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 MAY
3,2005 ESP PHARMA CO-FOUNDERS
OPEN PRIVATE EQUITY FIRM ESP EQUITY PARTNERS, LLC.
Howard
Weisman, S.Douglas Sheldon and Dr Jeffery Z. Li, co-founders
of ESP Pharma, and its predecessor ESP Partners, LLC announced
today the formation of ESP Equity Partners LLC (www.espequity.com
). They will all be General Partners in the new company.
Focused on emerging biotechnology
and pharmaceutical investment opportunities in North America,
Europe, and Asia, ESP Equity Partners will leverage their
pharmaceutical general management, production, sales and marketing
experience in the international pharmaceutical industry with
entrepreneurs and investors around the world.
Weisman, Sheldon and Li worked
together at Parke-Davis prior to founding ESP Partners, LLC
in 2000 and later ESP Pharma, Inc in 2002. ESP Pharma, a specialty
pharmaceutical company with a “Buy and Build, Search
and Develop” strategy, successfully quadrupled its sales
within 3 years, and significantly increased the potential
of its marketed and late-stage development specialty prescription
products. Protein Design Labs (PDL) acquired ESP Pharma for
nearly $500 million dollars in March 2005.
“Having overseen the growth
of ESP Pharma from start-up to a fully integrated company
in less than three years, we truly have a firsthand understanding
of the value of teamwork and the importance of domain expertise
in building a pharmaceutical company,” said Howard Weisman,
former President and COO of ESP Pharma. “We’re
going to take that expertise and our solid knowledge of pharma
management, production, sales and marketing and look for talented
teams with ideas, products and dreams we can fund and help
bring to fruition.”
“China,” according
to Jeffery Li, “with its rapidly growing pharmaceutical
market, improving business/regulatory environment, cheap labor
force, and vast number of highly skilled returnees trained
in the US and Europe, presents unique opportunities for entrepreneurs,
in manufacturing, R&D outsourcing and product development.
We will leverage our experience within the global healthcare
industry to help these entrepreneurs bring their products
and services to the international market”. Dr. Li, a
Chinese native, serves on the board of several Chinese Pharma
Professional Associations, including BayHelix (www.bayhelix.org).
Since last year he has brought numerous Chinese pharmaceutical
companies to the United States for a series of symposia focused
on the rapidly emerging opportunities in the Chinese pharmaceutical
industry.
S. Douglas Sheldon brings over
30 years of hands-on senior management experience in all aspects
of the domestic and international pharmaceutical industry
to ESP Equity. Most recently as Senior Vice President for
Operations, and as an ESP Pharma founder, he was responsible
for contracting the best cGMP manufacturing facilities for
the six actively sold products and their drug substances as
well as for three developmental products at ESP Pharma. In
the first two years he successfully managed four manufacturing
site transfers to ESP Pharma’s manufacturing facilities.
“The global opportunity for ESP Equity is enormous.”
says Sheldon. “As a pharmaceutical executive in Latin
America, Asia and the United States I’ve worked with
numerous bright entrepreneurs in all aspects of the pharmaceutical
business. ESP Equity will take advantage of the rapidly transforming
global pharmaceutical industry which we know is ripe for the
development of specialty pharmaceutical models - models that
we created successfully in ESP Pharma, and which created exceptional
returns for our investors.”
ESP Equity Partners LLC will
be based in New York, Miami and Beijing, and will complete
fund-raising activities later this year.
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