VALDOSTA — No one could foresee the impact of the little testing lab that was begun by Dr. Byron Davis in a small office space at the Doctors Building on Pendleton Drive in 1958.

Davis, a Valdosta pathologist who worked at South Georgia Medical Center beginning in 1957, had earned his credentials, in part, by studying at Cornell University under the famous Dr. George Papanicolaou, inventor of the pap smear for cancer detection in women, a diagnostic test that has saved millions of lives.

Davis started the medical testing lab and literally handled the testing and delivery of samples on his own.

Fifty years later, Davis’ work has evolved into one of the most productive and state-of-the-art medical testing labs in the nation. Davis left SGMC to manage Doctors Laboratory full-time in 1964.

The Doctors Laboratory Inc. now operates out of a 37,000 square foot building at 2906 Julia Drive off Connell Road on land that formerly was a corn field. It employs 200 staff on site and another 200 at satellite labs located at 24 locations in Alabama, Georgia and Florida.

Some 37 percent of the company stock is owned by its employees and the rest by private stock owners. While Davis now enjoys retired life on the Georgia coast and is the firm’s largest stockholder, his “little lab that could” continues to keep pace with state-of-the-art technology that, for example, enables it to be the only lab in Georgia that has a federal Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration certification.

The company has grown its market through the Southeast and is in national demand, delivering test results on drug testing samples for employer clients as far away as Nevada and Wisconsin.

In 2007, the lab’s headquarters on Julia Drive, where testing is done overnight and delivered the next day to clients by courier truck and overnight services, delivered some 6 million samples.

With the advent of computer technology and the Internet, Doctors Laboratory is able to compete with larger corporate testing labs. Its future is bright in a city that continues to grow into a metropolitan community.

“I never thought it would grow to this size,” said Lamar Courson, who became CEO of the company in 2003 after serving as its operations director since 1971. “I don’t think anyone ever thought we would grow to be this big.”

Dick Rockey, known locally as former announcer for Lowndes High School football and current Valdosta State University football, is the lab’s director of sales and marketing. He worked in the lab’s sales department for 13 years and was on the road for 12 of those years. In 2006, Rockey was promoted to his current position.

“I think what surprises me the most in my years here is seeing how we’re now able to compete against the larger national labs,” Rockey said. “We are able to go head-to-head with them.”

Not many regional labs like Doctor’s Laboratory are left because the larger labs keep buying them, Courson explained. But the Valdosta company has placed itself in a position to avoid such a takeover.

And in many medical communities in the Southeast, the company has put Valdosta on their map. The satellite labs are located as far west as Mobile, Ala., south to Miami, Fla., and east to the Atlantic seaboard in Georgia and Florida.

Several local companies in Valdosta use the lab as their preferred lab for implementing drug-free work site policies by sending employees in for pre-hire drug screenings and on-the-job testing.