Quang Pham
Founder & CEO
Espero Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Starting a New Specialty Pharmaceutical Company
Quang Pham has had an interesting path to becoming the CEO and Chairman of his own pharma company. Following his service as a U.S. Marine Corps aviator, Quang began his career in sales roles with Astra-Merck and Genentech BioOncology. He jokes that he was lucky to draw South Los Angeles as his first assignment—the company figured he may be better suited to handle the poor and crime-infested urban area given his military background. But Quang has never been one to back down from any challenge. After all, he landed in America as a refugee child from war-torn Vietnam.
As one of the top oncology sales reps for Genentech, Quang was on his way to a new assignment at the corporate headquarters in South San Francisco. But he decided to go out on his own in 2000, used his bonus and raised $14 million of venture capital funding for MyDrugrep.com (which became Lathian Systems), one of the first eDetailing companies in the industry. He also led the sale of the company to D&R Communications, a pharmaceutical direct marketing company, and became a Founding Partner of D+R LATHIAN, one of the leading providers of healthcare multichannel marketing solutions.
Over the past decade, Quang became a go-to expert in eDetailing, multichannel marketing, and non-personal promotional campaigns. Last March, he again decided it was time for a new challenge. He founded and funded Espero Pharmaceuticals, a specialty company with two products in nitroglycerin-based therapy (Nitrolingual Pumpspray), and—pending a June 2016 FDA approval for a novel nitroglycerin sublingual powder—the first new treatment for acute angina in the U.S. in two decades.
Quang is also CEO of Jacksonville Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Espero, which is focused on distributing and marketing select generic products. With both companies, Quang is striving to maximize the commercial value of proven treatments in order to improve the quality of life for patients.
