Meet the Former Pfizer Husband-and-Wife Team Who Founded Biotech TransPharm

As in most industries, there is regular news about mergers and acquisitions, as well as news of plant closings and movement of headquarters to different cities. What often goes unobserved are the stories of what happens to the people dramatically affected by those corporate changes.

In 2007, Pfizer made major changes to its structure, and closed its large campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dan and Samantha Ross, who both worked there, had recently built a 4000-square-foot log cabin in nearby Jackson Country. They had the option of taking another position with Pfizer in Connecticut.

“I knew what I wasn’t going to do, and that was move,” Dan Ross told Crain’s Detroit Business.

So the married couple founded TransPharm Preclinical Solutions, which is based in Jackson, Michigan. The company, which now has 11 personnel, is a contract research organization (CRO) focused on infectious disease research. Dan Ross is TransPharm’a president and chief executive officer, and Samantha Ross is its chief operating officer. Dan was an infectious disease researcher when he was employed by Pfizer, and Samantha, known as Sam, was an executive assistant for a veterinarian pathologist.

The company has an 8,000-square-foot laboratory and headquarters at a facility dubbed the Terry Wellhoff Center. It was named after the person they acquired by building from. When Pfizer shuttered operations in Ann Arbor, it agreed to donate equipment to staffers who planned to start their own businesses, but the deal was dependent on them having someplace to ship the equipment to.

Terry Wellhoff owned a company in Jackson that manufactured concrete building materials. Dan Ross inquired if he could have the equipment shipped to the facility and Wellhoff agreed. The Rosses tried to pay him for it, but he declined. Wellhoff died shortly after Dan Ross’s final day at Pfizer from testicular cancer. As part of an agreement, they leased the building until 2010, when they bought it.

Dan Ross used his Pfizer severance pay of a year’s salary along with a state loan of $300,000 from Michigan’s Pfizer Asset Retention program to launch the business, and it went live on Jan. 2, 2008. It brought in $147,000 in revenue the first year, $412,000 the second, and $1.3 million the third. For the last three years, annual revenue has exceeded $2 million.

“Their insight in the subject has been indispensable to us since this is a new focus for our therapies, which are usually against cancer,” Brian Drozdowski, a researcher at Morphotek in Exton, Pennsylvania, told Crain’s. Morphotek is one of TransPharm’s clients. “They have been extremely helpful in designing studies and helping to further our understanding of our molecule’s activity within a mouse model.”

Although Michigan isn’t necessarily thought of as a hotbed of biopharmaceuticals, there are actually about 195 contract research organization laboratories in the state. Although not all of them came out of Pfizer and Parke-Davis (prior to Pfizer), many did. And Pfizer still has a strong presence in the state, primarily in the Kalamazoo area, and a healthy biotech startup environment near its numerous research-universities, such as Wayne State University, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Eastern Michigan University and many others. MyBiotechCareer lists 72 biotech/pharmaceutical companies in the state.