TriCore top scientist earns achievement award

A cancer diagnosis changed David Grenache's career.

It was 1988, and he was teaching undergraduates at what is now Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. His sister was his doner for a bone marrow transplant, and Grenache took a year off work because he was immunocompromised.

"It was during that year that I had time to a lot of time alone to reflect and think about what I wanted out of my profession," he said.

He did a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical chemistry. He became a board-certified clinical chemist and started volunteering with the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine and worked a decade at ARUP Laboratories, an enterprise of the University of Utah.

Grenache, 59, is the chief scientific officer at TriCore, where he has worked for seven years. After more than 30 years in clinical laboratory science, Grenache was recently presented with a lifetime achievement award, the Outstanding Contributions Through Service to the Profession of Clinical Chemistry Award, by ADLM.

It was getting pricked and prodded as a cancer patient that drove Grenache to his current role.

"I was a patient. I was at the receiving end of many lab tests," he said. "It really did sort of motivate me to get out of the classroom and do something that more directly contributes to the practice of laboratory medicine."

TriCore is far and away the largest clinical laboratory in the state. Grenache estimated they do about 70% of laboratory testing in New Mexico.

"If your doctor orders a test and you go to a place to have the phlebotomy performed, that's probably a TriCore location," Grenache said. "And that sample comes to this building, our main lab."

Grenache helps lead and develops TriCore's research strategy and guides the TriCore Research Institute, which partners with companies that are seeking Food and Drug Administration approval and need data from a third party who can do laboratory tests.

He's the lab director at the main lab and a clinical professor of pathology at the University of New Mexico.

"It's very impactful and it's always changing," he said of the profession.

He's been at TriCore for seven years.

"We like to call ourselves New Mexico's laboratory. Many people don't know that TriCore is a New Mexican company started by New Mexicans," Grenache said.

TriCore also is recognized for its work analyzing its data.

"We've been very influential at leveraging laboratory data ... to identify care gaps and risk factors in populations," he said.

For example, there's a hemoglobin test for diabetes. TriCore can analyze test data from across the state and identify hot spots for diabetes or even identify people who aren't following medical guidelines for testing frequency.

"TriCore contributes to the health of New Mexico in ways that people don't realize," Grenache said.

Grenache has written more than 150 peer-reviewed publications.

“We are fortunate to work side by side with you every day,” Robin Divine, TriCore’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “You have devoted your entire career to making an incredible impact in the healthcare and scientific industries.”