check for HDL, he didn't become an investor. Instead, Mallory found another investor, and Rangarajan joined the company in 2009 as its chief operating officer.
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The tests HDL performs are designed to provide useful, easy to understand information for physicians and patients on risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases.
The goal is to provide key information early enough so that physicians and patients can take action before the disease sets in, and before the costs of treatment rise significantly.
"The analogy would be if you are driving a car, and suddenly that car breaks down on the side of the road," Mallory said. "Are we spending all of our effort in repairing an engine that is failing on the side of the road, or should we be putting maintenance into the system so that the car never fails on the side of the road?"
To that end, the company also offers health counseling services. It now has about 60 health coaches who work with patients on ways to improve their health.
"We train them on what sorts of things can be done, and they discuss that with the patients," McConnell said. "Obviously, their focus is on lifestyle: diet and exercise and those sorts of things."
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With the expansion announced in November, Health Diagnostic Laboratory will grow to about 240,000 square feet. By 2014, it should employ about 850 people, Mallory said.
As for its future growth, the company's founders see more markets where it can expand.
"We are evaluating markets outside the United States," Mallory said.
Another frontier is in corporate wellness. The company has been working for about a year and a half to "pilot and perfect" a corporate wellness program designed to help reduce health costs, Mallory said.
"We already have one for our own employees," she said, adding that the company has been rolling out the program to other large companies based in the Richmond area.
"It is quite effective," she said. "We are seeing that in about 14 weeks, we can decrease (health) risk significantly for employees."
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