Quintiles Founder Dennis Gillings to Retire

Dennis Gillings, the founder of US-based healthcare consultancy Quintiles is retiring as Executive Chairman of Quintiles Transnational Holdings at the end of this year, upon which former McDonald's Chairman Jack Greenberg will take over as Chairman of the Board.

Gillings (pictured) began performing biostatical analysis work for pharmaceutical companies with a single project in 1974 while still a Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina. His small consulting business, which would become Quintiles, comprised a handful of staff working out of a trailer on the UNC campus, until Quintiles was incorporated as a privately held company in 1982. The firm now has nearly 35,000 employees based in 100 countries and provides biopharma and other healthcare firms with insights from its scientific, therapeutic and analytics services.

Gillings took Quintiles public through its first Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 1994, and then led a buyout to take the company private again in 2003. Quintiles remained a private company for ten years until a second IPO in 2013. He served as CEO for nearly all of the company's first 30 years of operation until current CEO Tom Pike joined the company in 2012. During Gillings' tenure, Quintiles began its international expansion and moved into clinical drug development and commercialization services, and in 2014 the company earned $4.2 billion in service revenue.

Pike says of the announcement: 'Dennis recognized that a company such as Quintiles could become a true partner with its biopharmaceutical customers rather than a task manager, and provide a plethora of value-added services from product development and commercialization to advisory, regulatory and real-world, late phase services. We are proud to have him as our founder, and will continue to seek his guidance as he continues his work with the Quintiles Board'.

Greenberg will take up his post on the Board in January, after twelve years as a Quintiles director. Earlier in his career, he served as Chairman of The Western Union Company and InnerWork, as well as Chairman and CEO of McDonald's Corporation.

Web site: www.quintiles.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.